The widow of a New York City police officer who was shot and killed in an ambush attack has given birth to a baby girl through in-vitro fertilization, the NYPD said.
The birth comes about 2 ½ years after Det. Wenjian Liu was killed in a Brooklyn shooting along with his partner.
Pei Xia Chen, who goes by Sanny Liu, gave birth to the baby girl, named Angelina, on Tuesday, according to the NYPD. She was joined by Det. Liu’s parents, Wei Tang Liu and Xiu Yan Li, at Weill Cornell Hospital.
Chen gave birth to her late husband’s baby more than two years after his death. Liu and his wife had always planned to have children, but those plans were tragically cut short when Liu was fatally shot alongside Det. Rafael Ramos as they sat in their patrol car on Dec. 20, 2014 in Bedford-Stuyvesant by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who fatally shot himself in a nearby subway shortly after the ambush.
The night her husband was killed, Chen requested that her husband’s semen be preserved, so that she may one day have his child, the NYPD said. The night after his death, she had a dream that he was handing her a baby girl.
“I got pregnant through the [in-vitro fertilization] procedure,” Chen said. “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.”
Chen said she can’t wait to tell her daughter that that her father was a hero, and to introduce her daughter to the NYPD, which she refers to as her “big blue family.”
