Family on Florida Disney trip loses stuffed elephant with boy’s ashes. Where’s Bruce?
Somewhere — perhaps at Walt Disney World or a parasailing marina visit in Cocoa Beach or in a Kissimmee hotel or at Disney Springs — an Iowa family’s toy elephant disappeared.
But this wasn’t just any stuffed animal with pink cheeks, red ears and a red heart. This one, named Bruce, contained the ashes of their little boy Gabryel. He died a year earlier just before his eighth birthday after enduring dozens of surgical procedures since his birth in 2014.
Gabryel was born with a chromosome 9 abnormality, CBS News reported.
“Our son, Gabryel passed away before we could make it to Disney,” his mother Liz Atkinson wrote on Facebook. “For his birthday this year we took our surviving son, Sebastyan, on the trip. Gabryel was given this elephant in the NICU and it was at every surgery/procedure (over 50) and hospitalization (too many to count) with him. He slept with it every night and since his passing my husband and I have had it in our bed with us.”
The Facebook post
The boy’s mother posted that plea for the stuffed animal’s return with a detail-heavy post on Facebook on Saturday that has been shared more than 11,000 times since.
She told Fox-35 in Orlando on Monday the family had booked a 12-day trip to Florida in April to visit Disney as a way to celebrate Gabryel’s life and symbolize the family vacation he would have gone on had he survived his neurological struggles.
“When we’re missing Gabryel, we can physically hold him because he was always with Gabryel, so it’s helped us a lot in the grieving process having him, and it just felt right bringing him on vacation because he’s never missed a trip ever,” Atkinson told the station.
Where did Bruce the elephant go?
The family went to Cocoa Beach and stayed at Beachside Hotel & Suites April 22-24. After they left Beachside, Sebastyan clutched Bruce on the boat during an outing presented by Cocoa Beach Parasailing on April 24. The trio also stopped for a couple of hours at the Disney Springs shopping areal on the 24th, stayed for a day at The Palazzo in Kissimmee. On April 25, they checked in for five days at Disney’s Art of Animation resort.
Since posting, the family heard from the marina where they had gone parasailing, Atkinson posted, and that cameras showed Sebastyan carrying the stuffed elephant back to the couple’s car and didn’t show Bruce in the parking lot when the car pulled away, CBS News reported.
“The trip was a bit hectic with [three] different cities and hotels and grief brain kicked in at some point with all of the emotions, making me really struggle with simple memory tasks,” Atkinson wrote on Facebook.
When the family returned home on May 1, “Bruce wasn’t anywhere to be found,” she wrote.
The family has since contacted every place they visited and have asked people who may have information to contact them on the public Facebook post.
So far, no Bruce.
“I feel sick, struggling to sleep. I’m desperate. If you’ve found Bruce or saw him around any of these locations, please PM me!!! I need him back,” she posted on Facebook.
Since the posting, about 900 comments swelled the thread with most offering sympathy and some helpful tips (one person created a Tik-Tok video with images of Gabryel and the elephant. Some people, perhaps well-meaning, missed the memo and directed the couple to places where they could buy a similar replacement elephant. Another offered the family a stuffed elephant from their collection that looked just like the baby blue and red one once clutched by the Atkinsons’ boy. The one that carried his ashes.
“There’s just a big piece of our family missing, and it’s silly. It’s just a stuffed animal, but it was Gabryel’s, and it just means a lot to us and I just want it back in my arms,” Atkinson told Fox 35.
Gabryel’s illness
A chromosome 9 disorder, or Mosaic trisomy 9, is an extremely rare chromosomal abnormality where some of the body’s cells have three copies of chromosome 9 (trisomy), while other cells have the usual two copies of this chromosome, according to National Institutes of Health.
Signs and symptoms vary but may include mild to severe intellectual disability, developmental delay, growth problems , congenital heart defects, and/or abnormalities of the craniofacial region. Most cases are not inherited, the NIH notes, and can be a random event during the formation of the reproductive cells or as the fertilized egg divides.
According to the National Organization for Rare Disorders there have been about 30 cases reported in medical literature and has affected males slightly more than females.
The month Gabryel was born, his mom posted on Facebook the couple’s reasoning for selecting an elephant to represent their boy.
“When Ande Atkinson and I found out I was pregnant, we were trying to decide what animal we would decorate the room with ... we discussed for a long time and for some reason were just drawn towards elephants,” she wrote on April 3, 2014. “This may seem really stupid to a lot of you but it was kind of a big deal to us. Now with Gabryel’s room nearly finished with elephants everywhere I realized how perfect this animal fits. Elephants represent strength.”
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