Illinois authorities said hospital staff did not alert them to early clues in the case of the murder of a 9-month-pregnant woman and the subsequent removal of the baby from her womb.
Police said the woman, 46-year-old Clarisa Figueroa, murdered 9-month-pregnant Marlen Ochoa-Lopez on April 23 and then cut the baby out of her womb.
Figueroa then allegedly phoned 911 to say she had just given birth to a baby who wasn’t breathing.
Paramedics transported Figueroa to the hospital in Oak Lawn, a suburb of Chicago, where she reportedly underwent a physical exam that determined she had not given birth.
The baby was put on life support and he remains in intensive care.
Now both police and Illinois’s child welfare agency representatives said the hospital raised no alarm on circumstances that investigators suggested should have raised a red flag.
Oak Lawn police said they were not contacted about Figueroa, by the medical center, or any other agency. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said on Saturday, May 18, that authorities had to subpoena medical records from the hospital for Figueroa and the child. He said police didn’t learn that Figueroa showed no signs of childbirth until “a couple of weeks” after she was examined.
Illinois Department of Children and Family Services spokesman Jassen Strokosch said Saturday the agency was alerted on 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.
Strokosch said the Department of Children and Family Services was alerted by someone required by law to contact the department about suspected abuse or neglect, but he couldn’t say who contacted the agency.
Murder Charges Announced
Police announced on Thursday that three people had been arrested and charged in connection with Ochoa-Lopez’s death.The victim, 19-year-old Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, was found on May 15, strangled to death. Her unborn son had been removed from her womb.
The family said that they are praying for the child.
‘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,” Lopez told the paper. “I can’t explain what happened because he’s still a kid, but I try to make him happy.”
“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.”
“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.”