Interminable sadness at the Valva trial
Michael Valva in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead. Credit: James Carbone
It was a week of unbearable sorrow at the Valva trial.
Witness after witness described in excruciating detail the abuse of brothers Thomas and Anthony by their father, ex-NYPD Officer Michael, and his former fiancee and co-defendant, Angela Pollina, and what it was like for horrified outsiders to watch the boys' descent into something like hell on earth.
Some news reports were impossible to read straight through without turning away, literally turning away from the page to close your eyes, shed a tear, take a steadying breath. The mind reels at the cruelty.
Thomas and Anthony were 8 and 10 years old, respectively, when Thomas died in January 2020. You look at their faces in photos, and juxtapose that with the bleak lives of remorseless brutality they endured at home, which is supposed to be the safest of safe spaces. And you think of your own kids, and your grandchildren, and your nieces and nephews, and the little girl who plays across the street and the boy who rides his first two-wheeler past your front window and all the kids on all the playgrounds and all the playing fields you observe over all your days.
And you hope they are all being loved and protected but the Valva trial reminds you that some are not. And the helplessness you feel pierces you anew.
The Valva trial raises many questions, some more obvious than others.
How can a parent do this to one's own child?
How, after all the reports and warnings it received, did Suffolk County Child Protective Services not decisively intervene?
Did Michael Valva get special consideration by virtue of being a cop?
How will his death affect Thomas' brothers, including Andrew, who was 6 when Thomas died? How deep will their scars be?
What about the emotional and psychological health of the teachers and other school personnel who tried to call attention to the boys' plight?
And, perhaps most importantly for all of us, if this could happen to Thomas Valva, whose suffering was public and known, what's happening to how many other children who also are suffering, perhaps not as visibly and not as dramatically, but in ways that will affect them deeply for the rest of their lives?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says child abuse and child neglect are common. In 2020, 1,750 children in the United States died of abuse and neglect. That's nearly 5 kids per day, every day. In the past year, the CDC says 1 in 7 children in the U.S. experienced abuse or neglect, a number the agency acknowledges is likely an undercount.
Our inability to deal with this is a damning failure.
You might remember the trial of Joel Steinberg in New York City. Steinberg was convicted in 1988 of beating to death 6-year-old Lisa, a girl he and his partner, Hedda Nussbaum, had illegally adopted. It was the city's first televised murder trial, and it opened a horrifying window on child — and partner — abuse.
When Steinberg years later contested a $15 million award to Lisa's birth mother, saying the eight to 10 hours before a barely-alive Lisa finally died was but "a quick loss of consciousness," appellate judge James M. Catterson rejected him in a ruling that contained a haunting passage:
"For Lisa, lying on a bathroom floor, her body aching from bruises of 'varying ages,' her brain swelling from her father's 'staggering blow,' those 8 to 10 hours so cavalierly dismissed by Steinberg must have seemed like eternity as she waited and wondered when someone would come to comfort her and help make the pain go away."
At some point, Thomas Valva must have wondered the same.
So should we all.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
