A pregnant mom who's been responsible her whole life
just does not disappear.
Something's not right.
Lord, just give me the strength.
Why is no one talking about LaToyia?
She's a somebody
and she needs to get the same attention
that Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway is getting
at this point in time.
We pretty damn well worked around the clock.
But we don't have a body.
We don't have a crime scene.
You have a cooperating witness
in the car with a person who's just committed murder.
He has a gun.
Oh, God.
This is the worst-case scenario.
Everyone was dying.
He was not going to leave any loose ends this time.
What do you think's going to happen?
We're coming.
In the summer of 2005,
a pregnant mother from West Philly vanishes,
leaving behind her seven-year-old daughter.
No crime scene, no witnesses, no body,
only a family desperate for answers
and a community that refuses to give up on her.
This case tested every skill Philadelphia police had
because how do you solve a murder
when you can't prove someone's been killed?
The 18th of July, it was evening time.
It was dark.
My niece LaToyia didn't show up
to pick her daughter up from daycare.
That, for me, was where it started at.
The daycare knew something wasn't right
because LaToyia usually get there on time.
Her phone just keeps going to voice message,
so they end up contacting Anthony.
And Anthony went to pick her up.
Anthony, who is the father of LaToyia's daughter,
goes over to the home where LaToyia was living.
And she's not there.
Anthony and LaToyia met when they were in high school.
You know, that little puppy love, that kind of thing.
They dated for quite some years.
And when LaToyia had her daughter, she was very happy.
She wanted to be a mom.
Her daughter was her world.
And Anthony was a good father as well.
But, you know, sometimes, I guess, with couples,
sometimes you can grow apart from one another
far as the love.
So they broke up, but they remained friends
so that they could take care of their daughter.
So Anthony did some research immediately
to try to find out what was going on.
He called, you know, family members.
When LaToyia's dad, Melvin Figueroa,
and his wife, Yvonne, get the call,
concern sets in immediately.
I kept telling my husband, Melvin,
this is not like LaToyia not to answer her phone.
I got a call from my sister and Melvin.
And I just heard Melvin in the background just going off.
He was just belligerent.
And my sister was very, very upset.
This is not like her.
And it really was not like LaToyia.
She was a very responsible mother.
And her and her daughter had a closeness, a unique closeness.
Worried, her family attempts to piece together
where LaToyia had been that day and who she was with.
She was pregnant, and her cousin
said that she had a doctor's appointment that day,
so that was the last location that we known of.
Anthony wasn't the father
of the baby that she was pregnant with.
That was a man by the name of Stephen Poaches.
Stephen Poaches was also from West Philadelphia.
Stephen and LaToyia met in high school and became friends.
And she didn't really find him that attractive
or really wasn't paying any attention to him.
They had been out of each other's life
for quite some time
and one sunny afternoon in the summer,
he was walking down the street,
she was walking down the street on one side.
Stephen finally got the courage
to go and say something to LaToyia.
And at that point, they started talking.
And then they end up dating.
He was funny.
He was, you know,
very outgoing, taking her out places.
Later that night, the family calls Stephen.
He confirms he'd taken LaToyia to her prenatal appointment,
but they parted ways around 3:00
and he hadn't heard from her since.
We knew something was not right
and we started calling
different family members and friends.
Anthony calls her job, TGI Fridays,
and discovers that she hadn't shown up for work,
and then he starts calling around to local hospitals.
She was five months pregnant.
Perhaps something had happened with her pregnancy,
complications, and she was at the hospital.
And she's not there either.
I'm thinking, could somebody maybe have kidnapped her or...?
I didn't want to think the worst at the time, obviously.
So the next day, we end up calling the police
and putting in a report for missing person.
And they told us that we had to wait 48 hours.
After the 48-hour waiting period,
on July 21st, 2005,
it was assigned to southwest detectives.
The detectives, they interviewed everybody
that was close to her, all her family members.
As the police are talking to family members,
their daughter was a joy.
She works at Fridays as a waitress.
She has a side gig at Embassy Suites,
which is cleaning the rooms there.
And she wanted to be a nurse.
