The widow of an NYPD officer who was shot dead alongside his partner while sitting in a patrol car back in December 2014 has welcomed the late cop’s child into the world more than two years after his tragic murder.
Pei Xia Chen, the widow of fallen cop Wenjian Liu, was asked as he lay dying in a hospital bed that December if she wanted doctors to preserve his semen so that she could one day have his baby, The New York Post reported.
Chen accepted doctors’ offer, and, on Monday — more than two years after Liu’s death — she delivered a baby girl at New York’s Weill Cornell Hospital; she named the child Angelina (i.e. “Angel”) in tribute to her late husband.
But it’s a dream she had before her baby’s birth that’s perhaps the most intriguing element of the story.
Her friend, Maria Dziergowski, told the Post that Chen dreamt about her husband on the day she was inseminated, seeing him in a white gown and resembling an angel. In that dream, Liu handed his wife a baby and said that the child was a little girl.
“So [she] knew before everyone that it was a girl,” Dziergowski said of the child. “The baby’s adorable, smiling, laughing. She has a lot of hair, a lot of black hair.’”
https://www.facebook.com/NYPD/photos/a.274991665910956.65258.262068223869967/1449535575123220/?type=3&theater
A post on the NYPD’s Facebook page said that Chen had this dream the night after her late husband’s death. Either way, Chen confirmed the general details to the NYPD, explaining that she knew the baby’s gender before conception based on that dream.
“I got pregnant through the [in-vitro fertilization] procedure,” she said, according to WNBC-TV. “And I told my friend, ‘It’s going to be a baby girl.’ My friend said, ‘No, you haven’t even checked the sonograms,’ but I was right.”
Liu’s parents reportedly went to the hospital this week to see the baby — a clear blessing that emerged from tragedy.
“Now, Detective Liu’s legacy can live on through his daughter,” an NYPD statement reads. “And as far as Detective Liu’s legacy goes, [Chen] can’t wait to tell Angelina that her father was a hero. She is also eager to introduce her daughter to the New York City Police Department that she lovingly refers to as her ‘big blue family.'”
Liu was shot and killed alongside his partner, Det. Rafael Ramos on Dec. 20, 2014, by a man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley as the two sat in their patrol car. Brinsley killed himself right after the ambush, WNBC reported.