Surprise Baby Shower Celebrates Hero

Neighbors decorated Stephanie Allis’s lawn with tissue paper and balloons — not to mourn the life she tried to save, but to celebrate the one she will soon bring into the world.

At around 3 p.m. Sunday, Allis stood with her boyfriend in their yard on Newhall Street. A few balloons were floating in the breeze, tied to the fence. A table decorated with tissue paper stood on the sidewalk a few paces from the bank of memorial candles arranged to spell the nickname ​“Kay.”

Allis has gotten used to people gathering in front of her house. They stop by every day to mourn the friend, or brother, or son who lost his life there in July.

On July 18, Kaymar Tanner was shot while driving on Newbury Street in southern Hamden and crashed his car into the fence across the street from Allis’s house. Allis, a nursing student who works at Yale New Haven Hospital and is currently pregnant, ran across the street, jumped the fence, and tried to save Tanner’s life. She administered CPR and tried to stop the bleeding, but the wound proved fatal, and he died in her arms before the paramedics arrived.

Two days later, Allis went in for a doctor’s appointment. She is expecting a baby in January. That Monday, she found out her baby would be a boy.

Valerie Tanner, Kaymar’s adoptive mother, lives right around the corner from Allis. Every day since her son died on that street corner, she has stopped by the candles to clean them up and make sure there’s no trash around them.

But on Sunday, she came for a different reason. This time, she brought friends, balloons, and bags and bags of gifts.

Tanner said she wanted to thank Allis, so she decided to hold a surprise baby shower for her. For weeks, she has been calling Allis’s boyfriend Ben to plan. She told him to tell Allis that they were planning an event for Kaymar.

“I just wanted to give her love,” she said.

At around 3 p.m., Tanner and friends and family lined up in cars on Morse Street. One car had helium balloons floating out the sun roof. At about 3:15, the cars turned on their hazard lights and drove to the corner, where they turned left onto Newhall Street. They drove slowly down the block, blasting their horns as they went.

Allis stood with her boyfriend in the yard and burst into tears.

“I hate surprises. And I have an ugly cry face,” she said later, laughing with Tanner as they recalled her reaction.

The cars circled the block. When they drove by again, each one stopped so that a friend could unload a gift and carry it to the table on the sidewalk that was quickly filling up with all manner of presents. Underneath was a large stack of diaper boxes. In the bags on the table were games for Allis’s kids, gift cards, gifts for Allis and her boyfriend, and even a few for the dogs.

“Stephanie is our hero, our she-ro,” Shirley Lawrence (pictured above), a community activist and cousin of Tanner, said into a small red megaphone. ​“God bless you.”

Once the cars rolled by and parked, the friends and family that Tanner had invited got out and gathered around Allis.

Tanner had asked the town if she could leave the memorial candles on the other side of the street, she said into Lawrence’s small red megaphone. The town said no. The candles would have to be moved if they were there. So, she asked Allis if she could leave them in front of her house. Allis said yes.

When Tropical Storm Isaias hit, Tanner said, Allis called her to say that the candles were getting knocked over and damaged so she had taken them all inside. When Lawrence came by the next morning to bring them all back out, Allis and her family had already done so.

“I’ve never met a person like her,” Tanner said to the small crowd. ​“Since that day that my son died, Stephanie has been in my heart. We talk on a regular basis.”

Allis and Tanner said they now talk every few days, and have since July.

State Rep. Robyn Porter took the megaphone and shook it as Lawrence instructed her to so it would work. ​“You went above and beyond what your call of duty was that day,” she said. ​“I just want to personally thank you for allowing God to use you in that way. That he didn’t have to be alone, and that he was in your arms. And through God, that love was felt. I believe that.”

“It’s Natural”

Allis stood next to one of her sons, sometimes smiling, sometimes blushing. ​“I’m a really shy person,” she said. ​“Usually the only time I’m outside of my shy zone is at work when I’m helping people.”

Allis grew up in Fair Haven in the foster care system. Tanner, who works at the Department of Children and Families (DCF), works with Allis’s DCF workers, they later found out.

She also had another connection with Kaymar Tanner. Tanner’s best friend, Jericho Scott, was also killed by a bullet in a car five years and three months to the day before Tanner. Allis said she grew up with Scott. She said she knew him since he was ​“this high,” holding her palm at her hip.

Allis said her foster brother was killed when he was 21. Tanner was 22. She said she probably mourns as much for Tanner as for her brother, she said, and when she thinks of Tanner, she always thinks of her brother.

After she tried to save Tanner’s life, Allis said she decided to switch back to working in the emergency room. She had been working in a child psychiatry ward. ​“All I know is I just want to be in emergency service,” she said. ​“Everyone’s like ​‘you’re crazy, you went to the emergency department pregnant?’ I’m like, ​‘it’s natural.’”

Trying to save Tanner’s life also strengthened her resolve to finish nursing school and get her degree, she said.

“I felt like such a failure that he passed away,” she said. ​“But his family is like ​‘don’t feel like that.’”

When she said that to Tanner and her friends a few minutes later, her comment was met with a chorus of ​“no.”

“We don’t celebrate failures,” said Lawrence, ​“so you just got to…” she snapped her fingers. ​“Snap out of that.”

After the speeches, Tanner went up to Allis and hugged her, and Allis buried her face in Tanner’s chest. They stood like that, arms wrapped around each other, for almost a minute. When they let go of each other, Allis wiped a trickle of tears from her cheek.

Still Hard

Tanner said she or Lawrence come to tidy up the candles outside of Allis’s house every day.

“I just feel that I’m responsible for it as a mother,” she said. She said she feels the candles are mostly for his friends.

She sometimes sits on the steps of the business incubator across the street and watches the bank of candles that spell her son’s name. People — mostly Kaymar’s friends — ride by and stop. They walk over and tap one of the basketballs and stand for a moment.

“They find peace and comfort,” she said.

She found one of his friends sitting on the sidewalk next to the candles at 7 a.m. once, she said. Sometimes her other son, Kaymar’s brother, will take his dinner and go eat it by the candles. She said about 60 to 70 people stop by every day. They’ve gotten to know Allis and her kids and dogs. They know the kids’ names now and stop to talk with them over the fence, and they pet the dogs if they’re in the yard.

Tanner was smiling for much of Sunday’s baby shower. She was busy making the event a success. But once she got home that night, she said, then she might shed tears.

“It’s hard. It’s still unbelievable. I still can’t believe my son is gone,” she said. It was so sudden, she said, and it appears the bullet was not even meant for him, but for someone else who drove a similar-looking car.

Tanner said the problems that led to her son’s death run deep in the neighborhood. And the shootings have continued. Saturday night, as Tanner and Lawrence were sitting at Lawrence’s home, they heard gunshots. Tanner went out to see what had happened. There had been a shooting just a few blocks away. 

She is still mourning, but said she is beginning to think about creating something to memorialize her son. She said she is considering some sort of scholarship that would help kids who are struggling and ​“let them know that there is hope.”