The Tragic Forgotten Tale That Inspired Tupac’s “Brenda’s Got A Baby”

TrendingJuly 11, 2022

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 opportunities for self-growth.
During his time dominating the radiowaves, he used his influence to spread empathy and understanding for his fellow man. When Shakur got wind of a story about a teen abandoning their child after getting pregnant, he jumped on it and 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 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 to never see it again. The mother of the 12-year-old (the child’s grandmother) informed the police that she was busy somewhere outside the house when the childbirth took place.

The child still had its umbilical cord intact, and barely made a sound while it was stuck inside the compactor. The story sent chills down the spines of people in the community who had no idea the little girl next door was pregnant and tried to abandon her baby in such a gruesome way.

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 it diving through trash chutes. Be that as it may, Brooklyn’s own Phillip Insardi decided to become a hero and made a dive-in for the child 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 a bit of digging and shining his torch inside, the officer spotted little feet that were sticking out from the rest of the trash.

A Heroic Recovery

Insardi eventually dared to slide inside the chute, hoping to retrieve the child before the machine would eventually 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 baby in his shirt. The baby 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 for the kid’s safety. They treated them for Hypothermia and luckily the baby survived the ordeal. They examined the body for any injuries but declared the 6-pound 10-ounce baby was officially unharmed. Somehow, the kid 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 ended up visiting a six-story building on New Lots Avenue in East New York, on the fourth floor they found a mother who was claiming her 12-year-old daughter had just recently given birth.

Suspicions Emerge

Gladys Perry told the police that her daughter might be the one responsible for the baby they found, upon further probing she shared information about her daughter’s whereabouts and the police eventually came knocking at her classroom door. It was a normal day at Thelma J. Hamilton Junior High School until suddenly a child was asked to exit the classroom for a line of extensive questioning.

Perry denied it at first, hoping not to face the repercussions of her actions but unfortunately for her, she got forced into going to Brookdale Hospital with them. After a medical examination, it was determined that she was related to the child in some way.