Police have announced that three people have been arrested and charged in connection with the death of a pregnant Chicago woman.
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.
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,” Yiovanni 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.”
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.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.
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.
Her mother said at the time the family believed she had been kidnapped.