Ex-cop Eddy Coello was yanked out of his Bronx hideaway today and arrested in the grisly strangulation death of his estranged wife Tina Adovasio.
NYPD cops stormed the home at 2079 Wallace Ave. in Morris Park where the suspect has holed up at 2:30 p.m., just hours after victim Tina Adovasio was buried in upstate Putnam County.
A team of eight plainclothes cops hustled a handcuffed Coello out of a side entrance to and brought him to the back seat of an unmarked car with tinted windows and drove off.
Coello, 38, a former housing cop forced into retirement in 2000 over a domestic dispute with a previous wife, was busted six days after Adovasio’s battered body was found in the woods off the Taconic Parkway in Yorktown Heights.
SLAIN BRONX MOM LAID TO REST UPSTATE
Adovasio, 40, disappeared March 11 from the couple’s Bronx home, with Coello the last to see her alive. She was found along the Taconic Parkway in Yorktown Heights. An autopsy found she had been strangled and suffered blunt-force trauma to her head and chest.
The evidence against him includes a sordid record of abuse. The ex-cop was busted twice for domestic incidents — assault in 2007 and criminal mischief in 2006 — against Adovasio. He also was charged with harassment in 2005.
Coello is expected to be charged with second-degree murder by strangulation.
Glory Perez, Coello’s ex-girlfriend and the mother of one of his children, said she was relieved that he was arrested.
“I’m relieved, now I don’t have to move out of state,” said Perez, who was also beaten by Coello, an incident that forced his resignation from the NYPD in 2000. “Justice has finally been served to Tina Adovasio and her children.”
Meanwhile, hundreds of tearful friends, family and neighbors gathered this morning to mourn Adovasio, remembered as a loving mother devoted to her four children.
“We know there are no words, nothing we can do, nothing we can say, to take away the pain, the sorrow, the helplessness, the frustration and the bitterness we feel this morning,” the Rev. Patrick Angelucci told the gathering at St. John the Evangelist Church in upstate Mahopac.
“All of us, as we come into the church this morning, I’m sure are struggling within our own hearts to try to find some kind of meaning in something that is so meaningless, so brutal, so violent, so senseless as this,” Angelucci said.
Family and friends clutched pink roses, including the 40-year-old Adovasio’s youngest, 5-year-old Mia Coello – her only child with the ex-cop, Eddy Coello, the lone suspect in her grisly death.
The priest spoke emotionally of a conversation with Adovasio’s oldest son Joey, 16, one of three children she had with ex-husband Joe Adovasio.
“I was speaking to Joey (the oldest son) on the phone and he said to me, ‘I wish my mom could see me grow up.’ And I said to him, ‘Joey, your mom can see you. Your mom is with you. She is present with you, and she loves you, and she is near you,'” Angelucci said.
The boy also had a message for his late mother.
“Last night, I asked Joey, ‘What do you want me to say about your mom?’ And he said, ‘Tell everybody that she was a good mother…that she cared for her children first…that she was willing to do everything for us, to sacrifice everything for us…that she wanted to make sure we did our homework…that she wanted us to be our best, that she was always there for us,'” Angelucci said.
Speaking directly to Adovasio’s four children, including Alexis, 15, and Michael, 11, he said: “As you take your mother to the cemetery to be laid to rest, she says to you in a very special way, remember, there is no grave anywhere that is so deep that it could ever bury a mother’s love.” Adovasio’s lawyer, Michael Lease, has told The Post that the couple married 18 months ago, but that his client filed for divorce in February.
“It haunts me,” Lease said. “They were together for seven years. She worked two jobs. It is amazing to me . . . You carry yourself in the workplace, and all of a sudden, this one person is able to reduce you to a child.”
Adovasio had told Lease that if she turned up dead, he should look at Coello as the prime suspect.
Coello voluntarily showed up at the 45th Precinct station house in The Bronx last Thursday. He left after 24 minutes, refusing to submit his DNA or look at pictures pertaining to the case.