GRIM: Ex-cop Eddy Coello (inset top), charged with killing wife Tina Adovasio, sits in court yesterday as Mark Rapisarda (inset bottom) — the victim’s cop cousin — tells how he was part of the detail that found the body. (
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A young man yesterday heartbreakingly took jurors through a surveillance video that caught his abusive ex-cop stepdad allegedly carrying out his mom’s corpse in a duffel bag last year.
“Eddy is walking out of my house with my mom,” Joseph Adovasio, son of strangled mother of four Tina Adovasio, said of Eddy Coello as the video played in Bronx Supreme Court.
“It’s my mom,” Joseph, 18, sadly said as he stood between the jury and a flat-screen TV and pointed at the grainy image — which was caught only because the Edison Avenue building camera accidentally was bumped from its usual position.
Joseph Adovasio’s chilling testimony came after he took the witness stand and stared down Coello, 40, who was twice previously arrested for attacking and harassing his mom.
The former NYPD housing cop — who lost his job in 2000 after allegations of abusing an ex-girlfriend — is charged with murdering the 40-year-old nurse on March 11, 2011, and dumping her body in woods off the Taconic Parkway.
Joseph yesterday recalled that his mom — who suspected Coello of cheating on her — had argued with him over the telephone earlier that day.
Joseph said he later left home to pick up his girlfriend and returned with her around 11:30 p.m. to find his mother was no longer there. He dropped off his girlfriend several hours later and went back, and “I went to my room and called my mom, but she didn’t answer,” he testified.
After waking the next day to drive Tina to work, he saw she still wasn’t home. Nor was she at her job, a call confirmed.
Coello, who has a 6-year-old daughter by Adovasio, began acting suspiciously the following day, Joseph testified.
“ ‘You’re my alibi. You see my car; it hasn’t been moved from that spot,’” Coello told Joseph, the son recalled. “ ‘They’re going to blame me. They always blame the husband.’ ”
In fact, Coello was lying about his car and later lied about seeing Tina storm out of the house in anger after he got home March 11 and they fought, prosecutors charge.
The surveillance video not only shows her never leaving the house but also shows Coello getting his car from a nearby parking spot at 1:38 a.m. March 12, double-parking and re-entering his home.
He later is seen on the video walking out of the home carrying a bag with what appears to be a body and putting it into the trunk of his car.
Tina’s body was found by ATV riders in woods off the Taconic on March 16.
One of the cops called to the scene was her own cousin, Yorktown Heights Police Officer Mark Rapisarda.
“I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies. But not of someone that I know or someone that I’m related to,” Rapisarda testified yesterday, describing how he recognized Tina’s swollen face and the tattoo on her leg.