Editorial: The impact of Bella Seachrist's death

Bella Seachrist never had a chance.

Bella missed an opportunity for simply living. She was just 3 years old — almost 4 — when she died, slowly, of starvation.

Poverty will do that to a child. That isn’t what happened to Bella. Her stepmother, Laura Ramriez, had a room in the family’s Oakmont home just for her makeup and designer bags. Police say the home was neat and “nicely put together” — except for the stained and dirty cot on the floor where Bella slept in wet, stained pajamas.

The kitchen was full of kid-friendly food like macaroni and cheese and chips and candy. Perhaps those were for the three other children, who had their own room with bunk beds.

But for 10 months, Bella was abused. Prosecutors called it torture. They weren’t wrong. When Bella died in June 2020, she weighed just 20 pounds. At 20 pounds, many babies are still using infant car seats.

Bella was being victimized for something that wasn’t her fault — her father Jose Salazar-Ortiz Jr.’s extramarital affair that resulted in her birth. From September 2019, when the thriving little girl came to live in Oakmont after a year spent in North Carolina with family, her life collapsed until it was gone.

Ramriez was convicted of first-degree murder in September 2023. She was sentenced to life in prison. Salazar-Ortiz Jr. is serving 33 to 66 years for the third-degree murder of his daughter.

On Tuesday, Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Bruce Beemer sentenced the last defendant — Ramriez’s sister, Alexis Herrera. She also will spend the rest of her life in prison for first-degree murder.

It barely seems enough.

While Ramriez is where hate for the little girl festered and Salazar-Ortiz utterly failed his own child, Herrera is the one who could have stopped it. In the last week of Bella’s short, pained life, her stepmother and father were out of town. Herrera was in charge of Bella and four other children.

Did she stop the abuse? Did she feed Bella? No. She took pictures and video of the ongoing cruelty and exchanged text messages with Ramriez.

And when Bella died, Herrera finally called 911.

“I’m trying to do chest compressions and she’s not responding,” Herrera said calmly on the recorded call.

But it wasn’t true. Bella’s death was a response to being starved, to having other children throw toys at her, to being tied to the staircase with shoelaces, to being forced to stand in an ice-cold shower, to being kept stooped over in a closet and being perched on a toilet for hours.

Ramriez could have stopped torturing a preschooler for a man’s faithlessness. Salazar-Ortiz could have protected his child. And Herrera, the last person who stood between Bella and death, could have called for help before it was too late.

Bella never had a chance at anything other than pain, hunger and abuse. During those last 10 months, every adult failed her. The greatest failure is that no one was present at the sentencing to give a victim impact statement about her loss — because all of the people who might have were responsible for her death.

So let us give it.

We are all impacted when a child like Bella is abused into her grave because it means we live in a world where something so horrific is possible. We are impacted because Bella is not 8 years old, swimming and riding a bike and playing soccer. We are impacted because Bella won’t grow up to be a nurse or a teacher or a Marine or a mom who would never abuse her kids.

We are impacted because there is a Bella-shaped hole in the world and she should be here to fill it.

But she never had a chance.