Lockport mother, grandmother of slain victims says ‘justice was served’

A Will County jury found a Crestwood man guilty of strangling a Lockport woman to death and smothering his 14-month-old child four years ago.

The verdict Friday caused the family and friends of Ashtin Eaton, 32, and her daughter, Hazel Bryant, to weep with joy. The large crowd took turns embracing each other outside the courtroom.

Anthony Maggio, 30, sat with his head down when the jury rendered a verdict finding him guilty of the Oct. 2, 2020, first-degree murder of Eaton and Hazel.

A few of Maggio’s family members sat in silence in the courtroom. Maggio took one last look at his family before he was led out of the courtroom in shackles. There were no tears on his face.

Eaton’s mother, Shirley Onderisin, 65, of Lockport, told reporters outside the Will County Courthouse in Joliet that it’s “never going to be over for me.”

“I lost my first daughter in a car accident, and now I don’t have my second daughter and my granddaughter. It’s never going to be over. But justice was served,” Onderisin said.

Onderisin said Maggio is “going to suffer for a while,” but she will suffer until she dies.

“Because my babies will never be here with me again. But his dad can go visit him,” Onderisin said.

Onderisin was one of the first witnesses who testified in the nine-day trial of Maggio. She told the jury about finding her daughter’s body on the kitchen floor of her apartment and then finding her toddler granddaughter’s body on a bed.

“I had to go over my daughter’s pictures, and that was hard, because it took two years to get it out of my head. I was there,” Onderisin said.

Eaton’s body was first discovered on the morning of Oct. 2, 2020, by her then 11-year-old daughter, who is not Maggio’s child. She was the first witness called to the stand.

When Lockport police detectives arrived at the scene, the deaths of Eaton and Hazel looked suspicious. Eaton had a cut to her left forearm, and a box-cutter knife was next to her body.

Rumors had circulated that Eaton may have suffocated Hazel accidentally and then died by suicide, prosecutors said. But an autopsy by the Will County Coroner’s Office revealed that Eaton’s true cause of death was strangulation, and that Hazel had been smothered.

It would take the Lockport Police Department two years until they could bring a case against Maggio, a paramedic for an Amazon facility in Joliet where Eaton had worked.

In 2020, Maggio was hired as a probationary firefighter-paramedic for Cicero, but he was fired in 2021 for “unsatisfactory character” and other issues.

Even though Maggio was engaged to Marcelina Baliczek, 28, and had two daughters with her, Maggio had an affair with Eaton that resulted in the birth of Hazel in 2019.

Prosecutors alleged that Maggio was motivated to kill Eaton and Hazel because he was in debt and he didn’t want to pay child support for Hazel. Maggio also wanted to maintain his relationship with Baliczek, prosecutors said.

Although there were no videos or witnesses who could place Maggio at the scene of the crime, the scene had one key piece of evidence for prosecutors: Maggio’s DNA.

Forensic analysis revealed Maggio’s DNA underneath Eaton’s fingernails, on the neckline of Eaton’s T-shirt and on the handle of the box-cutter knife.

Text messages obtained by police revealed Maggio’s disputes with Eaton over paying child support for Hazel, prosecutors said. In one of those texts, Maggio told Eaton that he was not “sleeping on a bed of money.”

Dorothy Seaborg, grandmother of Eaton and great-grandmother of Hazel, said she was working with Eaton on getting child support for Hazel right up until the night Eaton was murdered. Seaborg is an attorney who once served as president of the Will County Bar Association.

Seaborg said she felt that Lockport police detectives “tried very hard” to conduct an investigation during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was a nightmare, partially because of the way [COVID-19] was at the time. It hindered the police, and I felt that they were probably unduly persecuted for that because they did what they could at the time with the situation,” Seaborg said.

She said she offered condolences to the detectives who were cross-examined by Maggio’s attorney, Michael Clancy.

“They both told me, ‘Hey, we’ll take that any day to get justice,’” Seaborg said.

In a statement, Lockport Police Chief Richard Harang said his investigations team did a “magnificent job.”

“Without their passion for this profession, their professionalism in the way they handled this case and commitment to ensuring justice was brought on the person responsible, this case could not have been solved,” Harang said.

Over the course of seven days, the jury listened to testimony from more than 20 witnesses, sat through hours of video depicting Maggio’s tense interview with Lockport Police Detective Jacob King and Cmdr. John Arizzi, and viewed grisly photos of the crime scene.

After about 16 hours of deliberation, the jury reached a verdict. Onderisin said she was “very worried” during the deliberations.

“You never know how a jury’s going to be,” she said. “But the evidence was there.”

Clancy and Maggio’s father, Martin Maggio Sr., who testified in the trial, declined to speak with reporters after the verdict was reached. During jury deliberations, Clancy had complained of “horribly one-sided” media coverage of the case.

One question that Onderisin has for Maggio is “why?”

“I mean, why did he do this?” Onderisin said. “He could have been living a good life. We all could’ve been living a good life. Now he’s going to sit in prison for the rest of his [life], and I don’t have my babies. So it was really senseless.”