Woman admits to helping kill pregnant Chicago teen after daughter agrees to testify against her
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A mother has pleaded guilty to her part in the gruesome slaying of a teen mom whose baby was cut from her womb in 2019.
Clarisa Figueroa admitted to murder charges in the slaying of 19-year-old Marlen Ochoa-Lopez. She will serve 50 years in prison.
Figueroa's daughter, Desiree Figueroa, pleaded guilty to murder in January and agreed to testify against her mother in exchange for a 30-year sentence.
The Figueroas both had been indicted on multiple counts, including murder, kidnapping, dismembering a body, and concealing a homicide in the deaths of Ochoa-Lopez and her baby, Yovanny Lopez.
Last year, Clarisa Figueroa's boyfriend, Piotr Bobak, pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of justice for helping cover up the murders. He was sentenced to four years in prison, and given credit for the 3 years and 8 months he had already spent in jail, so has already been released.
Police and prosecutors have said not long after Clarisa Figueroa's own adult son died of natural causes, she told her family she was pregnant. They say she plotted for months to acquire a newborn, and that she posted an ultrasound and photos of a room decorated for a baby on her Facebook page. In March 2019, she and Ochoa-Lopez connected on a Facebook page for pregnant women.
The two first met in person around April 1, 2019, when Ochoa-Lopez went to the Figueroas' house and left unharmed, prosecutors allege. The teen returned three weeks later to accept Clarisa Figueroa's offer of free baby clothes, and as Desiree Figueroa was showing Ochoa-Lopez a photo album of her late brother to distract her, Clarisa Figueroa sneaked up behind her and strangled her with a cord.
Once Ochoa-Lopez stopped showing signs of life, Clarisa Figueroa cut the baby from her womb with a butcher knife and she and her daughter wrapped the teen's body in a blanket, put it in a plastic bag and dragged it outside her Southwest Side home to a garbage can, according to prosecutors.
Later that day, Clarisa Figueroa called 911 claiming that her newborn baby wasn't breathing. When first responders arrived, the child was blue. Clairsa, a former certified nursing assistant, passed the baby off as her own when she took him to Christ Medical Center, where he died two months later.
The baby's real identity was not revealed for three weeks after Ochoa-Lopez's murder, after police investigating Ochoa-Lopez's disappearance conducted a DNA test on the baby and confirmed he was Ochoa-Lopez's. Detectives later found Ochoa's body stuffed in a trash can at the Figueroas' home.
