Friends: Drugs fueled pair’s troubles
New dad had no arrests but grew ‘darker’; young mom had drug arrests, served time.
Drugs tortured the lives of Nicole Marie Novak and Hugo Steven Selva.
Novak, 26, had been arrested multiple times on drug charges and served a two-year prison stint before Selva fatally shot her in the head outside a Lake Worth convenience store Wednesday morning.
Records indicate that Selva, 22, had never been arrested, but by age 13, he was smoking pot, popping pills and tripping on psychedelics, and at 17 was doing nothing but waking up and getting high, according to a childhood friend. Selva became violent, threatening the life of his 77-year-old grandmother, and growing so dark that he lost most of his friends.
“He would talk about going out guns blazing, but I honestly thought that it was just
an angry kid venting and not something that would eventually boil to the surface and cause a tragedy such as this,” said Bobby Stack, 25, a friend of Selva’s.
Selva died Wednesday morning inside a vehicle on a northbound lane of Interstate 95 near Lantana after he was shot by a Palm Beach County sheriff ’s deputy. The deputy is
on administrative leave while the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reviews the shooting.
Authorities said they believe Selva shot one man Tuesday afternoon in West Palm Beach, then another early Wednesday in Boynton Beach before shooting Novak — the mother of their 3-monthold daughter — outside the My Neighborhood Grocery store on South Dixie Highway near the Lantana border.
Witnesses say Selva picked up Novak off the ground and shoved her into his SUV before racing the wrong way down I-95 and causing three head-on crashes before he was killed.
Boca Raton police are investigating to see whether there is a connection between Selva and the death of Edwin Milkevic, 29, who was shot about 2:45 a.m. Wednesday while traveling south on I-95 near Yamato Road.
It’s unknown why Selva shot Novak or why the couple were in Palm Beach County. A clerk at the convenience store where Novak was killed said the couple were not arguing and behaving like “friends” inside the store before the shooting took place.
While Selva’s crim i nal record might be clean, friends say his life began spinning out of control in his early teen years.
“He had started using drugs around age 13,” said Stack, a resident of West Palm Beach, who met Selva about eight years ago. “Mostly marijuana, but also pills and psychedelics. His mom and him argued a lot, and it really seemed like he didn’t love her and vice versa.”
Stack said Selva was vio- lent at times, threatening peo- ple and getting into fights “and lost the majority of his friends.”
Selva “seemed sad on the inside and knew he needed help” but “started to get darker and more violent,” Stack said.
In January 2017, Delray Beach police were close to arresting Selva on several felonies connected to alleged exploitation of his grand- mother, according to a police incident report obtained by The Post.
Selva was being investigated on suspicion of grand theft, fraudulent use of a credit card and exploitation of the elderly when a detective assigned to the case said Marilyn Selva, Hugo’s 77-year-old grandmother, chose not to press charges against her grandson after she had obtained a restrain- ing order against him.
Selva allegedly forced his grandmother to sign off on a $10,000 line-of-credit loan and open a credit card account with maximum lim- its he regularly exceeded. He needed the money, his grandmother was told, because “he had a child on the way.”
When Selva blew through the card’s $4,500 limit and rang up $6,200 in expenses, he “demanded more money in order to suffice the future child’s needs,” Marilyn Selva told authorities.
If Marilyn Selva balked, her grandson would threaten her, including once with a knife, court documents say.
Hugo Selva also allegedly tried to open up two other credit cards in his grandmother’s name without her permission.
A Delray Beach detective was obtaining subpoenas for Marilyn Selva’s financial records when she decided not to go forward with the prosecution after a judge ordered that Hugo Selva stay away from his grandmother. The case then was closed.
In February 2017, Marilyn Selva asked that the restraining order be terminated because Hugo Selva had moved out of the area “and has not contacted me since December 2016, and has promised not to contact me or return to my home.”
But nothing in Selva’s history demonstrated he was capable of the rampage he allegedly went on this week.
“I have no idea what could have made him make such a terrible decision,” said Walt Macciel, a Greenacres resi- dent who said Selva was “like a brother” to him.
Despite her criminal history, Novak was working to turn her life around following the birth of her daughter, Grace, this past year, her friend Ambrosia Spivey said Thursday. The child was not
‘She was a good person with a really big heart.’ Ambrosia Spivey
Friend of Nicole Marie Novak
in the car with her parents when they were killed.
“She wanted to give up on life, but then she became a mother,” Spivey said. “She wanted Grace to have the childhood she didn’t have.”
According to court records, Novak was arrested six times in 2011 to 2012 — by Titusville police, Cocoa police, Melbourne police and the Brevard County Sheriff ’s Office — on charges ranging from drug possession to burglary and grand theft, according to records of the FDLE and the Florida Department of Corrections. She was imprisoned from January 2014 to May 2016.
Spivey said Novak lived with and helped to take care of her grandmother in Merritt Island in Brevard County, about a two-hour drive north of West Palm Beach. She said Selva also lived with them. Novak knew Selva from when she was younger, but they got close when she was out on a work-release program after one of her convictions, Spivey said. She believes they had been together since 2013.
Spivey said she has known Novak for “well over five years” and they kept in touch through Facebook and the phone. Novak confided in Spivey and admitted to her friend that there was both physical and psychological abuse in her relationship with Selva. She talked about leaving him on multiple occasions.
Then Novak found out she was pregnant.
Novak told Spivey she wanted to make her relationship work with Selva to keep the family together.
“She was a good person with a really big heart,” Spivey said. “And she was a good mother to her child. That’s something no one can take from her.”