A man was given life in jail because prosecutors say he “beat the living daylights” out of his 5-week-old daughter until she died in the hospital.
Kevin van Streefkerk, 38, of Cameron Park, admitted to torturing and killing his daughter in June 2023 in El Dorado Superior Court on Friday.
What Judge Mark A. Ralphs said about the crime: “it was especially heinous, atrocious, cruel, and showed exceptional depravity.”
Van Streefkerk was charged with first-degree murder and the “infliction of torture,” which meant that the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office could choose to give him the death sentence. The plea deal reduced the sentence to life in jail without the chance of parole.
As part of the plea deal, the charge of abuse of a child under 8 years old causing great physical harm that led to death was dropped.
Before he was sentenced, van Streefkerk signed an allocution on a part of the case’s El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office police report. This said that he confirmed that everything in the report was true.
In June of last year, sheriff’s officers were called to a report of physical abuse of an infant. The hospital put her out of her body on Father’s Day, and she died there.
Van Streefkerk, who was 37 years old at the time, was arrested in Cameron Park by sheriff’s officers in connection with the murder. His job as a communications expert at the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services began in 2016 and was going strong. According to earlier news, he also worked for a short time as the head tennis teacher at Mesa Verde High School in Citrus Heights in 2022.
Deputy District Attorney Kassie Cardulo said in a statement for the prosecution that the beatings caused the baby to have “three skull fractures, a minimum of eight blunt force impacts to her tiny face and multiple brain bleeds.” Many of the beatings were reportedly caught on video surveillance over several days.
She said van Streefkerk was said to have said that he “beat the living daylights” out of the baby before she died.
Defense lawyer Dain Weiner said van Streefkerk admitted to the crime many times and that the case was “one of the saddest” he’s ever worked on.
Cardulo read comments from the baby’s maternal grandparents, aunts, and surrogate mother about how the crime affected them.
The child’s grandma, Sharon Kavanaugh, said, “It’s like being in the worst horror movie, but you can’t turn the channel.”
Amber Kavanaugh, the child’s real mother, read her own statement and spoke directly to van Streefkerk.
She told him, “All I see is bad.” “I’m not sorry for what I did to you.”
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