Crystal Donnelly never really believed that spirits of lost loved ones can linger around, but her mother swears that babies can see ghosts.
Now, two years after the death of her second son, Tyree Murrell, she’s not so sure.
Tyree was just 5 months old to the day when he passed on Sept. 12, 2022, a victim of what the hospital said was shaken baby syndrome. And Tyree’s older brother, who is now only 3 and a half, says he’s still playing with him.
Tyree was a happy baby—born into a loving family in Frankford. He was always smiling, and he never really cried unless he was hungry, Crystal said.
“My oldest, Major, was only a year old when I had him, so I was overparanoid he was going to be jealous because he was so young,” Crystal said. “But they were really good together.”
Major is still too young to understand, and the family told him Tyree was off riding motorcycles with their grandfather, who loved to ride before he died in June. That didn’t stop Tyree from being a presence in Major’s life.
One day, he was laughing and playing around and kept looking at the seat next to him. He said he was playing with his brother in the car, Crystal said.
“I asked him once, ‘What did you do today?’” she said. “He says, ‘I went to school, and played with my brother in the car.’ And I said, ‘Tell your brother I said, ‘Hey, I love him and I miss him.’”
Then the little blue balls started showing up all around the house.
Major had a ball pit that he used to play with but stopped a couple years ago. Crystal and her mother would find a blue ball in the kitchen, put it back in the toy bin, find it again in the bathroom, put it back, later in a bedroom, and put it back.
There’s no explanation, other than that after Tyree died, blue came to be the little boy’s color. The family released blue and white balloons in Tyree’s honor during a ceremony in his grandmother’s back yard in Bensalem in November 2022. They picked that color because wearing a blue ribbon is a way people can demonstrate they are taking a stand against child abuse and encouraging others to do the same.
Tyree was a precocious little thing, Crystal said. Even at four months he was doing lots of baby talk, and he even was already walking round in one of those little walkers.
Memories like these keep Crystal going, but she has good days and bad days, and she wears a necklace with Tyree’s ashes and photo. Her sister has the same necklace.
She since has had a daughter, and now she worries about the day when she’ll finally have to tell Tyree’s siblings how he died.
“I gotta find something,” she said. “I don’t know what to say at this point.”
