On January 17, 2020, eight-year-old Thomas Valva died of hypothermia in the freezing garage at the home of his father and his father’s live-in fiancée. It soon came out that school staff had made multiple calls to the state child abuse hotline during the 16 months before Thomas’ death, describing how he and his brother were starved, beaten and forced to sleep in a garage and urinate upon themselves. Almost four years after Thomas’ death, a Suffolk County grand jury issued a report explaining that it had been denied access to records from the child protection system (CPS) concerning ten investigations prior to his death because they were “unfounded.” At no point did the state or the county explain how they had missed this case of chronic abuse, share plans for ensuring the same errors would not occur in the future, or hold any employee accountable for leaving Thomas in the hands of his abusers.
In September 2017, during a bitter divorce battle between Michael Valva and Justyna Zubko-Valva, a judge gave Michael Valva temporary custody of Thomas and his two brothers. The boys joined a household that included their father, his fiancée, Angela Pollina, and her three daughters. As described in the grand jury report, Michael Valva removed six-year-old Thomas, and his older brother Anthony, from their specialized school in Manhattan and enrolled them in a Suffolk County elementary school. Both boys had been diagnosed with autism and were described as “high functioning.”
According to the grand jury report, Thomas and his brother were the subject of at least ten reports to New York’s child maltreatment hotline between September 2018 and Thomas’ death in January 2020. All of these reports were “unfounded” by Suffolk County CPS; “unfounded” means that the investigator found no credible evidence of alleged abuse or maltreatment. But the New York Daily News obtained records of at least 20 calls by school staff about Thomas and Anthony during that period. We don’t know how many of these additional calls were investigated or screened out at the hotline as not warranting investigation. (Except where otherwise noted, all case details are based on the grand jury report.)
In January 2018, about four months after moving to their father’s home, Thomas and Anthony began to complain to school staff that they were hungry, reporting that they were denied breakfast as punishment. The staff alerted the CPS worker who was already investigating allegations against both parents, but it was not clear whether the boys’ hunger was addressed in the investigation.1 In September 2018, Thomas and Anthony returned to school looking very thin and both were now wearing pullups, despite having used the toilet without problem the previous year. School staff observed the children eating food from the trash and the floor. It was then that a school staff member made the first call to the state hotline that was documented in the grand jury report. The nine calls that followed during the next 14 months reported that the boys were hungry, had suspicious bruising including a black eye, were coming to school in urine-soiled clothing and shoes, and reported sleeping in an unheated garage, where they urinated upon themselves and were hosed down in the morning.
School staff made four calls in March 2019 in a concerted effort to get a response. But the effort seems to have backfired. When the staff called Suffolk County CPS to follow up, they were told that their multiple reports had “canceled each other out.” In April 2019, a staff member confronted a county CPS representative at the school. According to staff reports, the CPS representative responded that without broken bones, there was nothing they could do. The last report was made in November 2019 describing bruises on both children’s faces and their continuing complaints of hunger.
On January 17, 2020, the Suffolk County Police Department learned that Thomas had been pronounced dead. The cause was determined to be hypothermia. Video surveillance from the garage the night before Thomas’ death shows Thomas and Anthony shivering in the garage. The low temperature that evening was 19 degrees Fahrenheit. At the time of his death, Thomas’ body temperature was recorded at 76 degrees. Michael Valva and Angela Pollina have been convicted of “depraved indifference murder” and sentenced to 25 years to life. Justyna Zubka-Valva has sued Suffolk County for $200 million in Thomas’ death.
In the wake of the tragedy, the grand jury was empaneled to identify any failures in CPS conduct and practices, determining whether anyone should be found criminally liable, and potentially making recommendations to improve CPS practices to ensure that future children would be better protected. When the grand jury finally issued its report in April, 2024, its central conclusion was that its ability to investigate the case was “severely hampered” by the law governing the disclosure of reports declared by CPS to be “unfounded.” Under that law, these records are sealed and can be provided only for very restricted purposes to a short list of people and agencies under specific circumstances. Thus the grand jury had no access to any information about any of the CPS investigations that occurred in response to calls from the school.2
We know that reviewers in both Suffolk County DSS and New York State’s OCFS did have access to the complete records of the case. New York law requires local departments of social services to investigate all fatalities from maltreatment. The state’s Office of Children and Family Services is required to review each local fatality investigation and issue its own report within six months of the local investigation. Unfortunately, neither the state and county legislatures, the grand jury nor the public had access to these two reviews. The local reviews are never released to the public. OCFS posts its fatality reviews on its website (with names and identifying information redacted), but only when it is determined that “disclosure would not harm the child’s siblings or other children in the household.” An earlier post by Lives Cut Short discusses this process and shows that about a quarter of these reports on child deaths in 2022 appear to be withheld on these grounds, including most of the cases that had been covered in the media. Not surprisingly, the grand jury confirmed that the OCFS report on Thomas’ death was withheld on these grounds.
