A reputed Northwest Side gang leader who celebrated a 2016 murder by getting a “trophy tattoo” on his face was sentenced Monday to just under 33 years in federal prison.
Santo Lozoya, 24, also known by the street name “Saint,” pleaded guilty earlier this year to racketeering conspiracy for his role in the Milwaukee Kings street gang, which used shootings, beatings, murder and other violence to promote the gang’s status and control territory in the city’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood.
Among the string of deadly shootings was the December 2016 slaying of 28-year-old Crispin Coliz, who’d exchanged words with Lozoya and another Milwaukee Kings member at a Dunning neighborhood convenience store, where Coliz had stopped while on his way home from a Chicago Bulls game, according to court records.
Prosecutors said Lozoya and a co-defendant, Jose Martinez, retrieved guns from a nearby stash house before returning to the scene and fatally shooting Coliz in his vehicle, court records show.
To commemorate the murder, Lozoya and Martinez later got the logo from the D’Usse liquor bottle they’d purchased that night tattooed below their eyes, prosecutors said.
The symbol on the bottle is the Cross of Lorraine, a French emblem “that symbolizes courage, honor and perseverance,” according to the D’Usse website.
At the first portion of Lozoya’s sentencing hearing in June, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly heard from four of Coliz’s family members who testified about the heartbreak they’ve endured, particularly his daughters, who were 1 and 6 at the time of his murder.
“You don’t deserve to know how much we have cried, how broken we are,” his sister, Elena Coliz, said to Lozoya, who participated in the hearing by video link from the Kankakee County Jail.
In sentencing Lozoya on Monday, Kennelly called it a callous crime that showed “absolute disregard for a human life.”
Lozoya was one of four Milwaukee Kings members charged in an indictment in 2019 that alleged the gang was responsible for a combined three murders and two attempted murders between 2015 and 2017.
In addition to Coliz’s murder, the indictment alleged that gang member Pedro Navarro, who goes by the nickname “Cuba,” shot and killed 15-year-old Xavier Soto and wounded another teen in April 2017 behind Soto’s family home in Belmont Cragin.
The fourth defendant, Hector Rojas, 26, was accused in the September 2015 slaying of 19-year-old Daniel Guerra in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood. Records show Guerra was shot in the neck and chest by a gunman who opened fire after a quarrel on the street. A 23-year-old man was shot in the back and a 22-year-old was wounded in the hand.
Navarro, Rojas and Martinez have all pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.
In asking for 35 years behind bars for Lozoya, prosecutors wrote in a recent court filing that crimes committed by the Milwaukee Kings were particularly ruthless even in the spectrum of Chicago’s unrelenting gun violence.
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“The mandate of the Milwaukee Kings is to attack and kill rival gang members, or those perceived to be rival gang members,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeannice Appenteng said in court Monday.
Lozoya’s attorney, Keith Spielfogel, asked for 30 years, writing in a memo that Lozoya was a rising baseball star whose youth team made it to the national finals in Cooperstown before he fell victim to the gang trappings in high school.
“Even before his arrest, Santo questioned gang life and told his grandmother Ana that he was sorry for his gang involvement, but he did not know how to get out,” Spielfogel wrote. “He wanted out, but he was afraid he could be killed.”
Before he was sentenced Monday, Lozoya read a statement to the court apologizing for his actions and expressing “hope that one day Crispin Coliz’s family can forgive me.”
Lozoya said he was “misled and derailed” into the gang lifestyle from an early age when gang recruiters would harass him at school. The conflicts sometimes even spilled onto the baseball field, where gang members once showed up at a game with baseball bats and started beating the umpires, he said.
“I see now how wrong I was,” Lozoya said of his choice to join the Milwaukee Kings. “I think back on decisions I made and wonder what I was thinking.”