Melina Frattolin, 9, mourned by upstate NY community where she was visiting when murdered: ‘She will be one of us'
'If this is going to be the resting place where he left her, this is going to be her community now,' Bridgette Cruz, a mom and local business owner who organized a vigil in Ticonderoga told a crowd of a few hundred people.
'She will be one of us,' Cruz added.
7 Community members attend a vigil for Melina Frattolin at Percy Bicentennial Park in Ticonderoga, NY on July 22, 2025.
Hans Pennink
Little Melina, a Canadian tourist, was found in a shallow pond on the western end of Eagle Lake, about 10 miles away near the edge of town, where authorities allege her father, Luciuano Frattolin, drowned her before placing a bogus 911 call claiming she was kidnapped.
'As a mother, my heart has ached and stomach has churned since 1:30 that morning when that amber alert hit,' Cruz said.
She's not alone.
'It really does kind of take the wind out of us, right? That's why we're so glad to be able to participate in something like this,' said Adam Dubuque, an army vet who moved to the area in 2011 to get away.
'My faith has been a big building block for my life post-service. It's really cool to see the area start to embrace it and have us do things like this, show unity amongst the community, especially when things are kind of divided right now,' Dubuque added.
7 Melina Frattolin and her alleged killer father Luciano Frattolin before her death in New York.
Instagram/Luciano Frattolin
7 A couple mourns the 9-year-old girl during the candlelight vigil.
Hans Pennink
7 Hundreds of community members came together to mourn the girl killed in their community while on a trip with her father.
Hans Pennink
Tabitha Farmer described the murder as 'heartbreaking' and said she stayed up listening to the police scanner Saturday night when Melina's dad reported her missing.
Farmer and her husband, Jason, drove 45 minutes from Minerva, New York, to light a candle for Melina.
'Something like this is just unheard of around here,' her husband said.
7 Melina Frattolin was found in a shallow pond on the western end of Eagle Lake, about 10 miles away near the edge of town.
New York State Police
7 Luciano Frattolin was charged with Melina's father was charged with her murder and concealment of a corpse on July 21, 2025.
Essex County Sheriff's Office
A separate memorial was held in Schroon Lake on Tuesday evening.
'Number one, as a parent, you cannot believe that a parent would actually do that to their own child,' Tonya LaFrance, a lifelong Ticonderoga resident, told The Post.
'And secondly, it's a very, very tight knit, close community, most of the people here, everybody knows everybody,' she added.
She said the murder brings a level of 'terror' to the community and a sense of frustration that its reputation should be marred by such a disgusting tragedy.
'That is very very hard for everybody to swallow right now,' she said.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
3 hours ago
- New York Post
90 prosecutors quit Nassau County DA's Office over claims of incumbent's ‘dictator' leadership: ‘No longer about justice'
About 90 prosecutors have quit the Nassau County District Attorney's Office since Anne Donnelly took it over in 2022, says her political challenger — who left the job herself, citing a 'dictator'-like atmosphere. Nicole Aloise, a Democrat running against the GOP incumbent Donnelly for DA, called out her opponent Friday outside the county courthouse in Mineola, LI — accusing Donnelly of fostering a toxic work culture focused more on headlines than justice. 'I left the Nassau DAs office after truly believing I would be there for life,' said Aloise, who quit there in 2023. 'I loved serving the community, ensuring that victims were heard and perpetrators were brought to justice. 