Metro

Wife’s angry messages cited at ex-NYPD cop’s murder trial

Edwin Coello

Edwin Coello (Tomas E. Gaston)

LAST WORDS: Doomed Tina Adovasio texted her husband, Edwin Coello (inset), as he returned home late. (
)

Prosecutors are hoping a woman’s texts from beyond the grave will put her husband away for murder.

The defendant in the unusual case in Bronx Supreme Court is Edwin Coello, a former NYPD cop with a record of allegedly abusing women.

He’s accused of beating and strangling his estranged wife and dumping her body off a Westchester parkway.

Prosecutors say Coello, 41, flew into a violent rage after his wife, Tina Adovasio, 40, told him in text messages that she wanted a divorce because she suspected him of cheating.

In one, she invited him to “live your life as a single guy,’’ take “your s–t’’ and get out.

The texts were read at a pretrial hearing on a defense motion to keep the jury from seeing them.

Adovasio, a nurse, vanished March 6, 2011, from her Bronx home.

Her beaten and strangled body was found six days later in a wooded area off the Taconic Parkway in Yorktown Heights.

Detectives did not have to dig hard to find incriminating evidence.

The angry missives about Coello’s alleged cheating were retrieved from Coello’s own cellphone by Detective John Fennelli shortly after cops arrested the ex-cop at his Morris Heights home.

In one, Coello told his suspicious wife that he was having trouble getting home because of flooded highways.

“Do you really think I’m stupid to believe highways are flooded after sun out all day. Really?” she responded.

Coello ignored her question and asked, “R U cooking?”

But Adovasio persisted,

“[I] hope you have money saved for your lawyer cause you’ll need it,” she wrote.

“I only have to make a call and you are so pathetic you think I have no where I could go.”

He replies: “cooking?”

At another point, she wrote, “You want to live your life as a single guy then go ahead and take your s–t and leave,” according to a transcript Fennelli read in court.

“Tired of you and your disrespectful ways — can’t stay in this relationship.”

Coello’s lawyer, Renee Hill, is asking Judge Ralph Fabrizio to toss out the text messages, along with the testimony of a former girlfriend who described the alleged abuse that got him kicked out of the NYPD in 2000.

Hill refused to talk about the evidence until after the judge makes a ruling.

Prosecutors also want to introduce a handwritten alibi they say Coello concocted to describe the final moments before his wife’s disappearance.

“Tina was there. Spoke with trying to explain [I] am not cheating on her,” he wrote.

“She was very upset with me. She wanted to hit me with right hand. Grabbed it and she started to scream at me that she was leaving and clawed me with left hand. She received a text and left stating something like ‘by its my turn. See how you like it.’ ”

Coello told police she stormed out of their home after the fight.

Coello’s alibi quickly unraveled after security video showed him leaving their apartment building alone carrying a duffel bag.

After he lost his job as a cop, Coello returned to his old post as a doorman at a luxury Upper East Side building.

His volatile marriage to Adovasio was marred by several incidents of domestic strife.

In February 2005, Coello pleaded guilty to second-degree harassment after a domestic incident and received a conditional discharge.

In February 2007, he was arrested for an attack that landed her in a hospital. That case was sealed.

In November 2010, police were called to their home after a fight, but no arrests were made.

On Nov. 11, 2010, police were called to Adovasio’s home for a fight at the dinner table. No arrests were made.

Adovasio was the mother of Coello’s 6-year-old daughter and had three children from a previous marriage.

Coello was placed in protective custody after his arrest last year.