The grand jury’s central recommendation was that the state’s law must be changed to expand access to this information–but only to grand juries and district attorneys prosecuting cases. Actually, a much broader change is needed. At a minimum, the “best interests” determination must be eliminated and all of the OCFS child fatality reviews, with appropriate redactions, must be shared with the public. As described in a Lives Cut Short report on state disclosure policies, several other states share such case reviews. These include Pennsylvania (which posts case reviews on all child maltreatment fatalities and near fatalities); Florida, Oregon and Washington (which post case reviews on the deaths of children in families with which the agency had contact within a year); and Colorado, (where cases are posted if the agency has dealt with the family in the past five years). In addition, Arizona and Wisconsin post summaries of all child maltreatment fatalities and near fatalities including a brief description of prior agency requirement.
The public should have access to the full agency file involving its interactions with a family in which a child later dies of abuse or neglect. That includes records of all reports received and agency responses, including decisions not to investigate. These files should be redacted to remove the names of those who reported abuse and of other children in the family, though the names of Thomas’ brothers have long been known through media reports. Laws in Florida and Arizona require the release of redacted case files upon request in cases where a child dies of maltreatment.
The limits of the grand jury’s recommendation may stem from its limited view of why the changes are needed. The grand jury stated that the privacy protections enshrined in the law “have had the unintended consequence of shielding an entire agency, its leadership, and its hundreds of employees, from criminal investigation and prosecution.” Accountability is certainly necessary. Newsday has reported that three Suffolk County CPS employees that “played key roles” in the investigations of Valva and Pollina were promoted after Thomas’ death. But we don’t need transparency just for the purposes of holding people accountable. Individuals are not always at fault in these cases, and even if they are, there may be systemic flaws as well. Knowing the entire case history is critical to enable legislators, advocates and the public to identify the flaws in the system that caused it to fail.
Without access to the full agency record, It is difficult to understand how so many reports over 14 months could have resulted in no findings of abuse or neglect. The number of reports, the serious nature of the concerns expressed, and the repetition of similar concerns regarding two boys, do make it difficult to understand how all of these reports were screened out or unfounded. Suffolk County officials provided a clue when they stated in a recent press conference that CPS staff may have been biased in favor of Michael Valva because he was a police officer. But other flaws in policy or practice, such as high caseloads, untrained or unqualified staff, an extremely parent-centered culture, or even criminal misconduct by CPS workers or supervisors, may have been present as well.
On July 9, 2020, the Suffolk County Legislature enacted the CPS Transformation Act, which was designed to prevent future tragedies. It seems to have been based on a cursory external review by a legislative task force, which apparently did not have access to the internal DSS review. Four years later, Suffolk County officials announced “comprehensive changes” to CPS in response to Thomas Valva’s death. Strangely, several of the changes that were cited were completely irrelevant to the conditions that resulted in Thomas Valva’s death. These included changing the process of removing a child from a family by instituting “blind removals,” returning adult protective services to the Child and Family Services Division of DSS, and a new mobile “panic button” for employees who find themselves in danger.
The most bizarre of these reforms was the adoption of “blind removals” by Suffolk County. The blind removal process, pioneered in neighboring Nassau County, NY, was created in response to concerns about racial bias leading to the removal of Black children at a disproportionate rate compared to their share of the population. It requires each child removal to be approved by a panel that does not have access to demographic and identifying information on the child and family. The policy gained national attention due to a 2018 TED Talk citing numbers that were later shown to be wrong. The only academic study found no impact for the process; but New York State had already required all counties to develop a blind removal process by October 14, 2020.
County officials at the press conference attempted to connect blind removals with preventing future tragedies by stating that the policy “eliminates the type of “biased decision-making” that kept 8-year-old Thomas Valva in the custody of his police officer father before his death.” But Thomas was never found to be abused and therefore not considered for removal. Moreover, Suffolk County adopted blind removals in response to a state mandate, not Thomas’ death.
Thomas Valva suffered and died because CPS ignored his cries for help and the repeated warnings of staff at his school. Almost five years after Thomas Valva’s death, the public still does not know why the system set up to protect abused and neglected children failed both him and his brother. In New York and around the country, we need transparency around child fatalities and near fatalities when public agencies were involved with the family and could have stepped in.