Yovani Lopez in June 2019 holds up a poster calling for life imprisonment of Desiree Figueroa, who was charged with murdering Lopez’ pregnant wife, Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, and his son.
Andy Grimm/Sun-Times file
One of the city’s most shocking murder cases in years will avoid a lengthy and likely gruesome trial after the woman accused of luring a pregnant Marlen Ochoa-Lopez to her Southwest Side home to kill her and cut the baby from her womb decided to plead guilty.
Cook County prosecutors announced the plea deal at a hearing Tuesday afternoon before Judge Peggy Chiampas.
Clarisa Figueroa, 51, appeared in a bright yellow jumpsuit, her dark hair tightly braided behind her head, and was seated in a wheelchair as she agreed to plead guilty to a single count of murder. She was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Chiampas asked if Figueroa understood she would have to serve 100% of that time and would not get early release on parole.
“Yes,” Figueroa answered quietly.
More than a half-dozen family members and supporters of Ochoa-Lopez attended the hearing, including Yovanny Lopez, her husband and the father of the child, Yovanny Jadiel Lopez.
In a statement read in Spanish and English in the courtroom, he described how the tragedy affected him and the couple’s older child, Joshua., who he said “has lost his mother forever.”
“The memory of my infant son’s last breath in my arms is complete agony,” he said.
“God is the judge of all judges and today Jesus is Marlen and Jadiel’s attorney and God’s justice will be served upon you the day you die.”
In another statement, Ochoa-Lopez’s mother, who was not present, said she “would not wish this pain and sorrow on anyone.”
Figueroa declined to provide a statement to the court.
Figueroa’s decision to plead guilty comes a little more than four months after prosecutors announced that her daughter, Desiree Figueroa, had agreed to plead guilty and testify against her mother in a deal that would see the younger Figueroa sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Prosecutors accused Clarisa Figueroa of luring Ochoa-Lopez to her home on April 23, 2019, with an offer of free baby clothes after connecting with the expectant mother on Facebook.
Clarisa Figueroa strangled Ochoa-Lopez with a length of coaxial cable and then cut the baby from Ochoa-Lopez’s womb.
Desiree Figueroa, 29, told police she helped pry Ochoa-Lopez’s fingers from the cable as she struggled to stay alive and later brought her mother a kitchen knife used to cut the baby from Ochoa-Lopez’s body.
The Figueroas planned the killing for weeks before luring Ochoa-Lopez, 19, to their home in the 4100 block of West 77th Place, including an earlier meeting when their scheme was abandoned.
Clarisa Figueroa had asked for her daughter’s help “killing a pregnant woman and taking her baby,” a request prosecutors said Desiree told her boyfriend about ahead of the meeting, the Chicago Sun-Times has reported.
On April 1, 2019, Clarisa Figueroa invited Ochoa-Lopez to their house while Desiree’s boyfriend was present, but he told Desiree he would call the police if she and her mother planned on killing Ochoa-Lopez, prosecutors said.
Ochoa-Lopez left unharmed, and the pair claimed the alleged plot was an April Fool’s joke, prosecutors said.
But three weeks later, Ochoa-Lopez returned. At the time she went to the home, she was experiencing contractions, prosecutors said Tuesday.
As she leafed through a photo album of Clarisa Figueroa’s son, who had died around that time of natural causes, Clarisa wrapped the coaxial cable around her neck and pulled it tight until she died.
At their initial hearing, prosecutors said that as Clarisa Figueroa was choking Ochoa-Lopez, she yelled at her daughter “You’re not doing your f——— job,” because Ochoa-Lopez was able to get her fingers between the cable and her throat.
Desiree Figueroa then peeled Ochoa-Lopez’s fingers off the cable “one by one,” and after four or five minutes, Ochoa-Lopez stopped struggling, a prosecutor said.
After cutting open Ochoa-Lopez’s abdomen with a butcher’s knife, Clarisa Figueroa took the baby and placed him in a bucket, later wrapping the child in a blanket.
She put Ochoa-Lopez’s body in a plastic bag and moved her body to a trash can on the side of the house before calling 911 to claim she had just given birth at home and the child wasn’t breathing.
The baby was taken to Christ Medical Center and placed on life-support, with a GoFundMe page set up saying the baby was expected to die and seeking $9,000 for his funeral.
Desiree Figueroa took Ochoa-Lopez’s phone and car, went to her sister’s house, then parked the car a few doors from her own house.
When police visited Clarisa Figueroa’s house, her boyfriend Piotr Bobak was washing off a bleach-soaked rug. He was later sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to concealing the murder and was deported after his release.
The baby was eventually identified through DNA. The child died after several weeks without ever leaving the hospital. He was named for his father, Yovani Lopez.
Desiree Figueroa, who was pregnant at the time of the murder, gave birth while in custody in November 2019.