No Bail For Man Charged With Killing Son Because He Couldn't Sleep
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A 37-year-old man has been ordered held without bail, after he was charged with slashing his 2-year-old son's throat and nearly decapitating him, because the boy was keeping him awake.
At a bond hearing Friday afternoon, Cook County prosecutors said Rolando Ortiz and his wife work opposite shifts at the same factory, and after Ortiz came home from the night shift Wednesday afternoon, he was trying to take a nap, but his son, Mateo Garcia Aguayo, kept jumping and moving around on the bed. When Mateo got off the bed and started jumping around the house, Ortiz pinned Mateo down on the kitchen floor, grabbed a knife, and slashed his throat several times, prosecutors said.
According to prosecutors, Mateo's throat was slashed so deeply, his spinal cord was severed, and his head was left connected only by skin and tissue.
Ortiz and his wife work opposite shifts at the same factory, so prosecutors said his wife was at work at the time, and their two older children were at school
After he killed Mateo, Ortiz put his son's body and bloody clothes in a trash bag, and cleaned up the kitchen, then called his wife's sister to say Mateo "was with God" now, according to prosecutors.
Two relatives later showed up at Ortiz's home in the 2700 block of South Avers Avenue, demanding to know where Mateo was, and found the trash bag containing the boy's body under the kitchen table, prosecutors said. When the family called 911, Ortiz fled the house. Police later traced his phone to Kankakee, where Illinois State Police and the FBI arrested him.
Prosecutors said Ortiz confessed to killing his son because he couldn't sleep.
Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson on Thursday called Mateo's murder "brutal and horrific."
"Mateo wasn't old enough to make a bad decision," Johnson said. "Mateo wasn't old enough to take the wrong path in life. He was just an innocent kid whose trust and safety was betrayed by the one man that he should never have to question."
Ortiz has been ordered held without bail, and was scheduled to return to court on March 15.
