A New York jury delivered a guilty verdict on Nov. 4 against former New York police officer Michael Valva for killing his 8-year-old son after a family court judge had stripped his ex-wife—the boy’s mother—of custody for raising allegations of abuse against his father.
The verdict followed a four-week trial in which details of Tommy Valva’s death included severe punishments exacted by Valva against his autistic young son, including the fatal night he made Tommy and his 10-year old brother sleep on the cement floor of an unheated garage at the home where Valva lived with his then fiancee, Angela Polina. Polina has also been charged with Tommy’s murder and will face her own trial.
Tommy’s older brother survived the ordeal. Michael Valva faces 25-years to life at sentencing.
“No child should ever have to endure such evil acts,” Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney, who prosecuted the case, stated in closing arguments.
A civil trial is next in the death of Tommy Valva, who died of hypothermia after being locked up in freezing temperatures for some 16 hours in January 2020.
A federal court judge recently approved they boy’s mother Justyna Zubko-Valva’s wrongful death lawsuit against state social workers for allegedly conspiring with the court to cover up the abuse and switching custody from Zubko-Valva to Michael Valva.
Tommy’s death was the end of what started as Zubko-Valva’s attempts to protect him.
Court records show that Family Court Judge Hope Schwartz Zimmerman took the decision to strip Zubko-Valva of custody after hearing complaints from the father’s lawyer that she was alienating Tommy from his father by attempting to introduce evidence to support her concerns about her son’s safety.
When Zubko-Valva tried to have the custody decision overturned and was describing how the boys would come back from their father’s house with bruises and their clothes soaked in urine, records show that Family Court Judge Joseph Lorintz told her to stop talking.
Similar to Other Cases
The tragic death of Tommy is similar to many other cases that stem from acrimonious divorce proceedings or ongoing domestic violence problems.In another such case, 7-year-old Kayden Mancuso was bludgeoned to death with dumbbells by her father. The family maintains in a lawsuit that a Pennsylvania Family Court judge granted unsupervised visits, despite warnings from Kayden’s mother that her daughter would not be safe if left alone with her father.
The Michael Valva verdict comes just days after reports that a Colorado child custody evaluator appointed by family court judges admitted he doesn’t believe 90 percent of abuse allegations made in custody disputes. An investigation revealed that the evaluator Mark Kilmer had himself been convicted of domestic violence along with three other court-appointed custody evaluators used by the courts.
In March, New Jersey father Chris Gregor was indicted in the murder of his 6-year old son, Corey, shortly after a New Jersey family court judge refused to consider evidence that he was a danger to him, while discrediting the mother’s pleas to, at the very least, order that visits between her son and his father be supervised.
There is the also the case of 14-year-old Mikaela Haynes, who committed suicide after a family court judge ordered her to live full-time with her father, who had already admitted to molesting the girl’s older sister. As records in the case show, Charles Haynes was serving jail time for the sexual assault when a Family Court judge approved the custody switch.
That case is also now heading to a civil court in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Mikaela’s mother, Cynthia Haynes, against Jennifer Williams, an attorney and court-appointed guardian ad litem in the case. Like Zubko-Valva, Haynes was accused of parental alienation for raising concerns about the safety of her children.
Similar cases have been filed, though none against judges since they have judicial immunity from most of their actions.
While the media who reported on the Tommy Valva case has cast it as a failure of the court system, other points of view have emerged.
The real problem is a transparent and chronic pattern of family courts across America specifically discrediting mothers who raise abuse allegations as part of a “Family Court Playbook” of promoting patriarchal privilege, says Cynthia Dumas, executive director of The Women’s Coalition. The organization’s stated aim is to strive for “a future in which women have the power to maintain custody and protect our children after divorce or separation.”
Dumas agrees there are certainly cases of abusive mothers, but there is no indication of numerous cases of family court judges switching children over to their custody.
“There is an epidemic of judges falsely accusing mothers of alienating to justify switching custody to an abusive father,” Dumas wrote in an analysis of the problem. “There is no epidemic of judges falsely accusing fathers of alienating to justify switching custody to an abusive mother.”
According to a compilation by the U.S. Department of Justice, mothers account for only one percent of the more than 800 children killed in private custody matters in which judges have stripped them of custody and awarded full custody to the fathers.
On Nov. 1, the United Nations Human Rights Council put out a call for input for a report it is preparing on violence against women and girls. It specifically asks for stories about custody switches in cases where mothers are accused of parental alienation for raising abuse allegations.
“The aim of this report is to examine the ways in which family courts in different world regions refer to parental alienation, or similar concepts, in custody cases & how this may lead to double victimization of victims of domestic violence abuse,” the U.N. Council said in a statement. The submission deadline is Dec. 15.
Some legislative efforts have been born out of the tragedies. Kayden’s Law, named after Kayden Mancuso, is a resolution passed by U.S. Congress calling on states to make children’s safety a priority in custody awards.
In California, legislators recently passed a similar measure called Piqui’s Law named after 5- year-old Piqui Andressian, who was smothered to death by his father just hours after he won custody despite warnings from Piqui’s mother that her son would not be safe if left alone with his father.
The trend of awarding custody to fathers is turning some mothers into felons.
According to a story posted on The Women’s Coalition website, a California mother was held at gunpoint by U.S. Marshals after a family court judge awarded full custody of her children to her husband in spite of court records showing he admitted to abusing the children. The mother took the children rather than turn them over. Court records show the mother said Marshalls held a shotgun to her forehead as her children cried in the backseat.
