Police arrest Gregor in Tennessee after Corey Micciolo's death

TOMS RIVER — When Christopher Gregor was arrested by police in Tennessee two days after his 6-year-old son’s death in New Jersey, he called the child’s mother “a special kind of garbage bag” and told police his son would continue to do it. would be alive if his mother wasn’t a drug addict.

“A lot of me think it’s partly my fault in the sense that she did something,” Gregor told police in Alcoa, Tenn., referring to his son’s mother. .

“If he didn’t have a drug addict mother, he would still be alive,” Gregor said after being arrested by police on April 4, 2021.

Agents questioned Gregor several times about his route from New Jersey through Arkansas and almost to Texas, and why he had just picked up a friend from New Jersey at Alcoa’s McGhee Tyson Airport.

An Alcoa police officer even suggested that Gregor may have been trying to flee to Mexico.

“Were you trying to cross the border?” the policeman asked him.

“No, I mean, even if I did, I wouldn’t be heading in the direction I’m in,” Gregor said, telling them he had turned around somewhere in Arkansas and ‘he was now going straight home.

Gregor’s interactions with police in Alcoa that day were captured on police cameras.

Part of the body camera video was played last week in court here, where Gregor, 31, of Barnegat, is on trial before Superior Court Judge Guy P. Ryan, accused of murdering Corey Micciolo, 6 years, and endangerment. the well-being of the child.

The jury deciding Gregor’s guilt or innocence, however, will not be able to view the body camera footage.

Ryan, during the hearing outside the panel’s presence Wednesday, ruled last week that the video was inadmissible as evidence because it was filled with hearsay.

However, Jamie Schron, an assistant Ocean County prosecutor, told the judge that the state would confront Gregor with the statements he made on the video during his cross-examination if he said anything different when he would be on the witness stand later this week.

Corey died at 5:02 p.m. on April 2, 2021, a little over an hour after Gregor brought him to the emergency room at Southern Ocean Medical Center in Stafford Township. Hospital surveillance video previously played during the trial shows Gregor leaving the hospital, getting into his car and leaving at 5:19 p.m. that day.

Two days later, during a stop in Alcoa, Tennessee, on Easter Sunday, Gregor told police that he had driven for 20 hours straight and arrived somewhere near the border between Arkansas and Texas when he turned around and drove another five hours to Nashville. There, he said, he had dinner, had drinks, found a hotel room, called his friend who was flying to meet him, then fell asleep.

Gregor told police at one point that he was planning to go see his brother who lives in California. He didn’t seem to know whether he was actually in Arkansas or Texas when he turned around to return to New Jersey.

The police officers who questioned Gregor asked him why he had come to pick up his friend at the Alcoa airport.

“Because the flights lined up where she would arrive at a specific time,” he replied. “I didn’t check the flights. I didn’t ask why. I just said okay.

When an officer told him it didn’t make sense, Gregor replied, “I don’t think it doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t matter.” »

He told them the woman had come from New Jersey to meet him because she was worried he was going home alone.

“She didn’t feel comfortable with me driving another 13 hours after already driving so much,” Gregor said. “I haven’t slept much, as you can imagine.”

In parts of the video, the officers can be heard conversing with each other.

One officer informed the others that Gregor had been stopped for speeding in a construction zone.

“He seems pretty cooperative,” one officer said.

Another noted that Gregor’s hands were shaking on the steering wheel.

“He’s shaking like a leaf,” the policeman said.

Another officer said Gregor mentioned his son had just died.

When an officer asked him how the boy died, Gregor replied, “They didn’t know.” They thought it was internal bleeding.

“When he came home, I knew something was wrong in my stomach,” Gregor said, indicating he thought the boy’s mother had done something to him.

He went on to tell officers that he was once arrested in New Jersey after “they planted marijuana on me,” referring to the child’s mother and her family.

“He’s a special kind of dirtbag,” Gregor said, referring to Corey’s mother, Breanna Micciolo. “I regret meeting her.”

The beginning of the video shows Gregor, dressed in jeans and a beer brand sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off, getting out of his car and placing his hands on the roof while officers search him.

“We are a little more dressed, we have sleeves,” an officer later told Gregor.

“Yes, I took mine off,” Gregor told him. “I actually ripped them off on the ride.”

The officer then asks him if he was wearing a seat belt and if he “took them off while wearing a seat belt?”

Gregor replied: “I shot them.”

Gregor’s attorney had hoped to present the video to the jury to show that his client cooperated with police during the traffic stop, agreeing to let them search his car.

“I said, I don’t mind at all if you searched my vehicle,” Gregor told officers. “There’s nothing I’m hiding.”

He then asked them if there was a warrant to search the car.

“We’re trying to understand why we’re doing all this,” one officer told him. “I don’t know. The state of New Jersey is run by Democrats. We have very little to do with them.

Gregor replied, “You and I both.”

Later, the police tell Gregor to sit on the bumper of a police car. After a moment, Gregor gets up from the bumper.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he told the officer. “My father was a well-respected New Jersey state trooper, unlike most people in New Jersey.”

Gregor expressed concern about what was happening and why it was taking so long.

“It’s Easter, I understand that,” he said. “Did they say where it came from – the search warrant?”

An officer responded, “No idea, man. We don’t get this information. »

The police eventually let Gregor go, but they put his car and cell phone into evidence.

Gregor’s father, David Gregor, said he arranged for his son to then rent a car so he could return home to New Jersey.

Gregor was not charged in this case until July 2021, and then only for endangering the welfare of a child. The endangerment charge stems from an incident on March 20, 2021, in which Gregor is seen on surveillance video from his apartment complex gym speeding up a treadmill that Corey was running on, causing the child to repeatedly fall face first from the machine. .