6 Nicole Aloise, a Democrat running against the GOP incumbent Anne Donnelly for DA, accused Donnelly of fostering a toxic work culture. Nicole Aloise/Instagram 'Once Anne Donnelly took office — the job changed — it was no longer about justice, it was about her own agenda.' Donnelly's camp fired back by calling her political foe and the other former assistant district attorneys 'ethically challenged, soft-on-crime prosecutors like Nicole Aloise.' Aloise said she was one of the roughly 90 prosecutors in the office pushed to quit their jobs under Donnelly, claiming one of the reasons she left is because she was denied the resources she requested to try to expand a murder prosecution into a larger conspiracy case. 6 'Once Anne Donnelly took office — the job changed — it was no longer about justice, it was about her own agenda,' Aloise said. Nicole Aloise/Instagram 6 Aloise said she was one of the roughly 90 prosecutors in the office pushed to quit their jobs under Donnelly. Dennis A. Clark Some of the other former prosecutors said the alleged internal dismal culture shift under Donnelly also drove them out. They wrote to Aloise sharing similar accounts, including breakdowns in collaboration, shrinking support for long-term investigations and what they saw as a growing focus on politics over prosecution. 'You can either treat us like s–t or pay us like s–t, you can't do both — Donnelly did,' a former prosecutor told The Post under the promise of anonymity. 6 'You can either treat us like s–t or pay us like s–t, you can't do both — Donnelly did,' a former prosecutor told The Post under the promise of anonymity. Dennis A. Clark Aloise also cited a 44% spike in basic crimes during Donnelly's first two years in office — the highest level since 2013 — and attacked the DA for having the office's lowest felony conviction rate since 2014. County officials have touted a 25% drop in major crimes at the start of 2025, but Aloise argued that short-term improvements don't erase what she called a breakdown in leadership and the long-term damage to the justice system. But some local authorities blame the previous jump in crime and drop in convictions on former President Joe Biden's border policies and New York's 'soft-on-crime' laws, even going as far as previously calling Dem Gov. Kathy Hochul and her political party 'pro-criminal.' 6 Donnelly's camp called Aloise and the other former assistant district attorneys 'ethically challenged, soft-on-crime prosecutors.' Dennis A. Clark Donnelly's office contended that the prosecutors who quit their assistant district attorney posts also fit that description — and it said good riddance, framing their departures as a purge. 'The only exodus of attorneys, thankfully, have been by ethically challenged, soft-on-crime prosecutors like Nicole Aloise,' DA spokesman Mike Deery told The Post. 'Under District Attorney Anne Donnelly's watch, Nassau has been recognized as the safest community in the USA,' he said. 'The only exodus of attorneys, thankfully, has been by ethically challenged, soft-on-crime prosecutors like Nicole Aloise.' 6 According to DA spokesman Mike Deery, Donnelly is focused on rebuilding the office with prosecutors who support her tough-on-crime approach. Dennis A. Clark Deery said his boss has been focused on rebuilding the office with prosecutors who support her tough-on-crime approach and restoring public trust. He said Aloise has been previously accused of 'unethical conduct, corruption and abuse of power' after a group of law professors filed a formal ethics complaint in 2021 accusing her of prosecutorial misconduct during her time as an ADA in Queens over her father, Justice Michael Aloise. The complaint was eventually dismissed, according to a state letter obtained by The Post. Aloise's camp told The Post in a statement, 'If Anne Donnelly was a competent District Attorney and actually believed she had that many unethical employees, she'd have fired them rather than watch them flee her office en masse. 'Facts matter,' the statement said, pointing out that the stats used to determine Nassau County as the safest in the country are from 2014 and 2016 — before Donnelly took office.
