Oscar Lozada (East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office)
A 43-year-old man in Louisiana will spend the rest of his life behind bars more than a decade after he killed and dismembered his wife inside their Baton Rouge home. Judge Thomas Kleibert Jr. on Monday formally ordered Oscar Lozada to serve the mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole for the 2011 slaying of Sylviane Finck Lozada, whose remains have never been located, authorities confirmed to Law&Crime.
A jury in February found Lozada guilty on one count of second-degree murder and obstruction of justice in the death of his wife. Additionally, Judge Kleibert sentenced Lozada to another 30 years in prison for the obstruction charge, to be served concurrently with the life sentence.
“It’s a life sentence without the benefit of probation or parole or suspension of sentence,” East Baton Rouge Assistant District Attorney Dana Cummings said in a statement to Baton Rouge NBC affiliate WVLA-TV. “Plus he felt like an additional 30 years was appropriate for the obstruction of justice.”
Testimony from the trial established that Lozada and his wife got into an argument in July 2011 that continued to escalate until a rage-filled Lozada strangled her to death, according to a report from The Advocate. He then dragged Sylviane Lozada’s lifeless body into their garage to hide it from the couple’s then-4-year-old daughter.
The following day, Lozada reportedly went to a local Lowe’s hardware store for supplies. Lozada confessed to investigators that he then used power tools he had for work to dismember his wife’s body. Afterward, he reportedly stuffed the human remains and the tools into a series of newly purchased plastic garbage bags and containers — adding cement to each for additional weight — and threw the bags and containers into multiple different bodies of water.
A few days after the brutal crime, Lozada took his young daughter and fled to Venezuela, which does not have an extradition agreement with the United States. However, he eventually moved to Mexico where in 2018 he was arrested in Nuevo Leon and sent back to the U.S. to face charges for his wife’s murder, per the Advocate.
During the hearing, prosecutors read a victim impact statement penned by Sylviane Lozada’s sister, Ghislaine Finck, who was awarded custody of Lozada’s daughter after his arrest.
“This is the mother she knew and loved back when she was 5 years old, you know she’s got to have some good warm memories of her mother, and then to have been manipulated all those years, that’s just really tough,” the letter stated, according to WVLA. “I think that when she was young she was given a totally false account and probably felt, always felt her mother had left her and didn’t love her and that she was alone with Oscar because that was her mother’s fault. If Sylviane’s daughter is going to heal, she needs to know the entire truth.”
Lozada’s attorney, Bob Noel, reportedly told WVLA that despite his client confessing to the slaying, he plans to appeal the life sentence.
“This case will be turned over to the Louisiana Appellate Project, they are going to be scouring the records to see what mistakes may have occurred on the record, and we do believe there were a few,” Noel reportedly said.
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