A New Jersey mom is suing the Department of Child Protection and Permanency for ignoring her child abuse reports for months and denying her emergency custody request the day before her young son was allegedly killed by his father. Bre Micciolo is seeking justice in the death of her 6-year-old son, Corey Micciolo, and accountability from the agency that she believes could have prevented his death.
Micciolo reportedly filed the first abuse report with the agency nearly two years prior to the day her son died, with three additional reports being filed leading up to the day of his death, per Inside Edition.
More from CafeMom: Email Address for Citizens to Report Child Abuse & Neglect Suspicions Wasn't Checked for Nearly 5 Years
The mother started documenting evidence and filing reports regarding the father’s alleged abusive behavior with the agency nearly two years before her son died.
Bre Micciolo reportedly filed her first report of child abuse in September 2019, when her son Corey first started seeing his father Christopher Gregor, per Inside Edition. Micciolo claimed that Corey came home that day with a “busted lip” and “swollen face” that she took photos of and sent to DCPP.
Micciolo filed several more reports of child abuse in April 2020 and July 2020, and a report on the day her son died, April 2, 2021.
The agency denied her request for full emergency custody the day before her son died.
In a Facebook post on her page Justice for Corey months later, the mother wrote that the father wanted nothing to do with Corey until he was almost 5 years old. That's when he went to court and filed for visitation, and those rights were granted.
The day before Corey died, Micciolo had filed an emergency request for full custody that the agency reportedly denied because it did not find that her son was in “imminent and irreparable harm," reported Inside Edition.
"On April 2, 2021 I was forced to drop my son off at his fathers at 9am," Micciolo wrote in the Facebook post. In the post, Micciolo shared that she received a panicked phone call from Gregor around 3:30 p.m., stating that Corey was “lethargic” and “not waking up” and that he needed insurance information because they were going to the hospital.
By then, panicking herself, she called Gregor back to find out which hospital, and when she did not receive a response she reported it to police. She received the worst news at 5 p.m., when she learned that Corey had died and his father had left him alone at the hospital.
More from CafeMom: Teen Goes Viral for Barricading Himself To Avoid Court-Ordered Visit With Abusive Father
The final cause of the 6-year-old’s death was determined to be ‘blunt force injuries.'
The Ocean County Medical Examiner's Office ruled Corey’s cause of death as a result of "blunt force trauma," according to the New York Post.
Corey had sustained several “blunt force injuries” with “cardiac and liver contusions,” as well as “acute inflammation and sepsis," Inside Edition reported. “There was nothing that could’ve stopped his murder besides DCPP stepping in," Micciolo said, according to the news outlet.
The father was charged with murder a year later based on evidence that should have prevented the boy's death, and the mother is still seeking justice.
Gregor was charged with child endangerment back in April 2021, but he was charged with murder in the death of his son in the spring of 2022, per the Post. The child abuse allegations were confirmed with video footage from the Atlantic Heights Clubhouse Fitness Center, which showed Corey running on a treadmill that his father kept increasing the speed of that led to him falling down. At one point Gregor is seen appearing to “bite” Corey on top of the head while making him get back on the treadmill.
This video footage, along with other documentation and numerous reports, were given to the DCPP by Corey’s mother prior to the day he died.
In her civil suit against the agency, Micciolo stated that her son could still be alive if the agency had “adequately, properly and fully investigated the reports of abuse," reported Inside Edition. Micciolo is also seeking "wrongful death and survivor damages" on behalf of the Corey Micciolo Estate from the agency.
