from HORROR to HOPE

After suffering public and paralysing pain, three women tell Sarah Ayoub how they channelled their experience of trauma into a force for good

- Sarah Ayoub

THE FORGIVENESS ADVOCATE

Leila Abdallah lost three of her six children when they were killed by a drunk driver on February 1, 2020. In addition to working with the government on the Four Angels Law, she and her husband, Danny, recently launched i4Give Day.

Leila Abdallah remembers her sister asking if their children could walk together to get ice cream. It was a warm summer’s evening and Leila’s husband, Danny, replied he thought it would be fine – they were a group of seven children and the shop was only a five-minute walk from their home in Oatlands, in Sydney’s west.

Not long after, three of Leila and Danny’s children, Antony, 13, Angelina, 12, and Sienna, 8, as well as their niece Veronique Sakr, 11, were dead. They had been hit by Samuel William Davidson, 29, who was three times over the legal drinking limit and under the influence of cocaine and MDMA when his out-of-control ute mounted the kerb. “When I got to the scene and saw my kids, I was so shocked, I started praying the Our Father,” Leila recalls, her voice quiet. “It was horrific; I couldn’t believe it. I kept saying that God wouldn’t harm my kids, that nothing would happen to them. It was only when I heard my daughter Liana say she didn’t want to lose me like she had lost her siblings, I realised that it had actually happened and that I had to focus on her, her brothers and Danny.”