If Baby Hope were alive today, she would look exactly like the big sister she never got a chance to know.
“When my mom saw the drawing, she said Anjelica would’ve looked just like me if she were alive,” Laurencita “Lorena” Ramirez, 27, told The Post on Monday of the famous police sketch. “She said I look like her.”
Ramirez has the same eyes, nose and mouth as the sketch of the tragic 4-year-old that an NYPD artist drew after her naked and bound body was found stuffed in a cooler along the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991.
“It’s very painful. I have no joy right now,” Ramirez said. “I think about [Anjelica Castillo] all the time, and I wish I would have gotten the chance to meet her. She’s the sister I never met.”
Teary eyed and in a voice choked with emotion, Ramirez, a married Brooklyn mother of three, said she didn’t find out until age 11 that she had a sister who had been murdered.
She was told by younger sister Maribel Castillo — who had been living with their father — when the girl returned to live with the rest of her family.
But it wasn’t until Oct. 8 that Ramirez first heard about the infamous “Baby Hope” case while watching TV.
“When I saw the news about Baby Hope on Tuesday, I got this feeling in my stomach,” she said.
“I felt something like, ‘Could it be my sister?’ I was just crying because it was so horrible.”
The next day, NYPD detectives knocked on her Sunset Park door and confirmed her suspicions.
“They sat down and started asking me all these questions, and I just broke down,” Ramirez said. “It was hard to find out like that. I still don’t feel good about all this … It’s horrible. Who would do this? A real monster would do this.”
Added her husband, “We can’t f–king believe this. We got a kid that’s 4 years old right now. And just imagine that: what would we do?”
On Thursday, Lorena went to St. Raymond’s Cemetery in The Bronx, where investigators paid for a gravestone to mark Anjelica Castillo’s final resting place.
Ramirez said she left flowers and said a prayer — but has no memory of her slain sibling, who was 2 when their abusive father, Genaro Ramirez, snatched Anjelica and Maribel.
Before the Baby Hope news broke, Ramirez last talked to her mom, Margarita Castillo, two years ago about Anjelica and their father, whom she also does not remember.
“She told me that Anjelica went missing and she tried really hard to find her,” Ramirez said. “She said she wanted to find her, but relatives kept telling her she’s at this place, and she’d go there, but she wasn’t there.”
Ramirez also said she had never met cousin Conrado Juarez, 52, whom police say has confessed to sodomizing and smothering Anjelica in a relative’s Astoria, Queens, apartment.
Her mom — who never called the police when her husband snatched Anjelica — said Monday that she was “devastated” by the details of her daughter’s death, adding that “you can’t even describe a punishment” fit for the girl’s killer.
But Margarita, an illegal immigrant, wouldn’t answer when asked why she didn’t go to cops when Anjelica went missing.
“You wouldn’t understand my pain,” she said through the door of her Elmhurst, Queens, apartment.
She added, “I want to thank the people who prayed for my daughter.”
Retired NYPD Detective Jerry Giorgio, who investigated the case for years, was among the stream of visitors to Anjelica’s grave on Monday and said the mother’s inaction left him with “no sympathy” for her or her family.
“I’m sorry that their daughter is dead, but I just can’t,” he said.
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Hagen