ABC7 reporter Cate Cauguiran describes a case that feels almost impossible to process, even in a time when people are numb to bad headlines: a routine Facebook Marketplace vehicle sale in Downers Grove ended with a 30-year-old pregnant woman, Eliza Morales, stabbed to death in her own home, with court documents alleging she suffered 70 stab wounds.
Cauguiran’s report makes clear this wasn’t a random street crime or a break-in that happened while nobody was home, but a face-to-face encounter that appears to have started with the kind of transaction millions of people make every year – meeting up to buy or sell something, trusting a stranger for a few minutes, and assuming the worst possible outcome is an argument or a deal that falls apart.
Instead, a candlelight vigil was held as loved ones tried to reckon with what happened, and the grief in the voices Cauguiran captured sounds like grief that doesn’t know where to land, because it keeps crashing into the same wall: Eliza was months away from giving birth, and she already had a two-year-old daughter who now has to grow up around a hole that will never close.
Angelica Silva, identified in Cauguiran’s reporting as Eliza’s mother-in-law, puts the emotional whiplash into one sentence that’s hard to forget: you get angry, then sad, then angry again, and it turns into a roller coaster you didn’t ask to ride.
Carolina Castro, identified as Eliza’s cousin, talks about Eliza as a person rather than a headline, calling her “a sweetheart,” and saying she didn’t deserve it – words that sound simple until you realize how often families of victims are forced to say the same thing, over and over, because there’s nothing else that makes sense.
A Sale Listing That Turned Into A Scene Of Violence
Cauguiran reports that Eliza’s husband, Gabriel Morales, had listed a pickup truck for sale on Facebook Marketplace, and that court documents indicate a 19-year-old suspect intended to buy it.
That detail matters because it frames the moment as one of the most ordinary, everyday scenarios imaginable: someone wants to sell a vehicle, someone else wants to buy it, they connect through an app, and they meet.
According to what Cauguiran cites from court documents, the suspect told detectives he was upset about the condition of the pickup truck and “decided to take out his frustration on Eliza,” which is the kind of explanation that lands like a punch because it is both brutally direct and wildly disproportionate.
In the report, the violence is not described as a quick struggle or a sudden panic, but as something sustained and extreme, with investigators alleging Eliza was stabbed 70 times during a fight.
Cauguiran also reports that during the struggle, Eliza “mentioned she was pregnant,” according to court documents, a detail that makes the case feel even darker because it suggests there was a moment where she tried to communicate the reality of what was at stake, while the attack continued anyway.
ABC7’s coverage identifies the victim as a pregnant mother who was just months from welcoming a second child, and that point is repeated not for dramatic effect, but because it is the center of the loss: two lives were cut off, and a young child lost her mother in a way that will haunt everyone around her for years.
What Investigators Say Happened Inside The Home
In Cauguiran’s reporting, the violence is followed by allegations that the suspect didn’t stop at the stabbing.
Investigators, she says, believe that after the attack, the suspect started a fire inside the home, which is how the scene ultimately became an emergency call that drew attention that night.
The story is described as Morales being found dead after an apartment fire Monday night, and Cauguiran’s report ties that fire to the alleged actions after the stabbing, turning the case into more than a homicide investigation – it becomes, in effect, a chain of crimes that left a family and a community staring at the same question: how does a disagreement over a vehicle listing lead to this?
The suspect named in the report is Nedas Revuckas, 19, who ABC7 says has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of Eliza and her unborn child.
Beyond that, Cauguiran notes that the charges include armed robbery, arson, animal cruelty, and other crimes, and while the list is legal language, it paints a broader picture of what investigators believe happened that night and what they believe the motive may have involved.
One of the more chilling elements in the ABC7 details is the allegation that the family’s dog was also stabbed, and even though that detail can feel secondary beside the murder of a pregnant woman, it often signals something important about the nature of an offender: not just anger, but a willingness to inflict pain on anything in front of them.
From the reporting, investigators say Eliza resisted the suspect at her doorstep as he tried to rob her, meaning this wasn’t simply an argument inside the home, but a confrontation that began right at the entry point, where people usually feel safest.
The Family’s Grief And The Problem With “Motive”
Cauguiran notes that Eliza’s family says the suspect’s motive still isn’t clear to them, and that gap – the difference between what court documents allege and what loved ones can emotionally accept – shows up in the way relatives talk.
Silva’s line about “pure evil” is not a legal conclusion, but it’s a human one, and in cases like this, it’s often the only language people have when the facts are too grotesque to fit into normal categories like “argument,” “rage,” or “bad decision.”
It’s also telling, and heartbreaking, that Silva doesn’t just talk about Eliza, but about the two-year-old daughter who survives her, because that is the part of the story that will keep unfolding long after the court dates fade from the news cycle.
