STATEN ISLAND — A Staten Island man who beat his wife to death after she refused to pay for cable TV while he was in the hospital choked to death on a chicken dinner, the New York Post reported.
The toothless killer, Thomas Scala, 58, gagged while eating a chicken cutlet dinner he failed to cut into small enough pieces in his Tottenville home on July 12, days before he would be sentenced to probation, the Staten Island Advance reported.
“He got what he deserved,” Gloria Sellitto, the sister of victim Blanche Scala, told the Post. “It’s karma. If there is a God, he was punished. He choked on a chicken.
“He’s a chicken. The chicken got served.”
Scala died seven days later due to loss of oxygen to his brain at Staten Island University Hospital, Prince's Bay.
He was buried on July 24, the day he was to be sentenced to five-years' probation for criminally-negligent-homicide after he bashed his wife's skull with a can of oven cleaner because she wouldn't pay the extra $5.75 a day for cable TV while he was in the hospital on Thanksgiving 2010.
The blow opened up a wound from a previous beating in Blanche Scala's head and caused massive bleeding. She died the next day, the Post said.
Scala's son, Thomas Jr., told the Post his dad got what he deserved, saying that the deadly chicken cutlet was "from God."
“What goes around comes around,” he told the Post.
On his last meal, Scala, who did not have teeth or dentures, ate a piece of boneless chicken too large for him to chew with his gums, the Post said.
Family tried to preform the Heimlich maneuver, but Scala lost consciousness and was declared brain dead at the hospital. He was taken off life support a few days later, the Post said.
His nephew, John Scala, 14, told the Post that his uncle usually tried to scarf down bigger pieces then he could chew.
“I kept asking him to use the knife, to cut smaller pieces,” he told the Post. “But he would just chomp huge hunks.”
