Her miracle baby came to her in a dream.
On the Dec. 2014 night slain NYPD cop Wenjian Liu died, his devastated widow had a foreshadowing dream about the birth of their future daughter.
“I had a dream,” Pei “Sanny’’ Xia Chen told CBS News in an interview. “I heard the baby’s crying, and [Wenjian] handed me the baby. He said, ‘Baby, here’s the baby. Here’s a girl.’”
Last week, two-and-a-half years after Liu’s murder, Chen gave birth to their daughter, “Angel,” conceived through in-vitro fertilization.
Liu and Chen were only married for three months and were planning to start a family before he was killed in the line of duty by a cop-hating madman.
As Liu lay dying in a Brooklyn hospital, Chen asked doctors if they could preserve his sperm.
“They didn’t know if it was going to work,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill, who remembers the exchange, told CBS News.
O’Neill said: “They didn’t know if it was going to be a possibility. And here it is, two-and-a-half years later, and it’s a miracle.”
Chen said she went forward with the IVF process to honor her late husband.
“I want him to have the child to carry on his legacy,” she told the news outlet of the baby girl, whose full name is Angelina. “Because I love him. I want him have a child.”
Chen said that she will make sure her baby knows of her father’s heroics and plans to one day give the child a necklace with Liu’s badge number on it as a memento.
“I will show my daughter that her father was a hero,” Chen told CBS News. “Her father make the ultimate sacrifice to make this world a safer place.”
When asked if she would like she see her daughter become a police officer like her dad, Chen said, “Of course,” adding that the choice is “up to her.”
Liu was assassinated alongside NYPD cop Rafael Ramos while the pair sat in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on Dec. 20, 2014.