She didn't rely on anybody for anything.
She was very self-sufficient.
LaToyia went to nursing school to better herself
for her and her daughter
because she was an independent single mother.
And her spirit spoke loudly
in wanting to help other people
in just, like, a caretaking type of a way.
So police, using their common sense, say,
well, this is not an irresponsible adult,
not an irresponsible mother.
Something is afoot of why she just suddenly disappeared.
The father of her baby was the last person with her
when she disappeared that day on the 18th.
So naturally, they want to speak to Stephen Poaches
to find out what he knows about LaToyia's disappearance.
They go through the timeline for that day, the 18th.
When they got together, where they traveled, everything.
Stephen says that he had taken her down
to Pennsylvania Hospital for a checkup on the baby.
Sometime after 1:00, they leave,
and he drives her back to West Philly.
They stop at a fish restaurant,
they have a bite to eat.
He says afterwards, he withdrew money
and gave her $300 for baby things.
They go back to his apartment.
He says around 3:00, she leaves to go to work.
They ask Stephen, after she left, what did you do?
Did you do anything?
No, I never left my apartment.
Police ask him, did you try to call her?
And he said, yeah, but she hadn't answered the phone.
And so he hadn't talked to LaToyia
since she left his house.
Stephen explains that he and LaToyia weren't together,
despite the pregnancy.
And then comes an even bigger reveal.
He had recently had a newborn baby
that was born sometime in July, like July 1st
with his live-in girlfriend.
Stephen's up front with police
that LaToyia had gotten pregnant with their child
while he and his girlfriend were on a break,
and points their attention to another
complicated relationship in LaToyia's life.
He talks about Anthony and basically says that
they were co-parenting and they weren't getting along.
LaToyia told him that Anthony doesn't really care,
doesn't want to really be involved
in his daughter's life.
It's a very different picture of Anthony
than what detectives had witnessed to that point.
Anthony was the one that made the phone calls
to the different hospitals to check on,
to see if LaToyia had been admitted.
It seemed like he was very concerned.
But everybody's a suspect.
The police start to look into Anthony,
the father of LaToyia's oldest daughter.
And so they bring Anthony in and they question him.
During Anthony's interview,
he said that LaToyia was a loving mother.
She had no enemies.
And it just, you know, didn't make sense
that anybody would want to harm her.
Anthony and LaToyia had been apart for years,
but Anthony reveals to detectives
that might have been about to change.
Anthony was dating someone else,
but it wasn't really working out
and he had spoken to LaToyia.
And they talked about perhaps
getting back together and then moving to Florida.
Anthony still loved her and was talking about,
why don't we get together?
I'll raise this baby as my own.
So when you look at the interview with Anthony
and then you look at what Stephen's telling us,
that Anthony actually doesn't really care,
doesn't want to really be involved in her life,
there's two different stories.
We don't know who is telling the truth.
And we have to keep all our doors open at this point
because we don't know what happened to her.
It's like she just disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Coming up.
This guy calls out of the blue saying,
I got information.
She said some young lady jumped out of a van
and started kicking me in my stomach.
We all looked at one another.
He knows something and he's involved.
As detectives dig deeper into the two men
in LaToyia Figueroa's life,
her family begins their own search.
Melvin, he started putting out flyers
and going around to different blocks
and asking if anyone had saw his daughter.
We're going into every abandoned house,
every park, every river.
Whatever it takes, that's what we're going to do.
We're not going to lay down on looking for LaToyia.
For the Figueroas,
their mission isn't just about finding LaToyia.
It's about preventing a nightmare,
one that they've lived through before.
LaToyia was four years old when her mother was murdered.
It was April of 1985 when 22-year-old Ann Taylor
was found on a Philadelphia street, her throat slashed.
Her case was never solved.
LaToyia did not understand the magnitude
of what happened to her mother.
But to grow up and to have that
being absent out of your life,
that would affect anyone in a devastating way,
especially under the circumstances.
I believe Melvin was thinking about Ann
and thought, wait a minute, now my daughter?
Melvin was relentless in his search for LaToyia.
