Baby Killer Gets 34 Years in Prison

A Joliet man twice convicted of killing the baby son of a woman he met on the Internet for sex was sentenced to 34 years in prison.

The attorneys for Santos Loza, 34, plan to ask Will County Judge Sarah Jones to reconsider the sentence she handed down Friday.

Loza was found guilty of murdering 8-month-old Kevion Bender following a February trial. A jury found Loza guilty of murder once before, in September 2013, but Judge Jones decided to give him a second trial.

Jones ordered the new trial after ruling that limiting the questions lawyers could ask Kevion’s mother, Sandra Sitko, about her sexual relationship with Loza was a mistake. Judge Jones had forbidden defense lawyers from asking about the couple’s sexual history after February 2009.

Loza killed Kevion in 2008, about three months after he met Sitko on a website. Sitko, a West Chicago resident, had been traveling to Loza’s Joliet home to have sex with him about four nights a week. When she went to Loza’s home, Sitko always brought along both Kevion and her older son, Dillion. Kevion would sleep on a floor and Devion on a couch while she shared Loza’s bed, Sitko said.

The night Kevion was killed, Sitko left the boy alone with Loza for hours while she worked at a McDonald’s. After Sitko arrived that night with Dillion, she did not go into the bare bedroom where Kevion was sleeping on the floor to check on him until the next morning. When she did, he was dead. During Kevion’s autopsy, a forensic pathologist found evidence of 35 separate injuries, including a fractured skull and broken ribs.

For more than a year after her baby was killed, Sitko continued to have sex with Loza, she said, in an attempt to unravel the mystery of Kevion’s death.

“I wanted to find out what happened to my son,” Sitko explained. “I was trying to find out what happened to Kevion every time.”

Loza may have gotten Sitko pregnant twice during this period. One pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. The second resulted in the birth of a girl in 2010.