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.”
Ochoa laughed as he recalled his little girl arriving in Chicago. “She said, ‘You aren’t my dad.’ It took her a month before she said we were her parents.”
She turned 3 about a month later and was given a party. There was cake and a new dress. “It wasn’t a big party, but it was small and with lots of love. She was always smiling,” Ochoa said. “All of her pictures, she’s smiling. I remember her that way.”
The family left the hospital and went to a mural dedicated to Ochoa-Lopez in Pilsen, taking several pictures. Artist Milton Coronado painted the mural Sunday and it has since been decorated with flowers, stuffed animals and more than 200 religious candles. Two crosses were placed on the ground with balloons tied around them.
Ochoa-Lopez’s younger brothers, Miguel Angel Ochoa, 17 and Oscar Ochoa, 13, stood at a distance and looked at the memorial.
“I’m really going to miss her,” the younger Ochoa said, looking down at his feet. “Just seeing this makes me know that there are a lot of people that care about her.”
Visitation for Ochoa-Lopez will be from 3 to 9 p.m. Thursday and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday at Mount Auburn Funeral Home at 4101 S. Oak Park Ave. in Stickney. The funeral will be at 9 a.m. Saturday at the funeral home’s chapel. She will be buried at Mount Auburn Memorial Park at the same Oak Park Avenue address.
jvillagomez@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @JessicaVillag
