Man Gets Life in Prison for Child’s Death

TYLER – 28-year-old child death defendant Simon Lopez has been sentenced to life in prison after entering a guilty plea Friday morning in the 7th Smith County Judicial Court. KETK reports the case involved the murder of Emma Torres’s one-year-old son, Jeremy Silva, in 2010. Authorities say Silva died from blunt force trauma. Lopez had been watching him at the time. He called Torres’s relatives to tell them that the boy wasn’t breathing, but then fled the scene. He was later arrested in Mexico, and was arraigned on capital murder charges. Emma Torres, the 21-year-old mother charged in the death, was sentenced in October to two years in a state jail facility for child abandonment/endangering a child after she pleaded guilty.