Volume 9 · Chapter 4
Baby Lollipops
Anna Maria Cardona, Olivia Gonzalez
Victim: Lazaro Figueroa
Case at a glance
- When
- 1989 to October 1990
- Where
- Miami and Miami Beach, Florida
- Perpetrator
- Ana Maria Cardona; Olivia Gonzalez
- Victim
- Lazaro Figueroa
- Outcome
- Cardona convicted three times and sentenced to life in 2017 after two death sentences were overturned; Gonzalez pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was released in 2008
The case
On November 2, 1990, Florida Power & Light workers found the body of a small boy under bushes on North Bay Road in Miami Beach. No one knew who he was. Because of the lollipop pattern on his T-shirt, the press began calling him Baby Lollipops while police went door to door looking for his family.
The boy was three-year-old Lazaro Figueroa. He weighed just eighteen pounds, about half of what a child his age should weigh, and his body showed signs of long-term starvation and repeated injuries. Investigators learned that his mother, Ana Maria Cardona, and her girlfriend, Olivia Gonzalez, had mistreated him for about eighteen months as they moved around Miami. He died from a blow to the head. Cardona was arrested in December 1990.
Gonzalez pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 1992, testified against Cardona and was sentenced to forty years. She was released in 2008. Cardona was convicted of first-degree murder in 1992 and sentenced to death. The Florida Supreme Court threw out that conviction in 2002, and a second death sentence imposed in 2011 was overturned in 2016. At a third trial in December 2017, she was convicted again and sentenced to life in prison.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 9 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 9 on AmazonCase photographs
2 photos
Where it happened
Why this case
“Lazaro was found before anyone even knew his name, and for weeks the public knew him only by the pattern on his shirt. The legal case took twenty-seven years and three trials. I want readers to keep the boy at the center, because the long appeals can easily push him to the edge of his own story.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
