A small gathering was held at a Brantford cemetery on Tuesday to commemorate what would have been Baby Parker’s 21st birthday. The event was part of a local initiative to keep the boy’s memory alive. On July 28, 2005, the body of a full-term baby was found wrapped in a towel near Dufferin Avenue and Parkside Drive. When investigators could not identify his mother, they gave him the name Baby Parker. Shalyn Wilson is the organizer of Parker’s Project and Tuesday’s memorial service at Mount Hope Cemetery, where the baby was buried. “We all feel for Parker,” Wilson said. “Even if it’s just the three of us here, people are seeing there’s somebody out there that’s still remembering him.” Brantford resident Chelsea Davis was at the cemetery visiting a relative when she spotted Wilson’s event. She shared her memories from July 28, 2005. “We were down in the area of Wilkes Dam,” Davis recalled. “The police were in the area. It was quite a busy scene at the time, and they had a tarp over something. We came to learn that it was a baby found there, and it’s just been heartbreaking.” An autopsy found trauma to the child’s ribs and skull, but how he died or why he was abandoned remained a mystery. “It’s very heartbreaking that his mother felt there was no other resources that she could learn on,” said Davis. The annual gathering aims to raise awareness about support services in the community. “I think there’s women, like me, who feels ‘it could have been me’,” Wilson said, reflecting on being a young mother herself. “We were young moms and if we didn’t find the support that we needed, it could have been us.” This year’s event is also the first one since charges were laid for Baby Parker’s death. In February, more than 20 years after the infant’s body was found, Brantford Police charged a 39-year-old woman with indignity to a body and concealing the body of a child. The case returns to court on Aug. 6. “We don’t know the circumstances around why this baby was left there and what went on with the mother,” Davis said. “There’s all different scenarios. It’s such a shock to learn all these years later that there was somebody arrested.” Theresa Vidal, another Brantford resident at the gathering, said whatever the outcome of the court case is, she hopes people approach it with kindness. “We need to show grace to that situation and what those years may have looked like afterwards, the impact that it had on her at that time, and the years following.”