They were really hard to ignore
if you were living in the city
at that time because they wanted everyone
to know that LaToyia was missing.
Most of the people in West Philadelphia
who have lived there,
have lived there all of their lives,
their parents lived there,
their grandparents lived there,
and so they just, you know, are West Philly born and bred.
Everyone kind of, like, knows each other.
And the community really came together
and rallied behind Melvin Figueroa to find her.
Anyone have any information on my daughter,
please come forward.
Just seeing everybody coming together
to try to put the word out there, you know,
that was very much needed.
At this point, it's still a missing persons,
but it's obvious that something has happened to her,
so the decision's made by the department,
the bosses, that the case would be transferred
down to Homicide because that's what we do.
We would take over the job and bring it to fruition.
Homicide is involved because they're an elite unit.
They have the time and the expertise to investigate this.
And we start digging through the file.
We're basically starting over again,
going through everything, going out,
redoing interviews that we could.
Through these interviews, a picture emerges
of how the family really felt about Stephen.
I don't know what my niece saw in him, personally.
LaToyia, I believe she was a little blinded by love.
Because I can recall my sister telling me and Melvin
that LaToyia had invited him over for dinner
and she was overly ecstatic to introduce him to her father
and to her stepmother and her stepbrothers.
But he never showed up.
He just brought LaToyia and dropped her off.
And I thought that was a little strange and rude.
So after that, I was like,
I really don't want to meet him now.
This was at the time she found out
she was pregnant with her second child.
And she confided in my mom about that.
LaToyia told me that she was pregnant and was very excited.
I was like, oh, you're going to have another little baby.
She knew that she was a girl and she was elated.
Her name was going to be Nyla.
The sense I got from the family was,
things might be a little harder,
but you're also bringing in a joy.
You're bringing another member of the family,
so it's really a blessing.
I had asked her, how does the young man feel about it?
And she just looked at me,
and I'm like, something's not right.
Only thing LaToyia wanted Stephen to do
was to be a part of her life
and be happy that she was pregnant.
And Stephen Poaches did everything but that.
And at this point,
she found out about this situation
with this other young lady being pregnant as well.
This young lady, apparently, Stephen was with
before he even ran back into LaToyia.
LaToyia did not know he was in another relationship.
He has two girls pregnant at the same time.
He's responsible, financially, for two babies.
He asked LaToyia to get an abortion.
She was not having that.
She was happy that she was going to have this baby.
The family also sheds light on an incident
from three months earlier.
LaToyia, she came over to the house.
And she was very upset.
And she said, Mom, I was just getting off from work,
and from nowhere, some young lady jumped out of a van
and started kicking me in my stomach.
She's attacked. She's jumped and she's robbed.
She went to the hospital to get checked out.
Thank God that everything was okay with the baby.
How interesting that the beating she got
was not in her face or her legs,
but they purposely were kicking her abdomen.
We're thinking, you know,
did Stephen have something to do with it?
What are the chances that you have two girls pregnant
and all of a sudden,
the one that you really don't want to have the baby
all of a sudden now is robbed, beat up, and kicked?
She miscarriages, he's off the hook.
Detectives aren't the only ones clocking Stephen.
I just want to find her. That's all I care about.
Anthony Williams, LaToyia's ex-boyfriend
and father of their seven-year-old daughter,
says he doesn't understand why LaToyia's current boyfriend
isn't helping in the search.
If the shoe was on the other foot
and I was the last person that seen her,
I would be here still.
With all eyes on Stephen Poaches,
the father of LaToyia's unborn child,
detectives turn to the other woman in his life,
Lisa Lawrence.
They reach out to her. She comes and speaks to them.
She comes with an attorney, which is very interesting
of why she would bring an attorney.
She talks about Stephen
and gives a history of how they were together.
She refers to him as her fiancé.
And they had recently had a child on July 1st.
Ms. Lawrence says while she was pregnant,
she became aware of LaToyia Figueroa being pregnant
and has forgiven his indiscretion.
And the police delve into, were you angry at her?
Was he angry? Was he upset?
And she reveals that, yes, he was not happy with it.
We asked, did you have anything to do
with LaToyia being robbed and beat up and kicked?
