A mother broke down in court after her former best friend admitted to killing her newborn son and harming his twin in a last-minute plea deal. Nicole Virzi, 32, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to third-degree criminal homicide, aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of children.
Plea deal avoids death penalty
Virzi killed Leon Katz, who was just six and a half weeks old, and injured his brother Ari while babysitting at the family home in Pittsburgh. She reportedly told police that she has had an uncontrollable urge to hurt children since she was very young.
The boys' mother, Savannah Roberts, said in a statement that the crime has 'eradicated my sense of safety across every domain of my life'. She added: 'I will never fully understand the torture and murder that Nicole inflicted on my twins.'
Former California PhD student Virzi had potentially faced the death penalty if she had been found guilty of first-degree murder, although the district attorney in Pennsylvania indicated that the family specifically wanted the plea deal to avoid having to endure a full trial. She will now face between 35 and 80 years in state prison.
Details of the attack
Virzi, a former clinical psychology student who had been weeks away from completing her PhD, met Roberts when they were both working in Drexel University's graduate psychology department in Philadelphia. The events leading up to Leon's death unfolded in June 2024 when she was staying with Roberts, her husband Ethan Katz, and the two newborns.
On June 15 she claimed to have spotted a bloody injury on baby Ari's groin area, and insisted on staying to care for Leon while his parents took Ari to hospital. She called police at around 11.17pm that night claiming that Leon was having difficulty breathing and had a lump on his head. The infant died a few hours later from brain bleeds and a skull fracture.
Virzi, who was arrested at her Airbnb a few hours later, denied having harmed the six-week-old. She initially told investigators she heard screaming when she went to fetch a bottle for Leon, and claimed he had fallen from his bouncer chair, but later admitted she had shaken him and dropped him, as well as flipped him upside down on the tiled bathroom floor.
Confession and victim impact
She told police: 'Something just came over me I couldn't control. 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.' Virzi also confessed to causing the injuries to Ari which led his parents to take him to hospital.
'Something just came over me I couldn't control,' she told investigators in a videoed interview. 'I'm telling you this because I can't keep lying about it.' Virzi's lawyers argued that she was coerced into making the confession after 13 hours in custody without food and with very little sleep, although this motion was denied by the judge presiding over the case.
Roberts, in her victim impact statement, also questioned Virzi's claims of being unable to control her behaviour, saying her 'so-called compulsions' were no excuse for what she had done. According to TribLive, Roberts said she 'is constantly consumed with intrusive images of what Nicole did to him and his brother', who is now two years old.
'In fact, any memories I have from the six weeks I had with Leon are overshadowed hundreds-fold by my memories of the night he died,' she added. 'I have every indication that he would've been an amazing human being who made the world a better place by being in it. When I think of Leon, I want to focus on the bright light he was on this Earth and the incredible six weeks we had together, not what he endured in his final moments.'
