Brenda’s Got A Baby: The Tragic Forgotten Tale That Inspired Tupac’s Legendary Song
Tupac Shakur was a prolific rap artist known for his deep, insightful takes on African-American life and their struggles with institutional racism. He’s made several songs on the plight of the people on the streets and used his music to pull people out of a bubble of constant bloodshed, violence, and missed self-growth opportunities.
While dominating the music scene, he used his influence to spread empathy and understanding. When Tupac got wind of a story about a teen abandoning their child after getting pregnant, he started writing a song with a music video narrating the struggles of young mothers in disparaged communities.
The Setup
On March 28, 1991, a 12-year-old girl introduced by Tupac as Brenda gave birth in her fourth-floor apartment. After a few hours, the mother of the child abandoned the baby by throwing it into a trash chute, hoping never to see it again. Gladys Perry, the mother of the 12-year-old (Gladys is the infant’s grandmother), informed the police that she was busy outside the house when the childbirth occurred.
The little one still had its umbilical cord intact and barely made a sound while stuck inside the compactor. The story sent chills down the spines of people in the community who had no idea the young girl next door was expecting and had tried to abandon her newborn gruesomely.
A Swift Response
A police sergeant was the first on-scene to respond to a call from a couple of maintenance workers who tipped his department off about a baby’s cries coming from a compactor. It was 9:45 in the morning, and the officer didn’t expect to find himself spending his time diving through trash chutes.
Be that as it may, Brooklyn’s Philip Insardi decided to become a hero and made a dive for the infant, hoping to find it. At first, he was skeptical. He hadn’t heard any of the cries himself, so he wasn’t sure. Eventually, after some digging and shining a flashlight inside, the officer spotted little feet sticking out from the rest of the trash.
The Heroic Recovery
Insardi eventually dared to slide inside the chute, hoping to retrieve the baby before the machine would turn on. The newborn was lying there quietly and soon, upon retrieval, seemed to be relatively unharmed. It was a miracle, considering how steep the fall was from the opening.
The infant was lying there, abandoned on a pile of trash, ready to meet its grim fate, but the officer made sure that wouldn’t happen and luckily showed up right on time. It was cold, so the officer wrapped the child in his shirt. The little one was loaded onto an ambulance and sent to Brookdale Hospital for immediate treatment.
Finding The Guilty Party
The infant had no name, and authorities chose to keep it that way in their official statement. They treated them for hypothermia, and luckily the baby survived the ordeal. They examined the body for injuries but declared the six-pound, ten-ounce tot was officially unharmed. Somehow, the infant managed to land safely and was found lying under some newspapers.
The police decided it was time to approach the person who did this, and the investigators surveyed the locals. Eventually, they visited a six-story building on New Lots Avenue in East New York. On the fourth floor, they found someone claiming her 12-year-old daughter had recently given birth.
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