Three Arrested in Murder of Pregnant Chicago Woman

Left to right: Desiree Figueroa, Clarisa Figueroa, and Piotr Bobak. The trio suspects have been arrested and charged, according to an announcement by authorities on May 16, 2019. (Chicago Police Department)

Police have announced that three people have been arrested and charged in connection with the death of a pregnant Chicago woman.

Chicago Police said at a news conference on Thursday, May 16, that 46-year-old Clarisa Figueroa and her 24-year-old daughter, Desiree Figueroa, would face charges of first-degree murder. The mother’s boyfriend, 40-year-old Piotr Bobak, is charged with concealment of a homicide.

The victim, 19-year-old Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, was found on May 15, strangled to death. Her unborn son had been forcibly removed from her womb.

Police said Clarisa Figueroa called 911 on April 23 hours after Ochoa-Lopez was killed to report a baby had stopped breathing. The child that Figueroa said was hers was rushed to an area hospital where he remains in grave condition and is not expected to survive.

People magazine reported that the baby, who Ochoa-Lopez had intended to name Yavani Yadiel Lopez, has no brain function.

Fox32 reported that the family doesn’t have plans to remove the child from life support.

The family said that they are praying for the child.

“I have a lot of faith that the baby’s going to live. God is going to give me that miracle. We’re anxiously waiting to have him, to love him,” Yiovanni Lopez, 20, the husband of Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, reported the Chicago Sun-Times.

Clarisa Figueroa’s adult son died of natural causes two years ago, and police believe the woman was hoping to raise the newborn as her own. However, they said the investigation is continuing.

‘My Other Son Feels Sad’

Ochoa-Lopez, 19, went missing for three weeks before her body was found.

She left behind a 3-year-old son, Joshua, who has reportedly been asking for his mother.

“My other son feels sad,” Yiovanni Lopez told the paper. “I can’t explain what happened because he’s still a kid, but I try to make him happy.”

Arnulfo Ochoa, the father of Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, is surrounded by family members and supporters, as he walks into the Cook County medical examiner's office to identify his daughter's body, in Chicago, Illinois, on May 16, 2019. (Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

“There were plenty of clues and in my view this all took way too long. They kept saying how a judge had to OK every request—to check her phone, to check Facebook,” Lopez said. ”I hired a private investigator and he found all of that information, where my daughter was murdered, and he shared that information with police,” he added.

Arnulfo Ochoa, Ochoa-Lopez’s father, meanwhile, also said he is displeased with the Chicago Police Department’s response.

“We just want them to face justice,” Arnulfo Ochoa said on May 16. “We are not against them but we just want them to understand what they did wrong.”

Cecilia Garcia, a spokeswoman for the family, said that Ochoa-Lopez was possibly lured on Facebook by a woman who told her she was giving away baby clothes, The Washington Post reported.

“She was giving clothes away, supposedly under the pretense that her daughters had been given clothes and they had all these extra boy clothes,“ Garcia told the Post. ”That’s the false pretenses that we believe led [Ochoa-Lopez] to that house.”

The Disappearance

Ochoa-Lopez disappeared from Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood on the Southwest Side on April 23, according to the Missing Persons Cases Network.

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

She was last seen in the 2000 block of South California Avenue after leaving Latino Youth High School in Pilsen.

“The family says surveillance video at the school shows Uriostegui walking off campus alone at 3:06 p.m. and appeared to be texting on her phone,” according to the MPCN.

She was supposed to pick up her 3-year-old son from daycare, WGN-TV reported, but never showed up.

At the time, police appealed to the public for help and her family held a news conference on May 2 pleading for her safe return.

“We know nothing. We’re asking the community to help us find her,” said her father, Arnulfo Ochoa, according to ABC7.

Her mother said at the time the family believed she had been kidnapped.

Fox32 reported that Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said, “We believe that she was murdered and we believe that the baby was forcibly removed following that murder.”

Epoch Times reported Jack Phillips and The Associated Press contributed to this report.