Parents Point Fingers In Death Of Autistic Boy Who Froze To Death In Garage

The parents of an 8-year-old autistic boy have taken to scapegoating each other on a pre-trial hearing held Wednesday, following the death of their child who was abandoned overnight at the garage of their Long Island home in New York last year.

Former New York Police Department cop Michael Valva and his ex-fiancée Angela Pollina each face second-degree murder charges for allegedly locking 8-year-old Thomas Valva, who had autism, at an unheated garage last year because he soiled his pajamas.

The boy was found lifeless outside the next day. Prosecutors claimed that the boy died of extreme hypothermia in a freezing garage on a 19-degree winter night and that surveillance videos captured him shivering in the cold.

At the pre-trial hearing on Monday, the family's housekeeper, Tyrene Rodriguez, recounted the harrowing last minutes of the boy's death. It has emerged that the family's pet dog, Bella, was sleeping comfortably in a heated room the night Thomas was abandoned to sleep outside, Oxygen reported.

According to Rodriguez, she arrived at the family home at around 9 a.m. on January 17, 2020. She was having a chat with Pollina at the kitchen counter when she heard a child cry, to which Pollina nonchalantly said was Thomas and that he's fine. The housekeeper then proceeded to do her usual chores and cleaned the bathroom upstairs.

About five to ten minutes later, Rodriguez alleged that a ruckus had erupted in the household after Thomas was found naked, blue, and unresponsive outside. An agitated and hysterical Pollina called her from the bathroom and said Thomas wasn’t breathing, the housekeeper recalled.

She noted that she heard a 911 operator instructing Valva to perform CPR on Thomas but to no avail. Pollina, meanwhile, remained frozen and shocked with what she saw, and was just standing behind Valva and Rodriguez, freaking out, according to PIX11.

Valva’s legal representative John LoTurco called Pollina a “wicked stepmother,” insisting that she “is primarily responsible” for the 8-year-old's death.

“She was in charge of the children. She was the disciplinarian in the relationship,” LoTurco told reporters outside Suffolk County Supreme Court. “She had control over the surveillance video.”

He went further to assert that Pollina was manipulative, noting that his client was meek and was being repressed by the woman himself, the New York Post noted.

Meanwhile, Pollina’s lawyer Matt Touhy has hit back and accused Valva of killing Thomas.

“What my client is saying is that [Michael Valva] is unequivocally responsible for the boy’s death and she’s not,” Touhy said outside court.

Touhy ultimately decided to not allow Pollina to testify in the pre-trial hearings despite her wishes to take the stand. During the hearing, Judge William Condon asked Pollina if she agreed with her lawyer’s decision, to which she adamantly responded, "yes."

Previously, the former couple's other son, Andrew, 6, had told the court how he, Thomas, and their brother Anthony, 10, were allegedly abused by Valva and Pollina as a form of discipline. He claimed that they were often sent to the garage for the night as punishment for small misdemeanors.

The defense lawyers have since lodged motions to sever the cases after Valva and Pollina called on separate trials to prove their innocence. The next court hearing is slated for June 17.