A Rogers Park man was sentenced to 7 years in prison today in a drunken-driving crash that killed a 10-year-old boy on Chicago’s North Side last year.
Martin Candia, 31, pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated DUI involving a death stemming from the May 2010 crash in the 6900 block of North Ashland Avenue.
Prosecutors said Candia’s blood-alcohol content was 0.095 percent, slightly over the legal limit of 0.08 percent, when his vehicle crashed into a parked SUV, causing it to hit the back of the vehicle in front of it. The boy, Calvin Santos, was pinned in between the parked vehicles and died later that morning, according to prosecutors.
In an emotional victim-impact statement to Skokie Judge William O’Brien, the boy’s father, Bulmaro Santos, wrote that since his son was killed he has been tormented by thoughts of “what if.”
“(What if) just that one split second, choices had been different; we would still have our little boy,” Santos wrote. “We would still hear his laughter and feel his warmth. But instead in that split second I held my son, my child, in my arms as he lay barely breathing.”
A third-grader at nearby Boone Elementary School, Calvin was an energetic but respectful boy who liked soccer, bike riding and watching professional wrestling, family members said. His father wrote that the boy dreamed of being an FBI agent because he “wanted to protect people.”
Santos wrote he still has the pajamas that Calvin wore the morning of his death and the bicycle he loved to ride in the park. His younger sister, now 5, says she misses him “and sometimes asks when he will be back because she wants to see him,” Santos wrote.
Candia, a restaurant worker who lived around the corner from the site of the crash, had no criminal record but had been cited several times for driving without a valid license, according to court records.
He has been held in Cook County Jail in lieu of $350,000 bond since his arrest, records show.
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