Miami Herald
4 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Trump boasts of deporting the ‘worst of the worst.' LA raids tell a far different story
LOS ANGELES - They called them the 'worst of the worst.' For more than a month and a half, the Trump administration has posted a barrage of mugshots of L.A. undocumented immigrants with long rap sheets. Officials have spotlighted Cuong Chanh Phan, a 49-year-old Vietnamese man convicted in 1997 of second-degree murder for his role in slaying two teens at a high school graduation party. They have shared blurry photos on Instagram of a slew of convicted criminals such as Rolando Veneracion-Enriquez, a 55-year-old Filipino man convicted in 1996 of sexual penetration with a foreign object with force and assault with intent to commit a felony. And Eswin Uriel Castro, a Mexican convicted in 2002 of child molestation and in 2021 of assault with a deadly weapon. But the immigrants that the Department of Homeland Security showcase in X posts and news releases do not represent the majority of immigrants swept up across Los Angeles. As the number of immigration arrests in the L.A. region quadrupled from 540 in April to 2,185 in June, seven out of 10 immigrants arrested in June had no criminal conviction - a trend that immigrant advocates say belies administration claims that they are targeting 'heinous illegal alien criminals' who represent a threat to public safety. According to a Los Angeles Times analysis of ICE data from the Deportation Data Project, the proportion of immigrants without criminal convictions arrested in seven counties in and around L.A. has skyrocketed from 35% in April, to 46% in May, and to 69% from June 1 to June 26. Austin Kocher, a geographer and research assistant professor at Syracuse University who specializes in immigration enforcement, said the Trump administration was not being entirely honest about the criminal status of those they were arresting. Officials, he said, followed a strategy of focusing on the minority of violent convicted criminals so they could justify enforcement policies that are proving to be less popular. 'I think they know that if they were honest with the American public that they're arresting people who cook our food, wash dishes in the kitchen, take care of people in nursing homes, people who are just living in part of the community … there's a large segment of the public, including a large segment of Trump's own supporters, who would be uncomfortable and might even oppose those kinds of immigration practices.' In Los Angeles, the raids swept up garment worker Jose Ortiz, who worked 18 years at the Ambiance Apparel clothing warehouse in downtown L.A., before being nabbed in a June 6 raid; car wash worker Jesus Cruz, a 52-year-old father who was snatched on June 8 - just before his daughter's graduation - from Westchester Hand Wash; and Emma De Paz, a recent widow and tamale vendor from Guatemala who was arrested June 19 outside a Hollywood Home Depot. Such arrests may be influencing the public's perception of the raids. Multiple polls show support for Trump's immigration agenda slipping as masked federal agents increasingly swoop up undocumented immigrants from workplaces and streets. ICE data shows that about 31% of the immigrants arrested across the L.A. region from June 1 to June 26 had criminal convictions, 11% had pending criminal charges and 58% were classified as 'other immigration violator,' which ICE defines as 'individuals without any known criminal convictions or pending charges in ICE's system of record at the time of the enforcement action.' The L.A. region's surge in arrests of noncriminals has been more dramatic than the U.S. as a whole: Arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions climbed nationally from 57% in April to 69% in June. Federal raids here have also been more fiercely contested in Southern California - particularly in L.A. County, where more than 2 million residents are undocumented or living with undocumented family members. 'A core component of their messaging is that this is about public safety, that the people that they are arresting are threats to their communities,' said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank. 'But it's hard to maintain that this is all about public safety when you're going out and arresting people who are just going about their lives and working.' Trump never said he would arrest only criminals. Almost as soon as he retook office on Jan. 20, Trump signed a stack of executive orders aimed at drastically curbing immigration. The administration then moved to expand arrests from immigrants who posed a security threat to anyone who entered the country illegally. Yet while officials kept insisting they were focused on violent criminals, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a warning: 'That doesn't mean that the other illegal criminals who entered our nation's borders are off the table.' As White House chief adviser on border policy Tom Homan put it: 'If you're in the country illegally, you got a problem.' Still, things did not really pick up until May, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered ICE's top field officials to shift to more aggressive tactics: arresting undocumented immigrants, whether or not they had a criminal record. Miller set a new goal: arresting 3,000 undocumented people a day, a quota that immigration experts say is impossible to reach by focusing only on criminals. 