This story was reported by Lohr McKinstry and originally published in the Plattsburgh, N.Y., Press-Republican.
ELIZABETHTOWN — GPS positioning data from his rental car and cellphone place Luciano Frattolin at the hiking trailhead for a pond where his daughter was found drowned, an investigator said today at Frattolin’s murder trial.
Frattolin, 46, of Montreal, is charged with killing his daughter, 9-year-old Melina, and has pleaded not guilty to felony charges of second-degree murder and concealment of a human corpse.
State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation Senior Investigator Samuel Lizzio took the stand in Essex County Court to detail how he coordinated cellular data from Frattolin’s phone and GPS data from the Enterprise rental car, a Toyota Prius, that Frattolin drove on a U.S. vacation he took his daughter on that ended with her death on July 19, 2025.
Frattolin is accused of drowning Melina in Ticonderoga, off State Route 74, then reporting she was kidnapped by two men in a white van.
Lizzio is a State Police member of the FBI Cellular Analysis Survey Team (CAST) a specialized unit of experts that helps law enforcement obtain, understand, and map cellular network and GPS data during criminal investigations.
“I find a needle in a haystack,” Lizzio told the jury.
He said he contacted AT&T, Verizon and Enterprise to obtain whatever cell and GPS data they had on Frattolin, then used specialized software to analyze and compile the information.
That resulted in mapping of Frattolin’s drive up and down I-87 the day Melina was killed.
The coordinates showed Frattolin was at the Route 74 trailhead at about 7:55 p.m. and left at about 9 p.m. Melina’s body was found on July 20, 2025 at the bottom of a shallow pond off the hiking trial, held down by a large rock.
Essex County District Attorney Michael Langey showed the jury an animation created by the State Police using the positioning data, which showed his vehicle going up and down the Adirondack Northway. His journey ended when he went to the Warren County Sheriff’s Department in Queensbury to report she was missing.
Bureau of Criminal Investigation Investigator David Hungerford testified he analyzed Melina’s Apple iPhone 12 and found her last use was for a video to her mother from the Saratoga Springs McDonald’s Restaurant at 4:27 p.m.
Her phone went silent at 5:30 p.m. Frattolin didn’t report her missing until about 10 p.m., however.
Langey played the short video of Melina joking around, after Judge Tatiana Coffinger overruled defense objections to it as irrelevant.
Coffinger also announced she had discharged one juror “due to a legal issue” and remaining jurors should “make no inference from that.”
That leaves the trial with 12 jurors and two alternates.
The defense received permission to call a witness to refute prosecution testimony about the depth Melina was found at, and weight and dimensions of the rock she was found under.
Court will resume Friday with the prosecution close to winding down its case.
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