And she said, oh, no, not me.
She says, oh, yes, I heard about it.
But I didn't do it.
And she admits there was some bad blood
or kind of rough conversation between both ladies
which occurred in multiple occasions.
She's asked, would you take a polygraph?
A lot of times, we ask somebody to take a polygraph
and they kind of freeze up.
And they're like, nah, I don't know.
So that sends bells and whistles off to us.
But she said, sure, I'll take a polygraph.
She was very forthcoming.
So we felt that at that point in the investigation
that it wasn't important enough for her
to take that polygraph test at that time.
When it comes to polygraphs,
detectives often have to make a judgment call.
In a situation like this where a cop's instinct
is that someone's telling the truth,
the stress of the test can do more harm than good
by shutting down a witness they may need to come back to.
I was very concerned for LaToyia and for the baby.
And as the days went on, I just had started
getting the feeling of, she's not here.
Something bad happened to her.
I just had to say, Lord, just give me the strength.
Because now I have to really try to hold my husband up.
Here in Philadelphia, there's a station called Power 99.
And in the evenings,
a DJ named DJ Golden Girl would host a show.
And it was a very popular show in the city.
Golden Girl herself had become a local celebrity.
Golden Girl extended her hand to let Melvin
come on the show and talk about it
because she was interested in finding LaToyia as well.
Melvin talks about the fact that they
have set up a tip line,
and they are collecting reward money so that
they can offer a reward for LaToyia's return.
And during that conversation, he reveals Stephen Poaches
was not helping them search for LaToyia.
And people are calling in.
So it's not just Melvin, but people
putting in their two cents.
Steven Poaches is listening to that station
and not liking the fact that people are asking,
well, why isn't her future baby daddy not involved?
Well, maybe the baby daddy did it.
And he's so concerned that
he showed up at that radio station
to give his version.
He says the reason why he hasn't been
assisting in the searches is because
LaToyia's family suspects him.
And he doesn't think that he can trust them.
He seemed to be concerned about LaToyia's family
threatening him, coming after him.
Nobody was threatening him.
We asked Stephen Poaches to come in to Homicide,
basically to go over his story again.
And we confronted him with, well, why aren't you
helping out looking?
He says, well, I keep calling her cell phone.
What?
He doesn't hand out posters, he doesn't do anything.
He just goes on about his life like, well, she left.
She disappeared. That's not my problem.
That's just not normal.
He was supposed to be this guy that really cared about her
and went to the doctor's with her and all that.
We all looked at one another.
He knows something.
And he's involved.
But at this point, we don't have a body.
We don't have a crime scene.
We don't have enough to box him in.
But we're coming.
Here in Philadelphia, LaToyia's story
was breaking news.
It was on every newspaper and every lead story on the news.
But nationally, it wasn't getting any attention.
And this is right after the Natalee Holloway case,
the Laci Peterson case, all the news shows
covered you know, these white girls disappearing.
My niece LaToyia, who was Black mixed with Latino,
she wasn't worth talking about.
They were not bringing exposure to her
in the national media.
In my opinion, part of the reason
why the mainstream media don't give these cases
the attention that they deserve is because
they don't believe that women like LaToyia
are relatable to most of America.
LaToyia was from a low-income area of West Philadelphia.
She was a young, single mother.
She had two different baby fathers.
And so I think people don't elevate them
to where they need to be
because of these preconceived ideas that
nobody's going to care about a pregnant girl
from West Philadelphia who's missing.
She's a somebody and she needs to get
the same attention that Laci Peterson
and Natalee Holloway is getting at this point in time.
So local bloggers here in the city
started to question why no one was
talking about LaToyia's case.
And so one of those bloggers decided to reach out.
They started emailing Nancy Grace and CNN
and asking, why is no one talking about LaToyia?
Had she ever gone missing before
as long as you've known her?
No, never.
Has anybody used her cell phone, Tasha?
No, nobody's used her cell phone.
None of her credit cards ever have been used
since the day she's been missing.
Is she like me, always has her cell phone with her?
- Oh, definitely. - Hmm.
