A Long Island jury returned a guilty verdict Friday for Angela Pollina, charged with murder in the devastating case of Thomas Valva, the 8-year-old boy with autism who froze to death in an unheated garage where Pollina and her fiance — ex-NYPD cop Michael Valva — forced him to stay after he allegedly soiled the bed.
Michael Valva was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in December, as CrimeOnline previously reported.
Pollina’s two-week trial culminated with her own testimony, which appeared to do little to mitigate the case presented by prosectors of cruel text messages, cursing, berating the Thomas and his brother Anthony, also on the autism spectrum, as they shivered in the freezing garage, WCBS reported. The night was captured on the family’s home surveillance system, but Pollina admitted she erased most of the recordings.
“Michael told me to,” she said.
Investigators recovered enough of it, however, to for the jury to convict, despite her own testimony that she had watched as Michael Valva hosed Thomas off, naked, in the backyard — because Pollina refused to let them be bathed inside — and left him in the concrete garage as temperatures dropped well below freezing.
She said she saw Thomas — who was underweight and very thin — moments before he died and that he was “alert” and “not struggling to walk.”
She told the court that she wished she had realized earlier that banishing the boys to the garage because of bed wetting was bad.
I was evil,” she said. “I exiled them. I didn’t know what to do. My hands were tied.”
The two boys spent 16 hours in the frigid garage, and it was hardly the first time. In her testimony, Pollina said she was “comfortable” on the morning Thomas died and described the weather as “chilly,” according to The New York Post.
Pollina faces the same sentence as her former fiance, 25 years to life, when she’s sentenced on April 11.
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[Featured image: Thomas Valva/family handout]
