'Take it out on Bella': Prosecution rests case in Oakmont child's starvation death

A video taken on April 22, 2020, showed one of Bella Seachrist’s stepbrothers smacking her.

Another taken less than a month later, showed the girl, nearly 4, sitting facing a corner as two other children in the Oakmont house hit her.

A photograph taken five days after that showed one of those same children choking Bella as she sat on the floor.

“Were the kids instructed to hit her?” Allegheny County Police Det. Scott Klobchar asked Alexis Herrera during her police interview more than four years ago.

“Sometimes they were,” Herrera answered, referencing her sister, Laura Ramriez. “Laura said, ‘If you’re annoyed, take it out on Bella.’”

Bella died on June 9, 2020. She weighed just 20 pounds, and her body was covered in bruises.

Investigators charged Bella’s father, Jose Salazar-Ortiz Jr., her stepmother Ramriez and Herrera with criminal homicide.

Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Bruce Beemer found Ramriez guilty of first-degree murder in July 2023, and she is serving a mandatory prison term of life without parole. Salazar-Ortiz, was convicted of third-degree murder by Beemer and ordered to serve 33 to 66 years in prison.

In May, Herrera, 25, pleaded guilty to a general count of criminal homicide. Beemer must determine if she is guilty of first-degree murder, third-degree murder or involuntary manslaughter in order to decide her sentence.

A degree-of-guilt hearing began on Thursday, and the prosecution rested Monday afternoon. The case will now be in recess until early March when expert witnesses for the defense are available to testify.

Minimizing her role

On Monday, Deputy District Attorney Jennifer DiGiovanni played as her last piece of evidence Herrera’s police interview from the day of her arrest — June 25, 2020.

Herrera told Klobchar, a homicide detective, that she moved in with her sister’s family in January of that year.

Bella, who had been born as the result of an affair Salazar-Ortiz had, had been living with family in North Carolina until September 2019, when she returned to the house on 10th Street in Oakmont.

Her abuse, investigators said, began soon thereafter. Investigators said along with the adults, three of the four other children in the house were involved — two of Bella’s stepbrothers, who were under 12, and Herrera and Ramriez’s little sister, age 5.

During her interview with detectives, Herrera attempted to minimize her role in Bella’s abuse, telling them that it was her sister who began hitting Bella in the face soon after she moved in.

Then, when the investigators confronted Herrera with photographs and videos she took on her phone showing Bella bound or being forced to sit for hours on the toilet — as well as text messages she exchanged with her sister — Herrera claimed she took them to document her sister’s treatment of Bella so she could someday report her to the county’s Office of Children, Youth and Families.

But that never happened.

Herrera told the detectives she was afraid if she reported the abuse, her sister would kick her out of the house — or that investigators would think she was involved.

“You clearly were a part of it,” Klobchar said.

“Mm hmm,” Herrera responded.

“Not only did you not stop it, you participated in it,” he continued.

“I was scared my nephews would be in the foster system,” Herrera continued. “I was just trying to come up with a game plan.”

She described an atmosphere in the house where Ramriez and Salazar-Ortiz’s three sons were not allowed to play with Bella, and they sometimes threw toys at her.

The abuse directed at Bella ranged from making her hold herself up on the rim of a toilet for hours to making her stand naked in a cold shower for 15 minutes, Herrera said.

She was rarely fed, and sometimes the child’s hands and feet were bound with shoelaces to the spindles of the staircase for hours at a time.

‘Starved to death’

Jennifer Wolford, a pediatrician with the Child Advocacy Center at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, testified on Monday that Bella was the victim of “extraordinary abuse and maltreatment” who had evidence of abuse on every part of her body.

She had sores on her head, feet and back, bruises from her ankles all the way up her legs and torso, and bald patches on her head.

Wolford also noted that Bella had abnormal hair growth on her face and back — a primitive response of the body, she said.

When there is no longer fat, and muscle mass has been consumed through extended starvation — making a person no longer able to shiver — the body grows additional hair to try to stay warm, Wolford said.

There were so many injuries, she continued, there were too many to count. When she died, Bella weighed about the same as a 1 year old.

She was, Wolford said, “horrendously malnourished.”

“This child was the victim of months of torture,” she said. “She was starved to death.”