Christopher Yang and Melinda Thao had been trying to conceive for three years — and got a positive test in April. The married couple, who were high school sweethearts, went to their first ultrasound on June 18 and found out their baby was 9 weeks and 2 days old. On July 13, they got back the baby’s gender — and decided to learn together while sitting in their vehicle during Yang’s lunch break.
Yang pulled up the results on his phone, looked over at his wife and took a deep breath. “Don’t say anything,” Thao said during the gender reveal, which they recorded on video. “Just show me.
” Yang turned the phone in her direction. “It’s a girl!” she said, then laughed. “It’s a girl!” he said.
On Sunday, just five weeks after the happy moment, tragedy struck: Thao, 26, and the unborn child they had named Leona died after a driver, who was allegedly drunk, crashed into the couple’s car at a Coon Rapids intersection. Yang posted the gender reveal video to YouTube on Tuesday, the same day that Makayla April Sua Richardson, 20, of Mounds View, was charged with causing the crash. A preliminary breath test at the scene showed Richardson had a blood-alcohol concentration more than twice the legal limit to drive, the charges say.
In a GoFundMe post Wednesday, Yang wrote about the couple’s struggles to become parents. “Melinda was so excited, she waited until I went on lunch break so we (could) look at the results together,” he said. “To our surprise, it .