Grieving Twin Cities husband shares gender reveal video days after wife, unborn child die in crash

The Twin Cities couple sat in their vehicle in anticipation, just the two of them, ready to capture on video their own little gender reveal party.

Christopher Yang silently read the message on his phone and hammed it up with a high-pitched gasp.

“Show me!” insisted his wife, Melinda Thao. Yang turned phone in her direction.

“It’s a girl!” she said as she grabbed the phone to read it for herself. “Oh, my god. Funny crazy!”

On Sunday, just five weeks after that moment of joy, Thao and the future daughter they named Leona were killed in a collision at a Coon Rapids intersection. Yang suffered noncritical injuries.

On the same day that Yang posted the video to YouTube, Makayla April Sua Richardson, 20, of Mounds View, was charged in Anoka County District Court with one count each of criminal vehicular homicide and drunken driving, and two counts of criminal vehicular operation in connection with the collision Sunday at NW. Coon Rapids Boulevard and Springbrook Drive.

Richardson was jailed, appeared in court Tuesday and was released on bond Wednesday. She is due back in court on Sept. 12.

In an online fundraising campaign to help him with expenses related to the death of his wife and their unborn child, Yang detailed the difficulties they had trying to be parents for the first time and recorded their boy-or-girl news.

“Melinda was so excited, she waited until I went on lunch break so we can look at the results together,” Yang wrote. “To our surprise, it was a GIRL!”

The due date? Yang noted that it was tentatively set for Jan. 19, Thao’s birthday.

“It pains me to be reminded that we bought baby clothes that morning [of the crash], and now I don’t have Melinda or Leona,” Yang noted.

According to the charges and a related court document:

Yang, driving an SUV, was turning left with a green arrow from eastbound Coon Rapids Boulevard to northbound Springbrook Drive when he was struck by Richardson as she went through a red light while heading west and pulling a trailer.

Thao, sitting in the SUV’s front seat, was taken by emergency responders to a nearby hospital. Thao, who was five months pregnant, and her fetus were declared dead. Yang suffered broken ribs.

Richardson told officers at the scene that she had one alcoholic drink that evening. She also acknowledged that she was speeding and lacked a valid license. During a later interview with police, she said she had two shots of alcohol and half an alcoholic seltzer.

The state Department of Public Safety said that Richardson was driving on an instruction permit that required her to have with her a licensed driver 18 years of age or older. The criminal complaint made no mention of Richardson having a passenger.

Officers saw an empty alcoholic beverage in her pickup. The officers gave Richardson a preliminary breath test, and it measured her blood alcohol content at 0.18%. Richardson turns 21, the legal age for drinking alcohol in Minnesota, in three weeks. Her degree of intoxication was more than twice the legal limit in Minnesota.