New baby brings joy to a grieving Snohomish family

When Tessa Phelps was little, she would sneak into her big brother’s room. They’d talk late into the night. He taught her how to catch fish. He taught her to ride a bike.

The neighborhood kids were mostly boys. Big brother Perry Phelps made sure Tessa could tag along.

“I was a tomboy,” she said Friday. “We were really close.”

On March 28, 2007, the Snohomish teen lost the brother she had loved all her life. Tessa was home asleep that night. Sheriff’s deputies darkened the family’s door to bring the worst news.

Perry Duane Phelps, 21, was killed when his Yamaha motorcycle crashed into a pickup truck. He’d been out riding with another motorcyclist when his bike collided with the truck near the intersection of 171st Avenue SE and S. Spada Road northeast of Snohomish. Neither the truck driver nor the other cyclist were injured.

Her brother died two months before Tessa’s graduation from Snohomish High School. Today, 19-year-old Tessa Phelps is a mother.

Born April 15, Perry Richard Phelps slept blissfully in his young mother’s arms Friday. In the Snohomish home where she lives with her parents, Nanette and Richard Phelps, and her 21-year-old fiance, Anthony Clark, Tessa spoke frankly about her deliberate choice to have a child.

“After I graduated, I wanted to bring some happiness to this house,” she said. By last summer, she was pregnant — and absolutely certain she would have a son. His name would be Perry.

A grandmother at 47, Nanette Phelps said Tessa began talking about motherhood right after Perry died. Clark was already part of the household. The teen’s parents insisted she graduate, and she did. All the while, her intention to become a mother was serious.

“This wasn’t an accident, it was her doing. She is so headstrong,” Nanette Phelps said. Her daughter, she said, wants to raise her son in the family home because of her brother’s death. “She doesn’t ever want to leave now. That could change,” Nanette Phelps said.

If nothing else, the family is a living example of how deeply a sibling can be affected by the death of a sister or brother.

After Tessa’s 20th week of pregnancy, her fiance, her whole family and Perry Phelps’ girlfriend, Brittany Dallas, were with her at Monroe’s Valley General Hospital when an ultrasound exam revealed her baby’s gender.

“We were all so happy,” Nanette Phelps said.

Little Perry isn’t quite a month old, but already they see family resemblance. “He has our ears, and his second toe is longer than his big toe,” Tessa said.

“My son was really strong and broad-shouldered. The baby is strong, he weighed almost 9 pounds at birth,” the grandmother said. “He’s really special. He seems very kind, like he’s known us. It’s almost like he was sent to us.”

One human being can never replace another. The mother and daughter Friday remembered all that was unique about the young man they lost.

“He was 6-foot and real good-looking. He had so many girlfriends,” Nanette Phelps said. Many of her son’s friends now have tattoos in his memory, including one young woman whose back is covered with a winged motorcycle, she said.

Her son starting riding motorbikes at age 5. When he died, he’d only had the Yamaha R1 for six months. He loved driving a Toyota four-by-four truck at Reiter Pit, an off-road vehicle area near Gold Bar. A Snoho­mish High School graduate, he worked at Pacific Cable Construction in Everett.

“He was just interested in everything and everybody,” Tessa said.

“And he had ‘Mama’s Boy’ tattooed on his arm. He said he was proud of it,” Nanette Phelps said.

So sweet, so new, the baby snoozing with his head on his mother’s shoulder Friday knows nothing of his Uncle Perry. He will.

His mother hopes he’ll learn to fish, and to play baseball like her brother did.

And if the baby had been a girl?

“I was going to name her Faith,” Tessa Phelps said.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.