California graduate student who confessed to feeling an urge to hurt children since childhood pled guilty Wednesday for murdering her best friend’s infant son and injuring his twin brother in Pittsburgh.
Nicole Virzi, 32, of San Diego, pled guilty in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court to murder in the third degree, aggravated assault, and endangering the welfare of children. In the plea bargain, she will spend 35 to 80 years in state prison, according to TribLive and WPXI.
The prosecution had sought the death penalty, citing torture as an aggravating factor, NBC News reported. She could have received the death penalty if found guilty of murder in the first degree. Her capital trial before Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jill E. Rangos was set to start on Oct. 1 but was postponed while the two parties completed the deal.
Deputy District Attorney Emma Schoedel informed the court that the deal met the wishes of the child’s parents, Savannah Roberts and Ethan Katz, TribLive reported. Both were supposed to be witnesses in the case, and they asked prosecutors to resolve it so Virzi would serve most of her life in prison without putting their family through a public trial.
“This office has decided to invest in their healing,” Schoedel said.
Virzi, who was pursuing her clinical psychology doctorate in a joint doctorate program at San Diego State University and the University of California, San Diego, traveled to Pittsburgh in June 2024 to visit the couple shortly after their twin sons, Leon and Ari, were born, CNN reported.
On June 15, 2024, Roberts and Katz rushed Ari to the hospital with injuries to his genitals, scratches, bruises, and swelling, according to court documents cited by CBS News Pittsburgh and WPXI. They left Leon under Virzi’s care at their home on Walnut Street in the city’s Shadyside neighborhood. According to the prosecutors, Virzi had inflicted Ari’s injuries, WPXI reported. He survived.
At 11:17 p.m. that night, Virzi called 911 to report that Leon was having difficulty breathing and had a lump on his head. She told the police that the baby had fallen from a bouncer seat while she went to the kitchen to fetch him a bottle, TribLive reported.
Leon was rushed to UPMC Children’s Hospital, where he died within hours. He was 6 weeks old. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office concluded that the cause of death was a homicide resulting from blunt force trauma to the head, with a severe skull fracture and multiple brain bleeds, NBC News reported.
Police arrested Virzi shortly after 6 a.m. the following day at the Shadyside Airbnb where she was staying. She was interrogated for about 13 hours at police headquarters before charges were filed against her.
In the initial interview, Virzi told the detectives that she had fallen asleep with Leon in the bouncer and woke up to find him crying on the floor. After investigators pressed her, pointing out that a fall from that height could not explain his injuries, she changed her story.
“So when I was alone with Leon, I shook him a couple of times, hard. And I dropped him a couple of times, hard,” Virzi confessed during the interrogation, which was filmed and later reported by TribLive.
She also revealed that she had turned the baby upside down on the bathroom floor tiles.
“Something just came over me. I couldn’t control it,” she said. “I’m telling you this because I can’t keep lying about it.”
She told the investigators the urge wasn’t new.
“From a very, very young age, I don’t know what it is, but I always had this urge, almost like a compulsion I can’t control, to hurt kids,” she said.
She also said she was happy to visit her friend but felt she was being treated like a nanny, and that resentment made her angry. The prosecutors told the court on Wednesday that Virzi had been searching online about her compulsion, WPXI reported.
Her attorneys moved to suppress her confession, arguing that she had been coerced into confessing after a long day with no sleep and food. However, Judge Rangos rejected the motion, ruling that Virzi’s confession was voluntary, TribLive reported.
The family members wept in the courtroom on Wednesday, WPXI reported. Roberts remembered the nickname she used to call her son because he curled his legs and stuck out his tongue. Leon’s grandfather said the boy was supposed to grow up with his brother.
“I’ll never forgive myself for not protecting him from this monster,” Roberts said.
Virzi did not speak when given an opportunity. Her attorney, Tina Miller, said Virzi chose to remain silent out of respect for the family, since no apology could compensate for the damage she had done. Miller said Virzi wrote a letter to Leon’s family, which they can choose to read or not, TribLive reported.
In a statement reported by WPXI, the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office called the case horrific. It said Virzi used her trusted relationship with the family to put herself in a position to harm the boys. The office said it agreed to the plea after ongoing consultation with the family and asked that their privacy be respected.
Virzi has been in the Allegheny County Jail since her arrest on June 16, 2024.
