Now they may finally learn the identity of the young girl they have mourned for 22 years as Baby Hope.
“We have to know who that girl was because we don’t know,” said Andrea Arias, 65, a retired home health aide in Washington Heights who said she has remembered Baby Hope in her prayers year after year. “I am very curious.”
The case of Baby Hope shocked many New Yorkers in 1991 when the partially decomposed body of a young girl was found stuffed into a blue picnic cooler near the Henry Hudson Parkway just north of the Dyckman Street exit. But on the streets and playgrounds of Washington Heights, where the detectives of the 34th Precinct spent years investigating the case, it became personal.
The Church of St. Elizabeth, on Wadsworth Avenue, held a funeral Mass to remember Baby Hope in 1993. Hundreds of people turned out to mourn her, including Ms. Arias. On Tuesday, the day that the police said they had identified the girl, a senior center inside the church hummed with the news that there had been a break in the case after all these years. One woman excitedly told her friends in Spanish, “They found them.”
“Things like that, you don’t forget because it’s very hard,” said Iris Rodriguez, 78, a retired hairdresser and mother of three who has lived in Washington Heights since 1977. “After 9/11, I cried the whole month. After that little girl, a lot of mothers cried. It’s very sad, especially when you have children.”
Ms. Rodriguez added it was time for Baby Hope to get justice. “Whoever did that to this child, they have to pay for it,” she said.
Ms. Arias, who was collecting money for lunch at the senior center, said that after she heard about the girl in the cooler, she could not stop thinking about her. “At that time, you didn’t see things like that,” she said. “You think a lot of things. You think, who killed her? Why? So many questions.”
Ms. Arias said she became more vigilant about her own young son and daughter. She would not allow them to walk on the street alone, she said. For years afterward, whenever she would see friends who had moved away from the neighborhood, the case would come up again. “Always we say they never found them,” she said.
Outside the church, mothers pushed baby strollers and fathers tugged their toddlers along. The neighborhood, which was once plagued with street crime and drugs, has been transformed like much of northern Manhattan in recent years with many young families moving in for the relatively affordable apartments.
Although some of the newcomers know little of Baby Hope’s story, the case has been passed along as a cautionary tale to others who were not around in 1991.
Melissa Colon, 13, who grew up in Washington Heights, said that her parents and older brother have told her for years that something bad happened to Baby Hope and that she should be careful when walking by herself. “It shocked me because there’s usually nothing going on around here,” she said.
Around the block from St. Elizabeth, Milagros Hernandez, 67, a retired home attendant who was walking her dog, said that she relived the case all over again when she saw the police sketch of the girl in the news.
“It’s something that touched my heart,” she said. “That baby could now be at a university if someone hadn’t taken her life.”
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
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