Clarisa Figueroa strangled the pregnant Marlen Ochoa-Lopez and cut her baby out of the body, authorities said. (Mug shot: Chicago Police Department via AP)
The Illinois woman who strangled a pregnant woman to death and cut the victim’s baby from the body has pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and in exchange, she is set to spend 50 years in prison, according to Chicago ABC affiliate WLS.
As previously reported, authorities said that Clarisa Figueroa, 51, lured the victim, Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, 19, to her Chicago home in April 2019 by offering free baby clothes. At one point, Ochoa-Lopez, nine months pregnant, was looking at a photo album featuring Figueroa’s recently deceased son. The defendant used this moment to begin strangling her with a coaxial cable.
According to prosecutors, Ochoa-Lopez managed to get a hand under the cable, and Clarisa Figueroa called out to daughter and co-defendant Desiree Figueroa, 29: “You’re not doing your f—— job.”
The daughter managed to pull out Marlen’s fingers one by one, authorities said in a Chicago Sun-Times report. Ochoa-Lopez eventually stopped fighting. Desiree Figueroa then brought the kitchen knife that Clarisa Figueroa used to cut the baby out of the victim’s belly.
The infant, named by his family Yovanny Jadiel Lopez, initially survived but died at a hospital.
“Your punishment will never be enough because my son will never be able to hug his mother ever!” the child’s father, who is also named Yovanny Lopez, wrote in a statement read before the court in Cook County, Illinois, on Monday, according to WLS.
“The loss of my daughter’s life is something I will never overcome,” Ochoa-Lopez’s mother, Raquel Uriostegui, wrote in another statement.
During the criminal cases, her co-defendants folded under prosecution. Police caught her boyfriend, Piotr Bobak, hosing off a rug with bleach, and he later pleaded guilty to a charge of concealing a homicide and was sentenced to four years in prison. More recently, her daughter, Desiree Figueroa, 29, took a plea deal for 30 years in prison in exchange for testifying against Clarisa Figueroa if that case reached trial.
Authorities previously said that Clarisa Figueroa had told her family in October 2018 that she was pregnant — even though she was in her mid-40s and had already gotten her fallopian tubes tied.
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