Father Posts Hospital Photo of Baby Who Was Cut From Wife’s Womb

A file photo shows 19-year-old Marlen Ochoa-Lopez. (Chicago Police)

Yovani Lopez is the widower of Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, a 19-year-old who was strangled on April 23 after going to a house in Chicago to pick up free baby clothes.

The father of the baby boy who was forcibly removed from his mother’s womb provided new photos, showing him holding the infant.

Lopez said that the family is praying for a miracle. Reports said that the boy is brain dead and not expected to survive.

“We’re praying for a miracle,” a family friend told the Daily Mail.

The family also told the Mail that they will not turn off his ventilator.

Illinois Officials Not Alerted

Police and Illinois’s child welfare agency said staff at a Chicago-area hospital didn’t alert them after determining that a bloodied woman who arrived with a gravely ill newborn had not just given birth to the baby boy, as she claimed.

The woman, Clarisa Figueroa, was charged more than three weeks later after police found Ochoa-Lopez’s body outside Figueroa’s home. Chicago police said she cut Ochoa-Lopez’s baby out of her on April 23, then called 911 to report she had given birth to a baby who wasn’t breathing. Paramedics took Figueroa and the baby to Advocate Christ Medical Center in suburban Oak Lawn, according to The Associated Press.

Prosecutors said that when Figueroa was brought with the baby to the hospital, she had blood on her upper body and her face, which a hospital employee cleaned off. They also said Figueroa, 46, was examined at the hospital and showed no physical signs of childbirth.

Illinois Department of Children and Family Services spokesman Jassen Strokosch said Saturday the agency was alerted May 9 that there were questions about who had custody of the child in order to make medical decisions. He said he couldn’t speculate about why the agency wasn’t contacted sooner.

“We don’t know what was happening at the hospital,” he said.

Clarisa Figueroa, who was charged in the death of 19-year-old expectant mother Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, in a photo provided on May 16, 2019. (Chicago Police Department via AP)

The Associated Press contributed to this report.