'There aren't enough criminal immigrants in the United States to fill their arrest quotas and to get millions and millions of deportations, which is what the president has explicitly promised,' Bier said. 'Immigration and Customs Enforcement says there's half a million removable noncitizens who have criminal convictions in the United States. Most of those are nonviolent: traffic, immigration offenses. It's not millions and millions.' By the time Trump celebrated six months in office, DHS boasted that the Trump administration had already arrested more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants. '70% of ICE arrests,' the agency said in a news release, 'are individuals with criminal convictions or charges.' But that claim no longer appeared to be true. While 78% of undocumented immigrants arrested across the U.S. in April had a criminal conviction or faced a pending charge, that number had plummeted to 57% in June. In L.A., the difference between what Trump officials said and the reality on the ground was more stark: Only 43% of those arrested across the L.A. region had criminal convictions or faced a pending charge. Still, ICE kept insisting it was 'putting the worst first.' As stories circulate across communities about the arrests of law-abiding immigrants, there are signs that support for Trump's deportation agenda is falling. A CBS/YouGov poll published July 20 shows about 56% of those surveyed approved of Trump's handling of immigration in March, but that dropped to 50% in June and 46% in July. About 52% of poll respondents said the Trump administration is trying to deport more people than expected. When asked who the Trump administration is prioritizing for deporting, only 44% said 'dangerous criminals.' California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have repeatedly accused Trump of conducting a national experiment in Los Angeles. 'The federal government is using California as a playground to test their indiscriminate actions that fulfill unsafe arrest quotas and mass detention goals,' Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom told The Times. 'They are going after every single immigrant, regardless of whether they have a criminal background and without care that they are American citizens, legal status holders and foreign-born, and even targeting native-born U.S. citizens.' When pressed on why ICE is arresting immigrants who have not been convicted or are not facing pending criminal charges, Trump administration officials tend to argue that many of those people have violated immigration law. 'ICE agents are going to arrest people for being in the country illegally,' Homan told CBS News earlier this month. 'We still focus on public safety threats and national security threats, but if we find an illegal alien in the process of doing that, they're going to be arrested too.' Immigration experts say that undermines their message that they are ridding communities of people who threaten public safety. 'It's a big backtracking from 'These people are out killing people, raping people, harming them in demonstrable ways,' to 'This person broke immigration law in this way or that way,'' Bier said. The Trump administration is also trying to find new ways to target criminals in California. It has threatened to withhold federal funds to California due to its 'sanctuary state' law, which limits county jails from coordinating with ICE except in cases involving immigrants convicted of a serious crime or felonies such as murder, rape, robbery or arson. Last week, the U.S. Justice Department requested California counties, including L.A., provide data on all jail inmates who are not U.S. citizens in an effort to help federal immigration agents prioritize those who have committed crimes. 'Although every illegal alien by definition violates federal law,' the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release, 'those who go on to commit crimes after doing so show that they pose a heightened risk to our Nation's safety and security.' As Americans are bombarded with dueling narratives of good vs. bad immigrants, Kocher believes the question we have to grapple with is not 'What does the data say?' Instead, we should ask: 'How do we meaningfully distinguish between immigrants with serious criminal convictions and immigrants who are peacefully living their lives?' 'I don't think it's reasonable, or helpful, to represent everyone as criminals - or everyone as saints,' Kocher said. 'Probably the fundamental question, which is also a question that plagues our criminal justice system, is whether our legal system is capable of distinguishing between people who are genuine public safety threats and people who are simply caught up in the bureaucracy.' The data, Kocher said, show that ICE is currently unable or unwilling to make that distinction. 'If we don't like the way that the system is working, we might want to rethink whether we want a system where people who are simply living in the country following laws, working in their economy, should actually have a pathway to stay,' Kocher said. 'And the only way to do that is actually to change the laws.' In the rush to blast out mugshots of some of the most criminal L.A. immigrants, the Trump administration left out a key part of the story. