RIP Brian Daoust: One Of The Funniest Turtle Riders Ever And The Angela Shay Baby Drop King
Editor’s Note: We remembered Brian on the Live Show (1:26:00)
I received some sad news that a long time turtle rider named Brian Daoust passed away in his sleep before New Years. He leaves behind 3 recently grown children.
Brian was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and one of the biggest supporters of the blog.
He worked at Coopers Farm in Rochdale, where he taught his kids how to milk cows. I had to hand deliver Turtleboy gear to the farm because he couldn’t figure out how to pay for things online.
He was with the blog since the early days and has been sending me story ideas for years. The two that stand out most are:
- The Dasha Kelly story, which turned out to be one of the most consequential blogs I ever published.
He was the first person to alert me to that, and didn’t believe her story. Boy, was he right.
2. This hilarious video of a drunken woman named Felatio Fernandez who just got out of prison and was sexually harassing two National Grid employees in 2019.
Some turtle riders organized a get together at a house in Worcester in 2017 where I first met Brian. They made an Attorney Richard N. Vulva banner for the occasion.
Brian was a fierce defender of the blog and a master troll. He was such a frequent commenter that some ratchets thought he wrote blogs for me. In particular, our former Fitchburg nemesis Kevin Lynch was convinced that Brian was part owner of Turtleboy. He tried to play it off by giving people we blogged about bad legal advice.
What Brian was most known for to me were the infamous Angela Shay “baby drops.” He used to use a fake account called Angela Shay, featuring a large breasted woman he found somewhere online.
Angela existed mainly to do one thing – go in random Facebook groups, announce that she had a baby she was trying to get rid of, and watch as chaos ensued. I used to get messages asking me to blog about it all the time, but I never told the people who messaged that the joke was on them.
He sold it well. Too well.
I don’t know why, but the baby drop stuff just had me laughing for hours because he played it off so well. The problem was that after a while everyone around New England knew about Angela Shay so she had to find new Facebook groups around the country to do them in. He’d message me to tell me that he was doing a drop in Greensboro, NC, Fort Wayne, IN, or Grand Rapids, MI. His teenage kids thought it was hilarious too.
The point of the baby drops was to get people in a tizzy, which it always did. But he had a heart, and eventually he stopped doing it once some women in Grand Rapids started privately messaging him offering shady deals to take the baby. One of them couldn’t conceive, and after that Angela Shay retired from the baby dropping industry.
The last thing Brian ever would’ve wanted was to get blogged about on Turtleboy. But from my interactions with him I think he’d be happy to be remembered this way. He made the world a brighter and funnier place for everyone who got to know him, and he was very easy to get along with. We’re all going to die one day, so I think it’s important to focus on things they did during their life that brought you joy. He will be missed by many, including myself.
