Blanche Scala. (Gregory P. Mango)
The cable’s out — forever!
A brutish Staten Island man who fatally beat his wife because she wouldn’t pay extra for premium TV while he was laid up in the hospital has died – choking to death on a piece of chicken.
Karma came back to haunt tough-guy Thomas Scala, 58, on July 12 as he was in his Brighton Street home in Tottenville.
He choked on the chicken and was brought to Staten Island University Hospital, where he died July 19.
He was buried July 24, the same day he was to be sentenced to five years probation after pleading guilty to criminally negligent homicide for causing the death of his wife, Blanche, in 2010.
“He got what he deserved,” the victim’s sister, Gloria Sellitto, told The Post. “He’s a chicken. The chicken got served.”
“It’s karma,” she continued. “If there is a god, he was punished. He choked on a chicken.”
Scala hit his wife in the head with a can of peas after a fight broke out Nov. 26, 2010 in their New Dorp Beach home. The wound triggered the bleeding of an old brain injury she had previously suffered at the savage’s hands, and she died the next day.
The source of Scala’s murderous discontent – he was miffed that his spouse, whom family members say he had long abused, hadn’t shelled out $5.75-a-day so the boob could stare at the tube while laid up in the hospital over Thanksgiving.
“He never admitted to anything he ever did in his life. He was not remorseful at all. He kept saying he didn’t do anything wrong,” Sellitto said.
“I don’t have anything good to say about him. He was not a father, or a husband. He was drug addict. A con artist and a sociopath.”
Sellitto said that her sister’s family felt probation was a joke and are happy knowing that fate will mete out justice for her sister’s killer in the afterlife.
“She raised two wonderful sons, and would have been a grandmother in a few months,” an emotional Sellitto said.
“We try to remember the happiness. We loved her very much. Miss her dearly everyday.”
On Monday, the Staten Island DA’s office listed the case as “abated by death.”