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The “Baby Lollipops” Murder was a child abuse and murder case in Florida involving the mother, Cuban immigrant Ana Maria Cardona, as a perpetrator of violence and first-degree murder to her own son Lazaro Figueroa, who was three years old at the time of his death. The case garnered attention and media coverage particularly through newspapers and broadcasting platforms in Florida, the state in which the murder took place. The murder case was regarded by Dade Medical Examiner Joseph Davis as one of the worst cases of child abuse he had ever witnessed.

Background
In November of 1990, Lazaro Figueroa's three-year-old body was discovered in front of a beach property at Miami Beach. His body was found severely battered and bruised, making it difficult for authorities to identify him due to his extensive injuries. These injuries were the result of extreme domestic violence at the hands of his mother, Ana Maria Cardona, and her lesbian lover Olivia Gonzalez Mendoza. Lazaro's body remained unidentified for the weeks following the discovery, and so the local news outlets nicknamed him "Baby Lollipops" due to the t-shirt design he was wearing when he was found. Cardona, his mother, was an immigrant from Cuba who was a Miami resident at the time of the murder in 1990, and Lazaro was severely malnourished and beaten for a large portion of his life. The cause of his death was recognised as being dealt blows to his head using a baseball bat. Despite claims by neighbours and other individuals that Cardona was abusive towards Lazaro, she consistently denied abusing him. Her main defence was that it Olivia Gonzalez, her lover, who had beaten Lazaro and delivered the fatal blow with a baseball bat. Cardona attests that she wanted to escape her son's horrible beatings at the hands of her lover, and so she took cocaine in order to cope instead of defending Lazaro. To support her substance addiction, she showed the court evidence pertaining to her troubled upbringing in Cuba and of the severe emotional impact on her of the death of the victim's father.

Gonzalez, however, testified against Cardona in exchange for forty-year sentence for second degree murder, and was able to primarily blame Cardona for Lazaro's eventual death. Cardona's defense attorney noted: "As this case unfolded, it became clear that Ana Cardona was going to be held up to our community as a monster...."

Cardona had been convicted twice before and was given the death sentence in both trials, however the case was re-opened due to a technicality. She was then granted a third trial and found guilty once more, and sentenced to life imprisonment instead of death.

Discovery
Employees for the Florida Power & Light Company discovered a three-year-old boy's dead body in the bushes on the morning of November 2, 1990 at Miami Beach. The boy was so emaciated that his figure appeared skeletal, with a bruised right eye. He wore blue gym shorts over a soiled diaper of excrement that was wrapped with brown packaging tape multiple times. He weighed only 18 pounds (8.16kg) when he was murdered, which was half the healthy weight of a boy that age. The lollipops design on 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 held a news conference with multiple detectives working on the case in shifts. They also persevered in door-to-door interviews to gain more information about the boy and handed out flyers bearing this moniker in English and Spanish. They eventually received numerous leads, and the police was able to identify the child as three-year-old Lazaro Figueroa, who was the the son of Ana Maria Cardona and Fidel Figueroa.

Physical Injuries and Autopsy
The autopsy revealed that Lazaro had a fresh fatal tear to his corpus callosum as a result a head injury that occurred hours to days before he died. The police at the time concluded that he eventually died from a fractured skull, later known to be the a 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 tied to a mattress for prolonged periods of time. His diaper was caked with excrement and attached to his body with brown packing tape, and his arm was permanently fixed at a ninety-degree angle due to the abuse.

Lazaro was also malnourished, anaemic, and dehydrated, weighing only 18 pounds. His body was covered in scars and bruises, with bedsores from his head to his buttocks.The medical examiner opined that the cause of death was “child abuse syndrome,” which resulted in the accumulation of Lazaro's injuries from the months leading uptimes to his death.

Evidence presented for the trials demonstrated that the Lazaro experienced 18 months of torture while he was alive․ Medical evidence demonstrated that severe abuse occurred, resulting in an unhealed arm fracture, skull fractures with underlying subdural and subarachnoid hematomas and arm muscles that had turned to bone as a result of consistent and repeated trauma. His two front upper teeth were missing and the medical evidence of child abuse by the Dade County Medical Examiner was described as the worst he had ever seen in his medical experience.

