Cold Case Arrest Made 16 Years After Baby’s Death in Illinois

On December 17, 2010, before heading off to work, an Aurora, Ill., woman (whose name is not publicly available) left her three children in the care of her 28-year-old boyfriend, Spiros Elias. Elias and his mother were living with the family at the time, and there were no other adults in the house, although one other lived with them at the time.

But just 90 minutes later, the woman’s 11-month-old baby, Michael Ortiz, stopped breathing and started turning purple. Elias called 911. First responders took the baby to a local hospital roughly 10 minutes away before he was airlifted to a second hospital for more treatment. However, Michael’s injuries left him brain dead. He was declared deceased the next day.

For 16 years, authorities never named a suspect.

At the time, Elias told authorities that Michael stopped breathing after choking on the milk from a sippy cup Elias had left him with. But a few days later, an autopsy led the DuPage County’s chief deputy coroner to rule Michael’s death a homicide resulting from child abuse. A forensic pathologist found Michael’s injuries showed signs of violent shaking, strangulation and blunt-force trauma.

For months, however, investigators said they struggled with the case. They couldn’t dispute Elias’s story, and more importantly, they couldn’t establish a narrow timeframe for when Michael received his injuries. Authorities were unwilling to name Elias as a suspect, and over time, the case went cold.

“This has been an incredibly complicated investigation,” a police spokesman said at the time.

In the United States, hundreds of thousands of homicide cases have gone cold and left alone for decades. In 2020, clearance rates for homicide cases reached a record low. Illinois in particular has some of the lowest clearance rates in the country.

In December 2024, cold case investigators reopened Michael’s case.

For more than a decade after Michael’s death, resources for criminal forensics were improving for Kane County, where most of Aurora is located. In 2023, Kane County built its first forensics crime lab. The next year, it received $1 million in federal grants to expand it.

The investigators on Michale's case turned to an independent pediatric radiologist to reanalyze the evidence. That determined an improved timeframe of Michael’s injuries, which better linked Michael’s injuries to Elias and evidence collected during the initial investigation. Police additionally reinterviewed witnesses and other people involved with the case and looked again at the evidence and medical records from the initial investigation, this time with an investigator who specialized in child abuse cases. Slowly, prosecutors built a case against Elias.

On August 16, 2026, prosecutors presented their case against Elias to a grand jury, which indicted him on two first-degree murder charges: one for intending to “create bodily harm,” and one for knowing his actions would lead to bodily harm.

“A child’s life was taken, and Michael’s family has lived for more than 15 years without answers or accountability,” Aurora Police Chief Matt Thomas said in a press release. “While this arrest cannot undo their loss or erase the pain caused by the passage of time, we hope it brings them one step closer to justice. Cold cases are never forgotten, and we will continue pursuing justice no matter how much time has passed.” 

Since Michael’s death, Elias had moved to Burlington, roughly 40 minutes north of his shared home with Michael’s family. Prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant, and on August 21, officials from the Aurora Police Department and U.S. Marshals Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force took him into custody.

In the morning, they booked Elias, now 44, into Kane County Adult Justice Center. During an August 28 pretrial hearing, a judge ordered that Elias remain there and be held without bond. Elias’s attorney argued against that decision during the hearing, declaring that Elias did not pose a threat and noting that 16 years have passed since Michael’s death. His next hearing is scheduled for November 6.

Elias does have a criminal history. In 1999, when he was 17 years old, he was arrested after a 19-year-old man was shot in an allegedly gang-related incident. He was charged with murder, although a news report at the time said the shooting was not life-threatening. At the time, Elias lived on the same block that he lived on with Michael and their families.

The charge was ultimately dropped, but Elias was convicted on two counts of aggravated discharge of a firearm at an occupied vehicle and sentenced to six years in prison.