Silva says, as Cauguiran reports it, “We’re just going to raise her daughter the way she was,” which reads like a promise made in the middle of a disaster – one that implies the family is already thinking about what kind of childhood this little girl can still have, and how to keep her connected to the mother she won’t remember clearly.
Castro’s comment – “you just don’t ever expect this to happen” – hits the same nerve many people feel when hearing about violence tied to online meetups, because it’s true: people understand risk in an abstract way, but they don’t usually imagine a vehicle sale turning into murder, in a home, with a pregnant woman fighting for her life.
And that’s where the story becomes bigger than one family, because the reason it shocks is the reason it resonates: so many people have done a Marketplace sale, or know someone who has, and the normalcy of the setup makes the outcome feel like an ambush against everyday life itself.
Court Proceedings And The Weight Of Evidence
Cauguiran reports the suspect was due back in court, but that the detention hearing was postponed because of the amount of evidence attorneys have to go through.
That small procedural detail is easy to skim past, but it hints at how complex these cases can become quickly, especially when there are allegations involving a homicide, an unborn child, robbery, arson, and cruelty to an animal.
It also quietly signals that investigators likely have a large body of material – documents, forensic evidence, interviews, and possibly digital records related to the Marketplace exchange – because cases like this don’t rely on a single witness statement, they often become a web of timelines and proof.
The court documents cited in Cauguiran’s reporting also emphasize the suspect’s own claimed emotional trigger – anger about the truck’s condition – which, if accurate, raises an uncomfortable point about how some people treat frustration like permission.
A person can be disappointed in a product, feel insulted, feel cheated, even feel furious, and still have a thousand exits that do not include violence; so when the alleged response is a stabbing of this magnitude, it suggests something far beyond ordinary anger.
A Hard Look At Marketplace Safety And Human Nature
It’s tempting, in stories like this, to jump straight into safety tips, because it’s a way to feel some control, but Cauguiran’s report doesn’t read like a simple cautionary tale – it reads like a reminder that platforms built for convenience can also become stages where unstable people show up with real-world consequences.
The hard truth is that Facebook Marketplace, like any open marketplace, is a trust game, and trust games work fine until they don’t, because you’re not just selling a truck, you’re meeting a stranger who might be lying about who they are, what they intend, and what they’re capable of.
What sticks with me most from this report is the way the family’s grief circles back to the same theme: they can’t understand why, and they may never truly understand why, because explanations like “he was upset about the condition” don’t explain anything in a moral sense.
That’s not me trying to turn this into a lecture; it’s just the honest reaction most people have when they hear “70 times” attached to “stabbing,” because that number doesn’t sound like a scuffle, it sounds like sustained violence, and sustained violence usually reflects something deeply broken.
And when you layer in the allegation of arson afterward – starting a fire inside the home – you’re left with the impression, at least from what ABC7 reports investigators believe, of someone trying to destroy evidence, destroy a scene, or maybe just destroy everything they touched in a moment of rage.
The Life That Was Interrupted
Cauguiran opens her report by reminding viewers that Eliza Morales and her family were just months away from welcoming a new child, their second after their two-year-old daughter, and that framing matters because it restores the victim’s life context.
Eliza is not just a victim; she is a mother with a toddler, a woman preparing for a newborn, part of a family making future plans in the most normal way families do – shopping lists, baby names, appointments, and the daily grind that suddenly becomes precious only after it’s taken away.
The vigil described in the report becomes, in that sense, less about public mourning and more about community witness, because when a death like this happens, people gather partly to grieve, but also to prove the victim existed as a person, not a statistic.
Silva’s “roller coaster” line captures that perfectly, because grief in cases like this doesn’t move in a straight line, and it doesn’t get neatly resolved by an arrest or a court hearing.
If anything, the arrest and the charges are just the beginning of a long, exhausting process where the family has to keep reliving the details, while also trying to protect a two-year-old from growing up inside the shadow of what happened.
What Comes Next For The Family And The Case
Cauguiran notes a GoFundMe was set up to support the family, which is both a practical step and a quiet indictment of how expensive tragedy becomes, especially when a household loses a parent and a pregnancy in one blow.
The suspect, according to the report, faces severe charges, but no set of charges can rebuild the future this family thought they had, and that’s the part that lingers after the news clip ends.
This story, as Cate Cauguiran reports it, is not only about a violent suspect and a list of allegations, but about what it means when something as ordinary as a Marketplace meetup becomes a doorway to catastrophe.
And it’s also about how families survive afterward – how they keep telling stories about who Eliza was, how they raise her daughter with love instead of only fear, and how they try to make sense of a night that rewrote their lives in the most brutal way possible.
