Judge tells Angela Pollina she should spend rest of life in a garage as she’s sentenced for Thomas Valva’s death
Angela Pollina, the Long Island stepmom from hell who admitted that she forced her 8-year-old autistic stepson to sleep in a frigid garage the night before he died, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison on Tuesday, a report said.
“My only regret is, Miss Pollina, they don’t have a garage,” Suffolk County Supreme Court Judge Timothy Mazzei told Pollina about the prison where she will serve time. “That’s where you deserve to be for the rest of your natural life.”
Mazzei excoriated Pollina for her appalling treatment of little Thomas Valva and his older brother, Anthony, who survived.
“You tortured those boys — you tortured them,” he said, according to Newsday.
A Long Island jury convicted Pollina, a 45-year-old former medical biller, of second-degree murder and child endangerment last month after she admitted that she made the boys spend an arctic January night in the garage of the family’s Center Moriches home.
At the time of his death, prosecutors said, Thomas’ body temperature fell to nearly 76 degrees. He also had a head injury, sunken hips, no body fat, alopecia, and a chronic kidney infection from holding his urine.
Pollina declined to speak at her sentencing.
Her attorney, Matthew Tuohy, asked the judge to grant her clemency. Tuohy pointed to the fact that she had no criminal record and had “lived a good life” before she met Thomas’ father, Michael Valva.
His appeals did not sway prosecutors, who called for the maximum sentence.
Lead prosecutor Kerryan Kelly said that Thomas was not surrounded by love the day he died, but instead was enveloped by “pure evil,” according to Newsday.
“The defendant received the sentence she justly deserved,” Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said afterward, according to the paper.
Michael Valva, an ex-NYPD cop and Pollina’s former fiancé, was convicted in November for his role in his son’s death. A month later, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
During Pollina’s trial, Tuohy tried fruitlessly to paint Valva as the story’s sole villain. But an avalanche of jaw-dropping testimony swamped his declarations.
One witness told jurors that Pollina would curse and scream at the boy, and the couple mocked him for his autism.
The prosecution also showed videos of Thomas and Anthony, then 10, shivering on the cement garage floor because Pollina had demanded weeks earlier that Valva remove any creature comforts from the area.
Pollina did herself no favors when she took the stand. Some said her testimony was so vile, it brought jurors to tears.
“I treated them bad,” Pollina admitted to the court. “I treated them evil. I put them in the garage. It was horrible. Yes, I did … I exiled them.”
And jurors gasped when Pollina said she was comfortable on the winter morning that Thomas froze to death — the day was just “a little chilly,” she said.
She also admitted that she deleted incriminating footage from the family’s web of Nest cameras in her attempt to protect Valva, her then-beau.
In his closing arguments, Tuohy tried to tell the court that Pollina was not a bad person on Jan. 17, 2020 — the day Thomas died.
“She wanted the boys exiled to the garage,” he told jurors. “She got up and owned it, she said … it was wrong.”
“We don’t convict people because they’re bitches,” he added, shocking the courtroom.
Kelly, the prosecutor, swatted away Pollina’s stone-faced excuses.
“[Pollina] forced him out into the cold! Thomas was tortured and died for the sin of being autistic,” Kelly argued.
The jury swiftly convicted her, declaring her guilty after a single day of deliberations.