She has a seven-year-old daughter.
- Always keeps it turned on. - Yes.
Now the whole thing blows up.
The national media was, like, on every corner,
interviewing everyone they could.
And now there's a lot of pressure.
The bosses, they're asking questions.
What are you guys doing?
We pretty damn well worked around the clock.
Eight detectives get there, like, 8:00 in the morning
and leave at 2:00 in the morning,
come back, do the same thing the next day.
Your gut feeling is Stephen Poaches is involved,
but you can't get a warrant with that.
You can't use it in court.
We don't have a hammer to go at him.
At that point, there was a $10,000 reward.
But then there was donations
from local rapper Beanie Sigel,
who's a rapper here in Philadelphia,
and TGI Fridays,
which was the employer where LaToyia had been working.
And the reward grew from $10,000
to $100,000.
When I found out
that the reward was that high, I was like,
they're showing brotherly love in the city right now.
You got some folks that say,
I'll sell my grandmama for $100,000.
So people started talking.
Money talks.
A reward that big can help generate tips, no question.
But even with that kind of incentive on the table,
detectives don't just sit back and wait for the phone to ring.
We're always looking for other ways to push a case forward.
We're trying to think of different ways
to shake this case up a little bit.
And bingo, there was the answer.
Bill Shute.
At the time, I was an FBI agent
working on the Philadelphia Violent Crimes
Fugitive Task Force in Philadelphia.
I was developing a new sort of investigative technique
to apply historical cell site analysis in investigations.
This was cutting-edge technology that Bill Shute
was the only one in the FBI who was flying across the country
testifying and training FBI agents
with this new technology.
When the request came in from Philly Homicide,
the request was, can you look for the period of July 18th,
where was Stephen Poaches? Where was LaToyia Figueroa?
We got 30 days' worth of phone records.
And you can tell a lot about a person
by their cell phone records.
And so while I didn't know Stephen Poaches,
what I knew about him is that this guy made calls
at all hours of the night,
8:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m., midnight, 2:00 a.m.,
3:00 a.m., 5:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m.
In the five years of looking at cell phone records,
I had never seen somebody that had never took a break.
And that was odd.
I'm going to use a double negative here for effect.
He never not made calls.
I'm looking at the records from the 18th,
and I'm starting to see that it slowly
matches up with the story.
LaToyia and Poaches start moving from West Philadelphia
down into the vicinity of Pennsylvania Hospital.
After the prenatal visit,
they move into the West Philadelphia area,
where their phones were used several more times
before they both go off the network.
That's an a-ha moment.
From 3:00 to 9:00, his cell phone goes off.
And her cell phone never comes back on again.
That was significant.
Stephen Poaches always made phone calls.
Like I said, he never not made calls.
Something was happening
for him to have shut the phone down.
So what became really important was, who is he calling?
And where is he when that phone came back up on the network?
Around the 9:00 hour, I started seeing
cell phone usage in the vicinity of West Philadelphia.
And then after midnight,
I see that there's the same phone number being called,
12:06, 12:30, 12:49.
And so let's get the subscriber for that particular phone.
At the same time, Poaches starts
traveling down south
along Interstate 95
down into Chester, Pennsylvania.
So the question becomes
who is he calling and where is he going?
We get the subscriber information,
and it comes back to Javar Alston
out of Chester, Pennsylvania.
So that became a priority at that point.
We have to get ahold of Javar Alston.
Detectives go out, they bring them in.
They're talking to him.
You know, how do you know Stephen Poaches?
Why was he calling you that night?
And he's not forthcoming, right?
I'm outside, patiently waiting.
I'm anxious to find out what's going on.
But Chuck's in there doing his thing...
And a phone call comes in to the desk man.
And I can hear him talking.
They receive a tip from a man named Walter Myatt.
This guy calls out of the blue saying,
I got information.
Do I get the reward with the information?
The desk man puts his hand over the receiver
and says, anybody know the name Alston?
And I'm like, yeah, I think Chuck has him
in the interview room right now.
He's like, oh, somebody's trying to have him killed.
Wow, right? This changes everything now.
Philadelphia Police have their first major break.