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, its staff notified ICE on May 5 of Veneracion's pending release after he had served nearly 30 years in prison for the crimes of assault with intent to commit rape and sexual penetration with a foreign object with force. But ICE failed to pick up Veneracion and canceled its hold on him May 19, a day before he was released on parole. A few weeks later, as ICE amped up its raids, federal agents arrested Veneracion on June 7 at the ICE office in L.A. The very next day, DHS shared his mugshot in a news release titled 'President Trump is Stepping Up Where Democrats Won't.' The same document celebrated the capture of Phan, who served nearly 25 years in prison after he was convicted of second-degree murder. CDCR said the Board of Parole Hearings coordinated with ICE after Phan was granted parole in 2022. Phan was released that year to ICE custody. But those details did not stop Trump officials from taking credit for his arrest and blaming California leaders for letting Phan loose. 'It is sickening that Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass continue to protect violent criminal illegal aliens at the expense of the safety of American citizens and communities,' DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
New York Post
12 hours ago
- New York Post
Drunk teen killed groom-to-be in Harlem wrong-way horror after night out at NYC club, new suit alleges
The Long Island teen accused of driving the wrong-way on the Henry Hudson Parkway and killing a man 24 hours before the victim's wedding was allegedly drunk and being chased by an off-duty NYPD cop at the time of the crash. Jimmy Connors had allegedly spent the night drinking at Nebula on West 41st Street, where staff served him alcohol despite him being 'visibly intoxicated' in the hours before the horrific Aug. 24 collision, according to a lawsuit. After Connors, 17, left the club, he allegedly got behind the wheel of a white Chevy Silverado with Ontario plates and crashed into another car — prompting off-duty cop Boubacar Barry, who witnessed the wreck, to pursue him in his personal SUV instead of calling 911, according to the Manhattan Supreme Court filing. 4 Kirk Walker, a Manhattan dad of three, was just one day from marrying his fiancée when he was killed in the head-on crash. Advertisement Both vehicles then barreled south in the northbound lanes of the parkway, where the Silverado slammed head-on into a car driven by Kirk Walker and his cousin, Rob McLaurin, authorities said. Walker, 38, was one day from his wedding when he and McLaurin were killed. Walker and McLaurin had just left the groom-to-be's bachelor party and were driving north near West 154th Street in a Dodge Challenger when the 2:20 a.m. crash occurred, said Walker's fiancée, Shauntea Weaver, who filed the lawsuit this week against Connors, Barry, Nebula, the NYPD and the city. Advertisement Connors fled after the wreck, leaving behind his injured 21-year-old passenger. Police said the passenger tried to run but was caught 30 feet away. 4 The deadly 2:20 a.m. wreck happened as Walker and his cousin were returning from the groom-to-be's bachelor party. Post Mayor Eric Adams even put up $1,000 of his own money to help catch the suspect. Connors, of Syosset, was nabbed the next day at the Canadian border, limping, bloodied and without ID. Customs agents identified him using NYPD images that allegedly showed him bolting from the crash. Advertisement He was taken back to New York and indicted on charges including second-degree murder, manslaughter and leaving the scene of a fatal crash. He pleaded not guilty. His attorney Jonathan Perez previously told The Post that Connors is 'sick, autistic, has epilepsy' and believes he was manipulated by someone else in the car. Connors has been held without bail since his arraignment, the Manhattan District Attorney's office said. 4 Jimmy Connors, 17, was allegedly drunk and fleeing an off-duty NYPD officer when he drove the wrong way on the Henry Hudson Parkway, killing two men. Post Advertisement Walker, a Manhattan father of three and rental-car-business owner, was set to marry Weaver in a lavish New Jersey ceremony. 'Kirk was taken from me just as we were starting our new life together,' Weaver said in a statement released through her attorneys to The Post. 'He was the love of my life … We've been left trying to pick up the pieces of our lives and come to terms with a future without him in it. Our lives will never be the same.' Weaver, now the administrator of Walker's estate, argued in court papers that Barry acted as a cop — not a civilian — making the city and NYPD responsible for the unauthorized chase, which she contends isn't covered by emergency-response laws. Nebula also violated the state's Dram Shop Act, which allows victims to sue bars that serve alcohol to underage or visibly intoxicated patrons who later cause harm, Weaver said in the legal filing. 4 Walker's fiancée, Shauntea Weaver, is suing the city, NYPD, Nebula nightclub and Connors, alleging negligence and wrongful death. Weaver is seeking unspecified damages for wrongful death, conscious pain and suffering, negligence, emotional and psychological loss, funeral expenses and punitive damages. The NYPD and Nebula did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Mayor's Office referred questions to the NYPD. Advertisement Connors and Barry could not be reached for comment.
