Rant #2,998: Tears On My Pillow

It has been a bit of a rough week on my end, and I am glad that it is Friday and that we are moving into the weekend after today.
 
This has nothing to do with how my week has been, but is anyone following the Valva child abuse trial taking place here on Long Island?
 
This is a fascinating case, and a very sad one too.
 
Just to summarize, a woman had two children with her husband, two boys, and the parents broke up while the children were infants.
 
The father is a former transit cop, the mother … well, it really has never been established exactly what she does for a living, if anything.
 
For whatever reason—the reasons could be many-fold or they don’t have to make the least bit of sense take it from me and my experience in Family Court—the children were taken away from her, and the two boys grew up with their father and his fiancée in the cop’s house in Suffolk County.
 
The mother really wasn’t heard from again, and only resurfaced when what happened …
 
And what happened is that the two boys, both on the autism spectrum, were evidently mistreated by both thief father and the fiancée, with the father painted as a cuckold during this trial, who bowed down to the wishes of his partner—who did not like the fact that the two boys had incontinence issues.
 
The boys were mistreated in such a way that they were evidently mentally and physically abused, were given very little to eat, and were often banished to the garage to sleep often in frigid temperatures.
 
Teachers saw how the boys cane to school, did what they could—and they can’t do too much legally—Child Protective Services was called on the case but things still did not go right for the two boys, and the abuse allegedly persisted.
 
And then when one of the boys was banished to the garage once again because of incontinence issues, he literally froze to death, and there are going to be two separate trials—one that is going on now related to the father’s part in all of this, and one down the line for his fiancée—to judge who is culpable for what, related to not only the child’s death, but also how the two boys were being “raised,” which really translates into “abused,” leading to the one child's death.
 
This is a truly fascinating trial, because it seems that from literally the time of their births, every adult that they could look up to for guidance and help failed them--yheir birth father and mother, as well as the woman who became the man’s fiancée.

And again, all of this took place in suburbia, not in some grimy city tenement as is often, unfortunately, the case.
 
What is coming out at the current trial is that the man, a transit cop, was totally subservient to his fiancée, who wore the pants in this family and was a mother herself, was fed up with the two boys and their issues.
 
The man bowed down to all the wishes of his fiancée, which evidently included all of this abuse, because he wanted to keep his fiancée happy.
 
So if the kids had to sleep on makeshift cots in a sub-freezing garage because she had had enough of them, then he went along with this, and even participated in the abuse by screaming at them and agreeing to his fiancee's wishes.
 
The trial continues, but there are so many holes in what led up to all of this, and a lot of it has to do with the birth mother.
 
Look, people do get divorced and it doesn’t make them bad people.
 
I was in such a situation myself more than 30 years ago, and I am not a bad person.
 
But let me tell you, kiss the ground and thank God if you never have to go through a divo9rce and the impending custody situation if the two of you are parents, because Family Court is certainly “The Twilight Zone” on all the courts at least in New York State.
 
Inside these chambers, up is down, down is up, everything that makes sense does not make sense in this court … and some of the judges consider working in this court something of a demotion and many don’t want to be there to begin with.
 
No, this is not a “Judge Judy” TV show, this is the “reality” of such a court, and that leads me to what I am going to say about the birth mother.
 
She somehow lost custody of these children, and in Family Court, judges almost always side with the mother when it comes to custody issues, even if parents are given joint custody like I had.
 
My ex was the custodial parent, and since she refused to follow any of the tenets of joint custody, we were constantly in court, having hearings before judges who really didn’t care about what was right and what was wrong.
 
But my experience in that court taught me that the only ways that a mother is not granted any custody of her children is if she is found to be totally unfit to be a parent.
 
Is she a drug addict? Is she a prostitute? Does she have severe mental problems? Is she an abuser herself?
 
This would be the only ways that a mother would lose total custody of her kids, even if in this particular case, the father was evidently well off with a good job as a cop and the mother evidently wasn’t doing well at all.
 
The mother, unless she either fit those characteristics I just described or simply didn’t want any part in her kids’ lives, would get some level of custody even if it was supervised for a few hours a week.
 
In this case, I do not believe that the mother curiously was not granted any custody, and while some people claim that the father threw around his police background to show who was the better parent and that the incompetent judges actually fell for this ruse, it has never been fully explained why the mother lost or was not granted custody of her children.

(There was some talk early on that she, in fact, had some level of custody, which was constantly violated by the father, and that she went to court about the violations, but the court would not listen to her pleas, and if this is, in fact, true, why did they not listen to her?)

 
And what is worse is that she only seemingly surfaced when her son died, and has pretty much vanished off the face of the earth once again at least up until this point as the trail continues.
 
Yes,, this trial is a mess, what happened to these two boys is a tragedy of epic propositions and I will say it again: it seems that every adult that could have helped them let then down, and that includes the birth mother and father and his fiancée, who will have her own trial sometime in the future.
 
Children are precious gifts, and no child should ever be treated like the Valva brothers were treated.
 
The dead boy never had a chance; his brother has somehow survived, but what damage is within him now?
 
What a horrid situation, and I can just hope that the two trials bring the guilty to justice.
 
Have a good weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.