Former California state worker gets life sentence for torturing, murdering his 5-week-old child
A man who according to prosecutors “beat the living daylights” out of his 5-week-old daughter until she later died in the hospital has been sentenced to life in prison.
Kevin van Streefkerk, 38, of Cameron Park, pleaded guilty Friday in El Dorado Superior Court for the June 2023 torture and murder of his daughter.
Judge Mark A. Ralphs, who presided over the case, said the crime “was especially heinous, atrocious and cruel, and manifested exceptional depravity.”
Van Streefkerk’s charges included first-degree murder and had an enhancement for the “infliction of torture,” which gave the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office the option to impose the death penalty. The plea deal brought the penalty down to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
He was also charged with abuse of a child under 8 years old with great bodily injury that led to death, but that charge was dropped as part of the plea deal.
Prior to the sentencing, van Streefkerk signed an allocution on a portion of an El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office police report for the case, which stated he affirmed everything in the police report was truthful.
Last June, sheriff’s detectives responded to a report of physical abuse against an infant. She died in the hospital on Father’s Day after being taken off life support.
Sheriff’s deputies arrested van Streefkerk, then 37, in Cameron Park in connection with the homicide. He had been working since 2016 as a telecommunications specialist at the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. He was also briefly employed as head tennis coach at Mesa Verde High School in Citrus Heights in 2022, according to previous reporting.
In a statement for the prosecution, Deputy District Attorney Kassie Cardulo said the infant suffered “three skull fractures, a minimum of eight blunt force impacts to her tiny face and multiple brain bleeds” from the beatings, many of which were reportedly caught on video surveillance over multiple days.
She said van Streefkerk reportedly stated he “beat the living daylights” out of the infant before she died.
Defense attorney Dain Weiner said van Streefkerk repeatedly showed remorse for the crime, and that the case was “one of the saddest” he’s ever worked on.
Cardulo read victim impact statements from the infant’s maternal grandparents, aunts and her surrogate mother.
Sharon Kavanaugh, the child’s grandmother, said the situation “is the worst horror movie, but you cannot change the channel.”
The child’s biological mother, Amber Kavanaugh, read her own statement and addressed van Streefkerk directly.
“All I see is evil,” she said to him. “I don’t have any remorse for you.”
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