The medical examiner, Dr. Hyma, testified that based upon the physical injuries of the victim that excruciating pain was inflicted on this child over a long period of time, and was bound, gagged and tortured as well as being starved to death.

First Trial (1992)
Cardona was originally tried in 1992, found guilty of aggravated child abuse and first-degree murder, and sentenced to death, based on the condition of her son's body. After her first trial in 1992, Cardona was sent to Death Row, the first woman to be sentenced to die for killing her own child.

At her first trial in 1992, Cardona claimed that her girlfriend at the time, Olivia Gonzalez, tortured and eventually killed Lazaro. Dozens of friends and acquaintances testified against Cardona, recounting how the young mother had treated Lazaro badly and oftentimes left him in the care of others for weeks or even months at a time. Gonzalez, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to a 40-year prison sentence, of which she served 17, whilst Cardona was found guilty of aggravated child abuse and first-degree murder and sentenced to death.

First, with regard to the events of October 31, 1990, the day before Lazaro died, at trial Gonzalez described a specific incident on the “last day of October” when Cardona “got pissed off and she hit [Lazaro] with a bat over the head” because Lazaro was slow in taking off his diapers. Gonzalez stated that Cardona struck Lazaro with such force that “[a] hole was opened up in his head. His head was cracked.”   Gonzalez explained that the wound “started bleeding and bleeding and bleeding, and then I put mercury on it and I applied a plastic band.”   This incident occurred “like six or seven in the evening.” However, Cardona repeatedly labelled Gonzalez as a “monster” and “murderer” who forced her into a sexual relationship by giving her and her children a home. Defense attorney Steven Yermish remarked: “She was in an abusive relationship she viewed as inescapable because she was being provided for. "

Second Trial (2010)
In 2002, Cardona’s conviction was overturned and she was granted a new trial by the Florida Supreme Court. This was because the Florida Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors had committed a Brady violation in failing to give defense attorneys access to interviews with Cardona’s companion and codefendant, Olivia Gonzalez.

At the retrial in 2010, Cardona was found guilty by Miami-Dade jurors of the two counts again and was give the death sentence in 2011 for the second time. At the second trial, prosecutors focused on Lazaro's physical condition and the abuse he had undergone.

In contrast to her outrage at her verdict in the 1992 trial, Cardona appeared collected when her sentence was handed.

State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle stated that "Almost 20 years later, a second jury heard the evidence and has come to the same conclusion...The truth still remains the truth."

With the conviction, jurors rejected the defense team's attempt to pin the killing on a 14-year-old mentally disabled handicapped Miami Beach girl who had confessed to hurling the toddler against a wall. She quickly recanted, however, and maintained her innocence during testimony at trial.

Whilst reading her death sentence, residing Judge Diaz stated: "Ana Maria Cardona, you have forfeited your right to live," according to a report on NBC Miami. "The weight of the aggravating factors is overwhelming. She knew what she was doing. Lazaro was tortured to death, he was mistreated his entire short life."

Third Trial (2017)
Cardona had been found guilty and sentenced to death in her two previous trials, spending 17 years on death row before her verdict was overturned by a higher court based on technicality.

In her third trial in 2017, a neighbour testified: "She closed the door, and when I looked underneath the door, you know, it didn't appear that any lights were on but the shower was going and he was screaming." She went to comment that Lazaro was "very small, very thin, very frail". However, Cardona insisted under oath that she did not inflict significant abuse on her son or break any of his bones. She also continued to recant her 1990 statement that Lazaro fell off the bed and hit his head, causing the tear in his corpus callosum. Instead, she placed the blame on her ex-girlfriend Olivia Gonzalez, insisting that she hit Lazaro with a baseball bat.

The jury found Ana Maria Cardona guilty and convicted her of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse. She was sentenced to life in prison for the 1990 death of her son.The presiding judge, Judge Miguel de la O remarked that “there are wild beasts that show more empathy for their offspring than you showed Lazaro.”