Family criticizes police, military

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. -- For months after a pregnant 20-year-old Marine accused a colleague of rape, her family says, she continued to work alongside the man and endured harassment at Camp Lejeune.

In the weeks after she disappeared, they say, the sheriff's department was slow to act.

As authorities recovered Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach's remains Saturday from a fire pit where they suspect Cpl. Cesar Armando Laurean burned and buried her body, her family asked why authorities didn't treat her case with greater urgency.

Naval investigators said Saturday that the pair had been separated on the job, that a rape case was progressing, and that Laurean was under a protective order to stay away from Lauterbach. And Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown insisted his department acted as best it could on the facts available.

"As soon as it went suspicious, we contacted the media and asked for help," Brown said. "The case did not produce enough evidence, other than she was just missing."

On Saturday, her burnt remains, and those of her unborn child, were excavated from Laurean's backyard.

"As well as I could see, the body was much charred," Brown said. "The fetus was in the abdominal area of that adult. ... That is tragic, and it's disgusting."

Authorities have issued an arrest warrant on murder charges for Laurean, 21, who is from the Las Vegas area. They say he fled Jacksonville after leaving a note in which he admitted burying her body.

The Review-Journal visited the last-known Las Vegas address for Laurean on Saturday. The woman who answered the door said that he didn't live there and that she had lived at the house for a year and did not know where the previous occupants had moved to. She said the FBI visited her home earlier Saturday looking for members of the Laurean family.

In his note, Laurean wrote that Lauterbach had cut her throat in a suicide, but Brown doesn't believe it and challenged Laurean to come forward and defend his claims of innocence.

Authorities have described a violent confrontation inside Laurean's house that left blood spatters on the ceiling and a large amount of blood on the wall.

County prosecutor Dewey Hudson said Laurean had been in contact with three attorneys, including Mark Raynor, who declined to comment.

Lauterbach disappeared sometime after Dec. 14, not long after she met with military prosecutors to talk about her April allegation that Laurean had raped her.

Her uncle, Pete Steiner, said Lauterbach, stung by the harassment that eventually forced her to move off base, decided to drop the case the week before she disappeared.

Paul Chiccarelli, the special agent in charge of Naval Criminal Investigative Service at Camp Lejeune, said Saturday that Marine commanders submitted requests in October to send the case to the military's version of a grand jury. A military protective order had been automatically issued in May and renewed three times.

Review-Journal writer Antonio Planas contributed to this report.