‘I’m going to beat her.’ Texts show how sisters tortured Oakmont girl, 3
Share this post:
“I made her nose bleed,” one message read.
“Good. I’m going to beat her,” came the response.
Those were just two of hundreds of text messages between Alexis Herrera and her sister, Laura Ramriez, in early 2020 in the months leading up to their arrest for criminal homicide.
According to Allegheny County homicide Detective Scott Klobchar, the sisters’ text thread obtained from their cell phones as part of the investigation revealed nearly 900 pages of messages between them.
For more than two hours on Friday afternoon, Klobchar read them to the judge.
Many of the messages were mundane — Ramriez asking Herrera if she wanted anything from McDonald’s. Herrera sending a picture because she got a good parking space. A receipt from Ulta Beauty.
But most of the texts read by Klobchar focused on how much the two women hated Ramriez’s 3-year-old stepdaughter, Bella.
They called her ugly and stupid. They used expletives to refer to her. They constantly asked about her bathroom habits.
And they took joy in sharing the ways they tortured her.
Bella Seachrist, just two months shy of 4 years old, died on June 9, 2020, after becoming unresponsive at the family’s home on 10th Street in Oakmont.
Her body was covered in bruises and scabs, and Bella, who was born out of an extramarital affair her father had, was severely malnourished. Her death was ruled a homicide.
Bella’s father, Jose Salazar-Ortiz, Ramriez and Herrera were charged with criminal homicide two weeks later.
Salazar-Ortiz Sr. was found guilty of third-degree murder in May 2023 and sentenced to 33 to 66 years in prison.
Ramriez was found guilty of first-degree murder in July 2023 following a nonjury trial before Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Bruce Beemer. She is serving a mandatory prison term of life without parole.
Herrera pleaded guilty in May to a general count of criminal homicide. Beemer is now presiding over a degree-of-guilt hearing to determine if Herrera is guilty of first-degree or third-degree murder or involuntary manslaughter.
Prosecutors say it’s a case of first-degree murder.
The hearing, which began Thursday, will continue Monday with Klobchar still on the witness stand.
‘Slap her around’
On Friday, he told Beemer that investigators recovered 19,000 images and 1,100 videos from Ramriez’s phone, and that the text thread with her sister, who moved to Oakmont with the family in January 2020, ran for 865 pages.
Many of the messages were sent when Herrera was at the Oakmont house watching Bella, and Ramriez wasn’t home.
On Dec. 22, 2019, Ramriez wrote, “Is that ugly thing still up? Feel free to slap her around.”
As time wore on, the messages started to include pictures of Bella — sometimes with her hands bound by shoelaces to the spindles on the staircase, or forced to stand under a shelf in the closet with her legs bound. In others, she was trapped against a wall by a daybed.
Herrera sent those pictures to Ramriez, bragging that Bella couldn’t sit because of how her legs were tied together.
“If she does, it will hurt,” she wrote on Feb. 21, 2020.
Ramriez wrote back, “you savage.”
Other images shared by the women showed Bella being forced to stand on one leg, with her hands above her head.
In another, Ramriez speculated that Bella had drunk toilet water because she was so dehydrated and she’d left her on the toilet for so long.
A couple of days later, on Feb. 24, 2020, Herrera texted that she’d stuffed a sock in Bella’s mouth so she couldn’t scream and cry. Ramriez responded that she used paper towels to clean up Bella’s urine and stuffed those in her mouth and hit her in the face.
A shifting story
Earlier Friday, Dan Mayer, a former county homicide detective, testified about his interview with Herrera the night Bella died.
In the video-recorded interview, Herrera started out by saying that Bella fell a lot because she had no balance.
She claimed the bruises on the girl’s body were caused by a heat rash.
“I know you’re probably not going to believe me,” Herrera said. “She bruises very easily. I’m being 100% honest. I can take a polygraph.”
But then, Mayer confronted Herrera with the images of Bella’s body taken at the hospital after her death.
“It’s kind of at a point now where we need to back up … and get to the truth of the matter,” Mayer told her. “Alexis, if you saw something and don’t tell me about it, it’s going to be a problem for you.”
Herrera began to change her story, telling the detective that her sister sometimes hit Bella with a wooden spoon. And her sandals. And her fists.
Ramriez would kick Bella while she lay on the ground and sometimes kick her down the stairs, Herrera told the detective.
She saw Ramriez hit the girl so hard once that Bella was knocked out.
Eventually, Herrera admitted to giving her sister shoelaces and suggesting they bind Bella because they didn’t want her sneaking off.
She also said she struck Bella the weekend before her death, causing the child’s nose to bleed.
“I didn’t realize how hard I hit her,” she said.
A few minutes later in the recording, Herrera asked, ‘Am I allowed to go? Am I going to jail?’”