Inset left: Corey Micciolo (GoFundMe). Inset right: Christopher Gregor (Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office) Background: Gregor in court at his sentencing (Court TV).
A New Jersey man learned his fate this week after being convicted of killing his 6-year-old son after forcing him to run on a treadmill to lose weight and causing him to fall repeatedly.
Christopher Gregor, 32, was sentenced on Friday to 25 years in state prison in the 2021 death of his son Corey Micciolo, Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer announced in a news release. The sentence will be subject to the terms of the “No Early Release Act,” meaning Gregor must serve at least 85% of his sentence before he is eligible for parole. Gregor was found guilty in May of aggravated manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child.
Breanna Micciolo, Corey’s mother, gave a crushing victim impact statement in court in video from Court TV.
“Corey was and still is my life, my world and my everything,” she said through tears. “What this monster did was pathetic, disgusting, and I wish him nothing but the worst.”
As Law&Crime reported, Gregor’s son had been forced to endure severe and weight-focused abuse, forced to run on a treadmill, weeks before he died. Authorities said surveillance footage from the Atlantic Heights Clubhouse fitness center showed the incident on March 20, 2021. The boy can be seen running on a treadmill when his father approaches and increases the speed. According to details from an affidavit published on Patch, the father repeatedly put his son on the treadmill despite the boy repeatedly falling and failing to keep up with the increased speed of the device. At one point, Gregor can be seen in the video as he “appears to bite” his son on the head while putting him back on the treadmill, the affidavit said.
By April that year, the boy died at Southern Ocean Medical Center in the Manahawkin section of Stafford Township after his father dropped him off and fled the state, prosecutors said. The Ocean County Medical Examiner’s Office determined the boy died of blunt-force trauma. The prosecutor’s expert narrowed that down to trauma to his chest and abdomen.
In her victim impact statement, Micciolo said she hesitantly dropped her son off on April 2, 2021, at Gregor’s home, “a mistake that will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
“I kissed my son goodbye unknowingly for the last time,” she said. “I wish I knew it was going to happen, and I would never let him go.”
In the news release, Billhimer said Gregor “will spend the rest of his days here on earth knowing that he caused the death of his son Corey.”
While nothing can bring this precious child back to his family, I hope that today’s sentence brings some sense of closure for those who knew and loved Corey, ” he said. “At long last, justice for Corey has been accomplished.”
Law&Crime’s Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report.
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