Clarisa Figueroa, a 51-year-old woman from Illinois, has admitted to the first-degree murder of a pregnant woman, Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, 19, in a chilling case that has shocked the nation. Figueroa’s guilty plea will see her serve a 50-year prison sentence.
In April 2019, Figueroa lured Ochoa-Lopez to her Chicago home under the pretense of giving her free baby clothes. The victim, who was nine months pregnant at the time, was viewing a photo album of Figueroa’s recently deceased son when Figueroa began to strangle her with a coaxial cable.
Prosecutors revealed that Ochoa-Lopez managed to get a hand under the cable during the attack. Figueroa then called out to her daughter and co-defendant, Desiree Figueroa, 29, to assist her. Desiree proceeded to pry Ochoa-Lopez’s fingers from the cable one by one, according to a report by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Once Ochoa-Lopez ceased to resist, Desiree brought a kitchen knife to her mother, which Clarisa used to cut the baby from the victim’s body. The infant, named Yovanny Jadiel Lopez by his family, initially survived the horrific ordeal but later died in the hospital.
The child’s father, also named Yovanny Lopez, expressed his grief in a statement read before the court in Cook County, Illinois. “Your punishment will never be enough because my son will never be able to hug his mother ever!” he wrote. Ochoa-Lopez’s mother, Raquel Uriostegui, also shared her heartbreak, stating, “The loss of my daughter’s life is something I will never overcome.”
During the trial, Clarisa Figueroa’s co-defendants pleaded guilty. Her boyfriend, Piotr Bobak, was found attempting to clean a rug with bleach and later admitted to concealing a homicide, resulting in a four-year prison sentence. Desiree Figueroa, Clarisa’s daughter, accepted a plea deal for a 30-year prison sentence in exchange for testifying against her mother if the case went to trial.
In a bizarre twist, authorities revealed that Clarisa Figueroa had falsely claimed to her family that she was pregnant in October 2018, despite being in her mid-40s and having had her fallopian tubes tied.