Q: What happened to the man and his wife who starved to death the man's young son? - Debbie, Sacramento
A: A man previously convicted as a child molester was sentenced July 7, 2006, in Sacramento Superior Court to 75 years and eight months to life for starving and beating to death his 12-year-old son.
"It is so fundamental to human nature to love your own children," Judge Gary S. Mullen said in a voice cracking with emotion.
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"Even the most hardened criminals in our prisons can't imagine how a father can do this," Mullen said to Andrew Anthony Cejas (photo left from his trial), now 42.
Cejas was sentenced for the murder of Christopher Cejas of North Carolina, who lost 35 pounds over a four-month summer stay with his father and stepmother in Sacramento.
Trial evidence showed the boy, whom his father ridiculed for being overweight, was kept from eating by being handcuffed to doorknobs and an entryway post in their Watt Avenue apartment. He was fed a tablespoon of electrolyte-containing replacement fluid a day.
When he was found Aug. 21, 2002, he had more than 100 bruises with 74 major injuries, including a severed liver, torn kidney and bleeding in the brain.
For more than four days the boy was whipped with belts and pounded with a golf club. A video camera poised near his bed recorded his every move at night.
The 33-year-old stepmother, Kathryn Elizabeth Potter, who was sentenced on April 7, 2006, to 15 years to life, stood by and watched as the elder Cejas carried out the relentless whippings because she hated and was disgusted by the boy, court records show.
At the time of the murder, Cejas was on probation for beating Potter. In 1993, he was convicted of two counts of sexually molesting a 9-year-old girl.
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