Slain woman’s family won’t take newborn son off of life support
CHICAGO — Three days before she was killed, Marlen Ochoa-Lopez sent her father an ultrasound photo of her baby with a recording of the boy’s heartbeat inside her.
Arnulfo Ochoa smiled as he played the recording Wednesday night outside Advocate Christ Medical Center, where the boy has been on life support since he was cut from Ochoa’s 19-year-old daughter last month after she was strangled. Doctors say the boy is brain-dead, but the family says it has no plans to end his life.
“The doctors say he doesn’t feel anything,” Ochoa said. “But when we touch him, he reacts. The baby is getting better. This is the gift Marlen left me. I’m going through something so bad, but my faith in God is keeping me going.”
He was surrounded by the teen’s grandparents, who raised Ochoa-Lopez for two years in San Luis de la Loma, a coastal town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, until her parents in Chicago could send for her. They arrived Tuesday night for the funeral this weekend.
“My heart has been destroyed for what they did to her and what she had to go through,” said Ochoa-Lopez’s grandmother, Custodia Castro Rodriguez. “I have faith in God that the baby will get better. He’s the last piece of Marlen we have left.”
The family has been singing church hymns to the little boy and talking to him, careful with the breathing tube and connections to monitors.
“We want him to know we love him,” Ochoa said. “That positivity is helping him. He is a miracle of God.”
The hospital has not commented publicly about the baby, citing patient privacy. But the family says it has been told there is no brain function. The boy was unable to breathe on his own after being cut from his mother’s womb, and was pale and blue when paramedics were called to the Southwest Side home where police say Ochoa-Lopez was killed for her baby.
The baby was brought to the hospital on the evening of April 23, but his mother’s body was not discovered until last week after tips led police to three suspects, including Clarisa Figueroa, who told the hospital she was the mother. Even though an exam showed she had not given birth, the hospital did not notify anyone until two weeks later, after detectives went to the hospital asking about the baby.
“Everyone in our family is hurt,” said Raquel Uriostegui, Ochoa-Lopez’s mother. “We think the hospital made a lot of mistakes. The hospital didn’t do anything. They didn’t investigate. I don’t know. All of that needs to be cleared up. My daughter needs justice. We have questions that haven’t been answered, but God will give us justice. My daughter deserves it.”
She called on the media to stop posting the suspects’ photos.
“We want justice,” agreed Uriostegui’s mother, Benigna Perez. “I understand the pain of my daughter. It is awful to lose a child. She didn’t lose a child, they took her from her. ... They did so much to get here and it’s not fair this happened to my daughter.”
The grandparents shared stories of Ochoa-Lopez growing up in Mexico.
“I had her since she was a baby,” Rodriguez said. “I carried her everywhere. I’d hold her hand and take her with me to the store.”
Ochoa-Lopez would dance when people played music or sang to her. She loved going on rides at fairs and dressing up for church. When it was time to come to Chicago, she didn’t want to leave her grandparents.
“I convinced her to get on the plane to go see her daddy,” Rodriguez said. “When we took her to the airport, I remember seeing her little hand waving at us. That was the last time I saw her in person.
“We talked on the phone, but it wasn’t the same,” she said. “I missed my girl. Sometimes I look through photo albums.”