A Cook County judge ordered Heather Mack’s 7-year-old daughter into the temporary care of a maternal cousin of Mack’s from Colorado at the end of a contentious, hourslong hearing Thursday — despite Mack asking the judge from jail to choose the girl’s grandmother instead.
Lisa Hellmann will become the third person to care for Estelle Schaefer, known as Stella, since the child’s November 2021 arrival in the United States with her mother from Indonesia. Mack was immediately arrested at O’Hare Airport and has been in U.S. custody ever since, under indictment for conspiring to kill her own mother, Sheila von Wiese-Mack, in 2014.