Javar Alston is now in custody.
He's the man Stephen Poaches called repeatedly
the night LaToyia vanished.
And just as detectives are pressing him
on his ties to Poaches,
a tip comes in that changes everything.
The tip came in that Stephen Poaches
was trying to hire a hit man to kill Javar Alston.
The decision's made to talk to Javar Alston and tell him,
said, basically, Stephen wants to off you
because of what you know.
You better start telling the truth.
You got to help yourself. Tell us what you know.
So of course, he opens up.
What Javar Alston tells the detectives
is that he does know Stephen Poaches,
that they met at a vocational school where they studied HVAC.
Alston says that he remembers talking to Poaches
a couple of months earlier.
He talked about wanting to kill a pregnant girl.
She has to die because she won't get an abortion.
Alston reveals Stephen told him
he'd had someone beat the girl up so she'd lose the baby.
And he didn't think anything of it.
He thought he was, like, just running his mouth.
But on the 19th,
Alston found out just how serious Stephen actually was.
He says that July 19th,
he gets two phone calls from Poaches
saying, I'm en route to you.
I need your help with something.
Javar says, listen, Stephen needed a favor,
we've done business together.
We're good enough friends that when I've asked for money,
he's given me money when he has it.
I said, sure, whatever you need.
He said when Stephen got there,
he got into Stephen's car
and they drove to a wooded area
that was behind Javar's grandmother's house.
Stephen says, I got a dead body in the car.
Javar freaks out. What do you mean?
Hoping against hope he's joking.
But he pulls out a gun, opens the trunk, and says,
you're going to help me get rid of this body.
They open the trunk.
He helps him get the body out.
And Stephen drags her into the weeds.
And then he tells Alston, listen, you say anything,
you're as guilty as I am.
You're involved.
And if you tell anybody, I'm going to kill you.
So Javar was terrified.
He could hurt him, he could hurt his family,
and so he didn't say anything.
Javar told the police, listen,
I've been praying to God for forgiveness.
Please tell the family to forgive me.
We're all--I don't know if shocked's the right word.
You don't want to bring Stephen in now at this point
because he's going to lawyer up.
He's going to say, I don't know what you're talking about.
I had nothing to do with this.
After the tip from Walter Myatt,
police want to speak to him,
and so they bring him in and sit him down.
Myatt explains how he got ahold of this information.
He goes, well, I have a certain reputation.
I'm a tough guy.
People think I'm a hit man, all this stuff.
So Stephen Poaches reached out to me saying,
I need a favor. I'll pay you.
I want you to help me move a body and to kill Javar.
Stephen Poaches is under duress.
The case is closing in.
And he needs to tie up loose ends.
We know he's involved. Now we have him, right?
But what do we do? We don't have the body.
And so the police start to think,
well, maybe Myatt is actually telling the truth
and can be useful in this investigation.
The police say, call Stephen, tell him you're in,
accept whatever amount of money to move that body.
The plan is that Walter is going to go undercover.
He's going to pretend to help Stephen Poaches move the body.
And maybe we get lucky and catch Stephen right in the act.
And so now you have this massive operation
where you have to bring in surveillance teams and planes.
You had to have people waiting in the woods.
Stephen picks up Myatt
and they're headed down to Chester.
Myatt was wired so that police could hear
the entire conversation.
And they also had undercover detectives
following close behind him.
At this point, the stakes are high.
Walter Myatt is someone who has a shady past.
Plus, Stephen Poaches is someone
who they suspect as being a murderer who has a gun.
If something happened to Walter Myatt,
we wouldn't look too good, will we?
I know we'll have hell to pay if it goes wrong.
But she deserves our best.
Although we know she's dead,
but for the family to put her in a proper grave,
the police says, we're taking that chance.
At headquarters, we monitored the radio.
And they were willing to move at any time
if it looked like Myatt was in trouble.
The police are following that vehicle to Chester.
Everything works fine until they hit a pothole.
And the transmitter that was attached
to Walter Myatt goes out.
And now police can't hear anything
that's happening in the van.
They have no idea the conversations
that are taking place.
