Parents of Peter Zhu, dead West Point cadet, can keep his sperm to continue family name in accordance with Chinese tradition
- Peter Zhu was declared brain-dead days after a skiing accident and his family raced against time to get a rare procedure performed to ‘preserve his legacy’
- He was the only child in his family
Peter Zhu’s parents said their son always wanted to be a father.
The 21-year-old from Concord, California, dreamed of having five children, unswayed by his parents’ warnings that raising a large family would be expensive, Yongmin and Monica Zhu wrote in a court petition filed on Friday in Westchester County, New York. The vision they said Peter had for his future was living on a ranch with his family and caring for horses.
But the promising Chinese-American cadet, a senior at the United States Military Academy at West Point, fractured his spinal cord, depriving his brain of oxygen, while skiing on February 23. A few days later he was declared brain-dead.
“Peter’s death was a horrific, tragic and sudden nightmare that neither of us could have prepared for,” his parents wrote, seeking a court’s permission to obtain their son’s sperm. “We are desperate to have a small piece of Peter that might live on and continue to spread the joy and happiness that Peter brought to all of our lives.”
Just hours later, a judge directed Westchester Medical Centre in Valhalla, New York, where Peter was on life support, to retrieve the sperm and store it.