A tough-seeming Wearside teenager, Disa O'Brien helped Diane Butcher to survive when she lived rough on the streets. She too had run away. When Diane went home, a bedraggled Disa was still out there, begging and selling sex. Unknown to Diane, she became pregnant during 1990.
Disa was living rough in London just before the birth of her child when she accidentally bumped into Diane and Mark. Then at Christmas, she went into labour alone in a derelict building in Walford and left her new-born baby girl in a cardboard box on the Butchers' doorstep.
Diane and Mark searched for Disa and brought her back, under protest, to live in Mo's empty house in the hope she would become attached to the child that she first called Billie, then Jasmine.
Dot Cotton, a magnet for lame ducks, looked after the infant when Disa wouldn't or couldn't. Unwittingly she let a stranger called Ken into the house. She did not guess Disa's secret: that Ken, the father of Jasmine, was also Disa's stepfather and his abuse had driven her on to the streets in the first place.
Eventually, in a bid to get Disa back within his power, he kidnapped the baby. With the help of the police Dot trapped him, he was arrested and thankfully the baby was unharmed.
Meanwhile, Disa had confided in Kathy, through the Samaritans, and was helped to find the courage to tell her mother that Ken had forced both her and her younger sister to have sex with him and that he was the father of her child. After her mother had accepted the truth and confronted Ken, Disa took her daughter back up North, ready to start a new chapter in her chequered life.
See also
- Disa O'Brien - List of appearances