And they don't know if Walter is ultimately now in danger.
Panic sets in. Can't communicate with him.
You get a lump in your throat saying,
oh, God, this is the worst-case scenario.
An undercover operation to catch Stephen Poaches
moving LaToyia Figueroa's body goes sideways
when they lose the live feed to their informant.
You have a cooperating witness in a car
with a person who's just committed murder.
He has a gun.
This witness is not trained to handle this situation.
We were so worried, like, don't lose this guy.
And they continue to Chester to Javar's grandmother's house
with the police following.
They pull in
and it's like this open field behind the house.
They drive back straight back
to where the railroad tracks were.
And before Stephen can even open his door,
they move in and they grab him.
The police converge on Stephen Poaches
and he is placed under arrest.
And of course, that's when they found
LaToyia Figueroa, her body.
It's severely decomposed,
but we found that she was clearly strangled.
And Stephen has the tools, a shovel and other items,
he's got a ...45-caliber handgun,
he has a bulletproof vest.
Based on how Poaches was dressed,
we believe he was also going to kill Mr. Myatt.
He was not going to leave any loose ends this time.
We were in bed sleeping
and the police were knocking at the door.
I was still just trying to hold on to hope.
Then we got the news that she was gone.
That was a tough pill to swallow.
And the police took us out
to where they found LaToyia's body.
All I remember is that me and Melvin held each other
and we just broke down and started crying.
Full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Family and friends of LaToyia Figueroa
say the Rosary as they comfort one another next to the field
where her body was discovered around midnight in Chester.
Her father, Melvin, shakes with grief.
That was very hard, watching the pain
that my sister and Melvin was going through was unbearable.
And LaToyia was no longer here.
Her mother was murdered just about the same mannerisms
that she was murdered, so that was like déjà vu.
Like a nightmare that you couldn't wake up from.
The night that Poaches is arrested, he's sitting there.
He's warned of his rights.
So he's in the room and he's not saying a word.
And then he goes, what am I looking at?
I said, you strangled and dumped a 24-year-old female
that you had a relationship with that was carrying
your baby at five months.
What do you think is going to happen?
You're going to get the death penalty.
At which point, he made a statement
trying to at least minimize what he did.
He says they get into an argument.
He says that she smacked him.
He doesn't confess completely because
as most people don't want to admit
that they are an animal and pure evil.
He says, well, she was attacking me and hurting me,
and that's why I strangled her by accident.
Stephen Poaches's trial was set to begin
on Thursday, October 12th, 2006.
The defense asked us would we consider not seeking death?
I said you'll have to take a bench trial.
I'm not putting this family through a jury trial.
A bench trial meant that instead of having his fate
decided by 12 jurors of his peers,
it's decided by the judge.
A jury trial takes a long time.
The family is sitting there day in and day out
watching their daughter get murdered every day.
I said to my sister and to Melvin,
I know that y'all want him
wiped off the face of the Earth,
but I think that'll be a little too easy for him.
He needs to spend every day of his life behind bars
to think about what he did to LaToyia,
you know, suffer for years the consequences of his actions.
So the family, with their permission,
we withdrew death for a bench trial.
After a four-day trial,
the judge finds Stephen Poaches guilty
of two counts of first-degree murder,
one count for LaToyia
and one count for their unborn baby, Nyla.
Poaches is sentenced to life in prison without parole.
It's not an easy to lose a child just like that.
And deep in my heart, I always knew it was him.
We were very, very thankful that
what happened to her went national.
It really brought the light to her being a Black Latina woman
who was missing and that was worth looking for
because she was somebody.
Since 2005, the stories of missing and murdered
Black women and girls and other people of color
has begun to get more attention than it used to.
It's still not anywhere near where it should be.
And I hope that LaToyia's story
continues to show people that
race and class shouldn't matter, that LaToyia mattered,
and that her story mattered
and her unborn daughter mattered.
LaToyia had a beautiful personality.
And one thing that I would like for everyone to know
to just keep her beacon of light shining forever
because she did not deserve to leave the world
the way that she did.
She was such a beautiful person.
And that I wish the world could be more like LaToyia.