Thieves steal Kansas family’s last photos of child who died in sleep

When Ashley Pfeifer got home from work one day last week, she unlocked the front door and started to walk into in her Topeka home.

Then she stopped.

She could see through the kitchen that the back door was open, the door frame busted.

When the police arrived, she and her husband, Mic, took stock of what was gone. The Xbox. Their 50-inch, flat-screen TV, carried up from the basement. Ashley’s video camera, stashed in a kitchen cupboard.

And her Canon Rebel T3i camera.

No, not the camera!

Inside it, still stored on the SD card, were the last photos the Pfeifers took with their 5-year-old daughter, Faith, who died in her sleep on Jan. 21.

The end came suddenly for Faith, who was born two days after Christmas 2010 at St. Luke’s in Kansas City with a severe form of the birth defect spina bifida.

Faith hadn’t slept well those last few weeks so Mic had started checking on her every night. His daughter was something of a night owl. The family joked that she was having “parties in the middle of the night” because she would just sit awake in the dark.

When Mic checked her that last night at 1:30 a.m., “she was not OK,” said Ashley.

Faith had died.

Even so, Ashley performed CPR. She couldn’t have forgiven herself if she hadn’t.

A few hours later, when Ashley called to tell her best friend, her friend offered to take photos of the family with Faith.

“You might look at them every day or not ever want to look at them, but either way you’ll have them,” the friend said.

So she came to the house and took nearly two dozen photos with Ashley’s camera. Faith with her brother and sister — Mason, 9, and Elizabeth, 7. Faith with her parents. Faith with her mommy. Faith snuggled with the whole family on her toddler bed.

Ashley had only looked at them twice since that night, the last time just a week before the burglary. “I thought: ‘I’m just so glad that I have these. I’m so thankful ... that she took these.’ Then, the robbers came.”

As with most moms, the first time Ashley saw her baby was in a sonogram. Because hers was a high-risk pregnancy, Ashley had sonograms every month. In the image taken at about 24 weeks, Faith “was giving me a thumbs-up,” said Ashley. “Like, ‘We’re gonna do this, mom. We got this.’”

She knew her baby had spina bifida. The baby might be stillborn, doctors warned. To make the big day more joyful they waited to find out if they were having a boy or girl. They debated names but didn’t pick one.

“We mourned the entire pregnancy,” said Ashley.

When the baby arrived by C-section, Mic exclaimed, “It’s a girl!”

Because faith had carried them to that day, they named her Faith.

Spina bifida caused her to be born with a hole in her back, so Faith was rushed to Children’s Mercy Hospital, where, within days of coming into the world, she had surgery on her tiny back and brain.

She spent the first four months of life — and countless weekly visits throughout the rest of it — at Children’s Mercy. “We called that our second home,” said Ashley.

Faith was born determined, proving doctors wrong at every stage of her life.

She’ll never crawl, doctors said.

She crawled.

She’ll never walk.

She learned how to with a walker.

She’ll never talk.

She could say “mama” despite the tracheotomy tube in her throat.

And she learned more than a thousand words using American Sign Language. All with a smile on her chubby little face.

“Always happy, always a smile,” said her mama.

On Feb. 21, one month after Faith died, Ashley grieved with her Facebook family.

“I miss her more than anyone!!! She really was the best, happiest little thing ever. Thinking about her every moment of everyday. Death is a very strange thing.”

On Saturday she wrote about the burglary on her Facebook page.

The thieves — Ashley calls them “idiots” — left behind a crowbar that might reveal fingerprints. Topeka police told the Pfeifers it could take as long as six months to work their case, said Ashley.

In the meantime, she hopes someone who might unknowingly buy her camera off Craigslist, at a pawn shop, maybe a garage sale, will realize it’s hers and return the SD card. There are also photos on it of Faith at Christmas and her last birthday party.

“What I’m hoping is the idiots sell it and somebody with a great heart says, ‘Wait a minute, I think this is the girl I saw on Facebook,” she said.

And, P.S.

She doesn’t want the camera back.

This story was originally published March 30, 2016 at 8:56 PM with the headline "Thieves steal Kansas family’s last photos of child who died in sleep."