A nine-year-old girl was drowned in murky marsh water during a trip to upstate New York, prosecutors alleged at the murder trial of her father, a coffee company CEO.
Melina Frattolin was found dead in July 2025 near Eagle Lake in Ticonderoga. Experts told the court that mud, plant matter and debris from the marsh were discovered in her lungs, airway and stomach.
Her father, 45-year-old Luciano Frattolin, has pleaded not guilty to murder. Prosecutors claim he devised the killing as part of a scheme to avoid paying child support.
As jurors were shown disturbing images of his daughter’s body, Frattolin looked away.
Frattolin, the founder of the coffee company Gambella, was also seen writing rapidly on a legal pad while prosecutors presented evidence in court.
Medical examiner Dr. Michael Sikirica testified that Melina was recovered from knee-deep marsh water and was covered in a “large amount of mud,” calling her death “definitely a drowning case.”
“The lungs were just full of black material, basically mud and plant debris,” Sikirica said. He testified that her lungs were visibly hyper-expanded and added that her body appeared to have been held down in the water by a stone.
The testimony followed reports that Melina had pleaded with her mother not to make her go on a previously planned trip with her father to Ethiopia, his homeland.
Luciano Frattolin, 45, allegedly drowned his nine-year-old daughter Melina in a marshy lake in upstate New York in July 2025
Melina Frattolin, nine, was found with her lungs, airway and stomach filled with mud, debris and plants after her father allegedly drowned her, experts testified this week
This week, prosecutors also presented cell phone data that they say places Luciano at the lake near where his daughter’s body was found.
When Melina was reported missing by her father on July 19, 2025, Frattolin claimed that she had been kidnapped by two men in a white van as they traveled back home to Canada from New York.
New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation Investigator Daniel Mauro testified that he interrogated Luciano for 13 hours after he reported his daughter was missing.
Mauro said the coffee CEO changed his story about changing his clothes, at first saying he did not and then admitting he changed his shirt because he ‘was sweaty.’
The investigator said inconsistencies in the story alerted cops, who believed Frattolin changed his clothes because he had been wading in the marsh.
Frattolin’s wet clothes were allegedly later found in a trash bag discarded along Interstate 87, the route where he had been driving Melina back to her mother in Montreal, reports the Press Republican.
Partial footage of Mauro’s interrogation of Frattolin was displayed to jurors, showing the moment the investigator told the father he did not believe his story about Melina being ‘kidnapped.’
‘You know something you haven’t told us,’ Mauro told Frattolin.
When Melina was reported missing by her father on July 19, 2025, her father claimed that she had been kidnapped by two men in a white van as they traveled back home to Canada from New York
Frattolin has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and concealment of a corpse
Frattolin claimed his daughter was taken by two men in a van when he pulled over by the side of the highway to urinate, alleging that she was snatched as he turned his back.
But during his police interrogation, another investigator told Frattolin that they had cell phone data placing him near the scene where Melina was found.
The father insisted: ‘I’m not lying.’
Earlier on Tuesday, Melina’s mother Kali Galanis took the stand, where she told jurors that Frattolin’s trip to New York with their daughter came after he unsuccessfully tried to take her on vacation to his native Ethiopia.
The trip to Ethiopia had been planned for January 2025, but Galanis did not allow her daughter to go after Melina told her she did not want to.
Galanis and Frattolin were separated, and she said she had become concerned about Frattolin’s plans to travel overseas with Melina as her lawyer mentioned cases in which estranged spouses take their children to other countries and refuse to return with them.
The worried mother also noted there were other ‘troubling and alarming things’ that the young girl told her that her father said about her unwillingness to travel to the east African nation that Galanis ultimately decided not to allow Melina to go.
‘I became uncomfortable,’ she explained as Frattolin’s murder trial continued. ‘I was not OK with that anymore.’
Melina’s mother said she sent her this picture just hours before she was allegedly murdered
Frattolin compromised with taking Melina to New York instead, where he allegedly drowned her as they drove back to Canada.
Prosecutors argue that the trip was just a ploy to kill Melina so that he would no longer have to pay child support.
Frattolin also allegedly believed that both Galanis and Melina suffered from mental illness and had been planning since early 2025 to end her suffering, CBS6 Albany reports.
The coffee magnate has pleaded not guilty to the charges, as his defense insists that the young girl was kidnapped that night per Frattolin’s account.
