Three people have been charged in the gruesome murder of a pregnant Chicago woman whose baby was cut from her womb.
Marlen Ochoa-Uriostegui, 19, went missing after she responded to an offer on Facebook for free baby clothes. Police say Ochoa-Uriostegui was strangled and her unborn baby was forcibly removed from her womb via a crude incision.
Clarisa Figueroa, 46, and her daughter Desiree Figueroa, 24, are charged with murder. Desiree confessed to helping her mother strangle Ochoa-Uriostegui with a coaxial cable, CBS Chicago reports.
Clarisa Figueroa’s boyfriend, Piotr Bobak, 40, was charged with concealing a crime.
Police say Ochoa-Uriostegui and the Figueroas knew each other from previous exchanges of clothes. Ochoa-Uriostegui’s family said she met the women through a Facebook group called “Help a Sister Out.”
The teenager’s body was found early Wednesday behind a house. She was last seen leaving her high school on April 23, and getting into a black Honda Civic, according to her family. The car was later found abandoned.
On April 23, paramedics responded to a 911 call about a newborn baby having difficulty breathing at a home on the Southwest Side of Chicago.
A dispatcher reported that the 46-year-old woman called to say she had given birth 10 minutes earlier and her baby was pale and blue and not breathing, according to WLS-TV.
The newborn baby is in critical condition in a neonatal intensive care unit. He is not expected to survive.
Ochoa-Uriostegui’s family had hopes that another baby boy found on top of a garbage can lid in an alley was Ochoa-Uriostegui’s baby, and that she was being held somewhere against her will, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.
The baby boy was found shortly after 4 p.m. on Tuesday in the Hermosa neighborhood.
Ochoa-Uriostegui’s mother, Raquel Uriostegui, believed the foundling was her grandson, and that he was the key to finding her missing daughter.
But the foundling was not related to Ochoa-Uriostegui. A source on Wednesday confirmed the baby boy is doing well, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Police are searching for his parents.
Ochoa-Uriostegui leaves behind a three-year-old son and her grieving husband, Yiovanni Lopez, 20.
