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CHICAGO (AP) – A Chicago woman who sold baby clothes to a pregnant woman and brought her home with an extra offer of clothes was charged with murder for strangling the woman with a rope and cutting the baby from his belly, the police said Thursday.
Clarisa Figueroa, 46, reportedly wanted to raise another child two years after the death of her adult son from natural causes, according to investigators.
"The words can not express how disgusting and deeply disturbing these allegations are," Police Commissioner Eddie Johnson told a press conference in an attempt to announce the murder charges against Figueroa and his 24-year-old daughter, Desiree Figueroa. Piotr Bobak, the mother's boyfriend, was charged with concealing a homicide.
The charges come three weeks after the disappearance of 19-year-old Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, and one day after her body was found in a garbage bin in the garden of Figueroa's house, in the south-west part of town, around 4 miles from his own home.
According to the police, the young woman drove to Figueroa's house in response to an offer of free clothes that Figueroa had posted on Facebook. When she arrived, said the police, she was strangled and the baby was cut off from her body.
A few hours later, Figueroa frantically called 911, claiming that his newborn was not breathing. When first responders arrived, the child was blue. They tried to resuscitate the baby and transported him to a nearby hospital, where police said he was in serious condition and that he was not supposed to survive.
The police did not put the woman's disappearance in touch with the 911 call on the baby until May 7, when friends from Ochoa-Lopez led the detectives to his account on a social network, which showed that she had contacted Figueroa in a Facebook group for pregnant women.
At the same time, Clarisa Figueroa had launched a GoFundMe campaign for the funeral of her baby, according to her, dying, said Sara Walker, spokeswoman for the family Ochoa-Lopez.
The police then performed DNA tests, which showed that Ochoa-Lopez and her husband, Yiovanni Lopez, were actually her parents, Walker said.
When the police arrived to question Figueroa, his daughter told them that his mother was in the hospital with some kind of leg injury, before adding that she had just given birth said Brendan Deenihan, deputy chief of detectives.
"She told an extremely strange story," and the officers "somehow knew where it was headed," said Deenihan.
The police then searched the area and found the Ochoa-Lopez car a few blocks away. On Tuesday, they returned with a search warrant, finding cleaning equipment and traces of blood in the hallway and in the bathroom. They then found the body in a trash can behind the house and retrieved a surveillance video showing Ochoa-Lopez's vehicle circulating in the neighborhood the day they thought they had been killed, the authorities said.
Ochoa-Lopez's family had been looking for her since her disappearance on April 23, organizing search parties and press conferences during which the police asked for news of the investigation.
His father, Arnulfo Ochoa, said his family was grateful to have found her. Now they want justice. The family was also preparing for the baby's death, hoping for a miracle.
"We implore God to give us our child, because it is a blessing that our wife has left us," Yiovanni Lopez told the press through a Spanish interpreter outside the morgue of the county where his wife's body was washed away.
The three suspects had to appear Friday in the court of obligations.
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