After murder acquittal, many in North Platte gave teen cold shoulder

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2798&u_sid=10374782

Published Sunday July 6, 2008
After murder acquittal, many in North Platte gave teen cold shoulder
BY PAUL HAMMEL
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

NORTH PLATTE, Neb. — The clink of metal bats and the pop of softballs in leather mitts echoed across the dusty diamond.


Alisha Ochoa

This railroad town's elite girls fast-pitch team, the Sensations, was delivering a licking to a team from Cozad, Neb., on a recent spring evening. The dugout chatter rose as the blue-and-white-clad Sensations circled the bases for another batch of runs.

But something was missing from this Norman Rockwell-like scene, an absence discussed only in whispers.

A talented member of the Sensations, Alisha Ochoa, was no longer patrolling the infield.

After she was acquitted in March in the murders of her mother and 5-year-old half sister, Ochoa, now 16, became a virtual outcast in her hometown.


Lori Solie, 39, and 5-year-old daughter Tiara were killed May 17, 2007. Solie's daughter Alisha Ochoa, now 16, was acquitted in March of first-degree murder charges.


She got dirty looks and sometimes rude treatment in public. Returning to her high school, or visiting the normal summertime haunts of teenagers, was not a good idea.

And though Ochoa — surrounded by family members — attended a Sensations game recently, rejoining her former team was out of the question.

"I can't believe she had the audacity to come back," Judy Wehrle said as she waited on customers at a convenience store at the Interstate 80 interchange at North Platte. "She's unfortunately going to be looking over the shoulder as long as she's here."

"I can't see her ever having a future in North Platte," Ochoa's grandmother Judy Cotton said in an interview. "She's struggling."

Family members recently made the decision to send Ochoa elsewhere for school, though they're not saying where.

It's a move recommended by an Omaha psychologist. And it's a move also endorsed by an author who wrote about another teenager who was traumatized — though, unlike Ochoa, convicted — in a sensational crime: Caril Ann Fugate, the 14-year-old girlfriend of 1958 Nebraska mass murderer Charles Starkweather.

FULL story at link.