The "Baby Lollipops" murder was the murder in 1990 of three-year-old Lazaro Figueroa by his mother Ana Maria Cardona, in Florida. The body of Lazaro was found abandoned, and identified through house-to-house inquiries. The case was widely covered in US media, who called the initially unidentified boy "Baby Lollipops", after the design on the T-shirt he was wearing when found.
Cardona was arrested for the murder and sentenced to death; her girlfriend, Olivia Gonzalez, was sentenced to forty years. On a second appeal Cardona was sentenced to life in prison. Gonzalez was released after 14 years.
Background
Lazaro Figueroa was born on September 18, 1987, to Ana Maria Cardona and Fidel Figueroa. Cardona also had two older children. Fidel Figueroa was a well-known drug dealer and died under mysterious circumstances on September 20, 1987. This crime remains unsolved.
In November 1990, Lazaro Figueroa's body was discovered in front of a beach property in Miami Beach. He had been severely battered, which made it initially very difficult for authorities to identify him. Because Lazaro's remains were unidentified for weeks after his discovery, local news outlets nicknamed him "Baby Lollipops" in reference to the shirt he was found wearing. The cause of death was later determined to be a blow to the head from a baseball bat. Trial evidence showed that shortly after leaving Lazaro's body in the bushes, Cardona and her lover, Olivia Gonzalez, fled to Central Florida, even making a stop at Disney World. Despite claims by neighbors and other individuals that Cardona was abusive towards Lazaro, she consistently denied it. Her main defense was that it was Olivia Gonzalez who had beaten Lazaro and delivered the fatal blow with a baseball bat. Cardona attested that she wanted to escape the pain of her son's horrible beatings at her girlfriend's hands and so sank into cocaine use to cope. To support claims on the influence of her past in the case, her defense presented the court with evidence pertaining to her unsettled Cuban upbringing and the psychological devastation caused by the death of Lazaro's father. According to prosecutor Reid Rubin, however, Cardona was "angry and spiteful" from the death of her wealthy husband as she had lost a luxurious lifestyle.
Gonzalez, however, was able to state her case against Cardona in exchange for a lighter 40-year sentence on the count of second-degree murder. She served 14 years. While admitting she played a role in her girlfriend's abuse of Lazaro, she was able to lay the majority of the blame on Cardona for Lazaro's eventual death.
Discovery
Employees for the Florida Power & Light Company discovered Lazaro Figueroa's dead body on the morning of November 2, 1990, at Miami Beach, hidden beneath some bushes. The boy was so emaciated that he appeared skeletal, with a bruised right eye. He wore blue gym shorts over a soiled diaper wrapped multiple times with brown packaging tape. At the time of his murder, Lazaro's weight was 18 pounds (8.16 kg), half the weight of a healthy child his age. The t-shirt he was wearing caused the Miami Beach Police Department to name him "Baby Lollipops," and he remained unidentified for weeks after his discovery.
The Miami Beach Police Department hosted a media conference with multiple detectives handling the murder case. They also conducted door-to-door interviews in both English and Spanish to obtain more information about the boy. They received numerous leads and were eventually able to identify the boy as Lazaro Figueroa, son of Ana Maria Cardona and the late Fidel Figueroa .
Physical injuries and autopsy
The autopsy revealed that Lazaro had a fresh tear to his corpus callosum as the result of a head injury that occurred hours to days before he died. The police concluded that he died from a fractured skull, later known to be the result of a baseball bat blow. He was also starved and beaten, with a cigarette burn on his left cheek, broken teeth, broken bones, and bedsores from being bound to a mattress for extended periods. His diaper was caked with excrement and attached to his body with brown packing tape, and his arm was permanently fixed at 90 degrees.
Weighing only 18 pounds at the time of his death, Lazaro was malnourished, anaemic, and dehydrated. The majority of his body bore bruises and scars, which were the result of longstanding injuries from the months preceding his death.