With the five-year anniversary of the slaying of 19-year-old Marlen Ochoa-Lopez looming, the woman accused of killing the teen and cutting her baby out of the womb in a sensational case that drew international attention was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Clarisa Figueroa, 51, entered a guilty plea on charges of first-degree murder Tuesday. She had been charged with murder, kidnapping, dismembering a human body and other felonies in the April 2019 killing of Ochoa-Lopez, who was nine months pregnant.
She appeared in court at the Leighton Criminal Court Building sitting in a wheelchair, while family members of Ochoa-Lopez lined the front row of the gallery carrying a photograph of Marlen’s young family.
“They … live every single day with the actions that you put into motion on April 23, 2019,” Judge Peggy Chiampas said after she accepted the guilty plea. “Every single day, I want you to think of those individuals. Every single day.”
Figueroa strangled the teen with a cable, slicing open her abdomen from side to side, removing the baby from the womb and placing him in a bucket, prosecutors said. The baby, Yovanny Jadiel Lopez, died months later.
“The memory of my infant son’s last breath in my arms is complete agony,” wrote Marlen’s husband Yovanny Lopez in a statement read to the court by an advocate.
Lopez and his family wore shirts that displayed a photograph of a sunflower field, which he said was Marlen’s favorite flower.
In his victim impact statement, he said his other son Joshua “has lost his mother forever.”
“The death of my wife Marlen in this matter has hurt me physically, scarred me emotionally for which I will never recover,” he said in the statement.
After the hearing, Pastor Julie Contreras, a family friend, said she was with Lopez when he held his son at the hospital.
“I had never heard a sound come out of a human being the way I heard it come out of him,” she said.
Figueroa’s daughter, Desiree, 29, previously agreed to testify against her mother in exchange for a sentence of 30 years in prison. She pleaded guilty to murder in January.
A third co-defendant, Piotr Bobak, the boyfriend of Clarisa Figueroa, last year pleaded guilty to a felony count of obstruction of justice and was sentenced to four years in prison.
The mother and daughter lured Ochoa-Lopez to their Southwest Side home with the promise of free baby clothes, prosecutors have said. Ochoa-Lopez was last seen leaving her high school in the Little Village neighborhood. Clarisa Figueroa planned to raise the baby herself, and tricked Bobak into believing the baby was his child, according to police and prosecutors.
After cutting out the baby, Clarisa Figueroa called 911 and announced that she had delivered a baby who was not breathing, prosecutors have said. As paramedics arrived, she was holding the baby with its placenta and umbilical cord attached.
Both were rushed to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn. The newborn had problems breathing and appeared blue.
About two weeks after Ochoa-Lopez was last seen, detectives investigating her disappearance learned the teen had gone to the Figueroa home the day she disappeared.
They went to the home and were told by Desiree Figueroa that her mother had recently had a baby, and found Ochoa-Lopez’s car parked nearby.
Detectives visited Clarisa Figueroa at the hospital, but she denied that the teen came to her home the day she disappeared. Police eventually used DNA to determine Clarisa Figueroa was not the baby’s mother.
When detectives arrived to search the Figueroa home, Bobak was outside cleaning a rug with bleach and a hose, prosecutors said during a bond hearing in 2019. When Bobak saw the officers, he dropped the bleach and hose, and walked away, they said.
Ochoa-Lopez’s decaying body was found in a garbage can outside the Figueroa home with the coaxial cables used to strangle her still around her neck, prosecutors have said.
After police discovered Ochoa-Lopez’s body and her hospitalized child, her husband, Yovanny Lopez, told the Tribune he prayed for the baby’s recovery, though family were told he had brain damage.
“It’s so hurtful losing a wife that you spent beautiful moments with,” he told the Tribune at the time.
