Family of grandmother Rosemary Franzidis forgive person allegedly responsible for her tragic death
The family of Moreton Bay grandmother Rosemary Franzidis who was killed on her way home from church have opened up about how bright, exuberant and full of joy she was.
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This is a story about love. And the perfect pasta sauce. Knotty cloves of garlic. Doughy pizza bases. Syrupy layers of baklava. Plump spanakopita.
But mostly, love.
This is the story of Rosemary Franzidis, who was front-page news because of the way she died – but the people who love her want to tell another story.
They want to tell of how the beloved 69-year-old wife, mother and grandmother lived.
Rosemary was killed on her way home from church on November 7, 2024, when an Audi, allegedly driven by a 16-year-old boy from Caboolture, struck her hatchback on
Dohles Rocks Rd, Murrumba Downs, north of Brisbane.
Three people are facing several charges surrounding the high-impact collision: the 16-year-old boy, a 21-year-old man from Annerley, and a 35-year-old woman from Caboolture.
In the days after the accident, it was alleged that the three accused had earlier stolen a Holden Barina from Northgate, and driven it through several suburbs, before allegedly stealing the Audi under duress from Dohles Rocks Rd at Griffin.
The alleged crime spree only ended when the Audi ploughed into Rosemary’s car as she made her way home, leaving behind her husband of almost 50 years, Jean-Paul, 73, her three daughters, Evie, 44, Alexia, 42, and Katina, 41, and grandchildren Freya, seven, Benjamin, three, and Rosalind, one.
But on the walls of the Murrumba Downs home she once shared with her family, Rosemary has also left behind hundreds of her paintings – artworks that reflect, her family
say, who Rosemary was. Bright. Exuberant. Full of joy.
In the kitchen, stacked at the bottom of the freezer, are her homemade pizza bases, and in a cupboard, her well-thumbed recipes for spanakopita, baklava – all her family’s favourites, because Rosemary’s way of showing that she loved you was to feed you.
They all still make her recipes – Jean-Paul says that when the house they shared is filled with the scents of garlic, onion and oregano, “it makes me feel like she is still here with me”.
This house is indeed filled with memories of Rosemary, including the one memory that changed her family’s life forever, and the one that they are each trying to make sense of.
“I live in the United States,” Alexia, a tourism professor at the University of North Carolina, says, “and I was home for a visit.”
“Katina and her husband, Andrew, and two kids who live on the Gold Coast had just gone on holiday to Dubai, so the rest of us were going to go stay in their house before I headed back to the States.
“I was home alone, packing, and Dad was teaching at U3A (The University of the Third Age, a voluntary, global organisation with a diverse curriculum, which promotes learning after retirement) and Mum was on her way home from church.
“I do remember thinking that she was a little late, and I thought she must have stopped at the shops on the way.”
When the front doorbell rang, Alexia thought it might be a delivery, but when she opened it, two police officers were standing there, one of them holding an iPad in his hands.
“I could see it had a photo of Mum’s driver’s licence on it, and one of the police said: ‘Does Rosemary live here?’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s my mum’, and I thought he was going to say, ‘Oh she’s been driving too fast’ or something – I don’t know what I was thinking – but instead he said there’s been an accident, and Mum was in critical care.”
Like her sisters, Alexia becomes emotional when recalling that morning: “I still can’t form proper sentences when I try to talk about it,” she says.
The police officers offered to drive a very distressed Alexia to the U3A campus where her father was teaching.
“Dad was having morning tea, and I said ‘Daddy, Daddy we have to go, Mum has been in an accident’, and Dad was getting his things and saying to his colleagues ‘my wife, my wife’ … and then one of the police took a call, and asked us if there was a place we could talk quietly and we went into this little back room.”
There, they were told that Rosemary, beloved mother, wife, grandmother, painter, cook and friend to many, had not survived the high-impact collision.
“He (the police officer) was very kind. He said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you Rosemary didn’t make it’, and I just broke down in tears, and then Dad said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t believe you, she just left for church this morning’.’’
Such is the shock of a sudden death, such is the surreality that surrounds it – as Evie Franzidis also found.
Alexia had called Evie before she had left for the U3A, and Evie had left the gym where she had been working out to immediately head to her parents’ Murrumba Downs house – via Dohles Rocks Rd.
“The road had been blocked off, so I parked the car and started walking. I saw a paramedic in a car and I said, ‘I think my mum is up there’, and he drove me up to the site,” Evie recalls.
“I saw my sister’s car (which Rosemary had been driving) and the other car, and I said, ‘What’s happened?’ They said, ‘There’s been an accident’. Another paramedic asked me what my mum’s name was, and I said Rosemary and she said, ‘I’m really sorry, but your mum has passed’.”
It was a terrible moment, forever distilled in time for Evie – but there was one, small comfort to be found within it.
“The paramedic,” she says “let me know that my mother was never alone for one moment.
“She told me that Mum had never regained consciousness after she was hit, but someone had stayed with her the whole time.”
That his wife of nearly five decades was not alone in the wreckage is something Jean-Paul, a retired professor in the field of engineering at the University of Queensland, also takes great comfort in.
And he finds it in the knowledge that the woman he first met in 1974 in Cape Town, South Africa, more than 50 years ago, had a deep and abiding faith. He fell for Rosemary, he says, in church.
“I was at the university in Cape Town, and we used to joke that girls came to uni to find a husband – well Rosemary found hers in her first week,’’ he chuckles.
“She was a very regular mass goer, so she found the Catholic Students Society, and knocked on the door.”
Behind it, stood Jean-Paul.
“I actually had seen her as I was driving there earlier that day. I drove down the hill towards it, and Rosemary was crossing the bridge ahead of me.”
Does he remember what she was wearing? “Blue denim skirt, red top,” he answers without hesitation.
Married in 1975, the couple led an adventurous life, living on the Greek island of Rhodes for a year where they, Jean-Paul smiles, “picked a lot of olives and drank a lot of wine”, before they moved to the United Kingdom.
“I got a scholarship to study engineering there and we had our three girls in 1981, 82, and 83.” It was, he notes wryly, “quite a busy time”.
And a happy one, knee-deep in nappies and babies, the couple shared the child rearing duties, Jean-Paul, then a PhD student, helping out “whenever I could”.
In 1983, the family moved back to Cape Town where Jean-Paul lectured at university and Rosemary – once her three girls were in daycare and school – got herself a job in … the family laughs … a very Rosemary way.
“She wanted to contribute to the household finances, so she had started doing a bit of cooking and catering,” Jean-Paul recalls.
“One night we went to a Greek restaurant. Rosemary said to the host Paddy, who was Irish, by the way, ‘There’s no baklava on the menu. Where is the baklava? I make the best baklava in Cape Town’.” Jean-Paul smiles. “She’d never made it in her entire life.”
Rosemary’s daughters break into laughter as their father continues.
“Paddy ordered some of her ‘famous’ baklava, so she was in a bit of a flap, but when we got home, she found her copy of Mrs Stubbs’ Home Book of Greek Cookery, and away she went.”
Well loved and well thumbed, it remains in the Franzidis’s kitchen – as do all of Rosemary’s handwritten recipes. Each of her daughters has a favourite. Evie’s is Rosemary’s cannelloni, Alexia’s is her mum’s spanakopita, and Katina’s is her mother’s “perfect pasta sauce”.
“I make it all the time now, the kids love it,” she says.
Each of Rosemary’s daughters also had their own, very close relationship with their mother.
For Katina, a proposal bid writer for an engineering company on the Gold Coast, it was a bond strengthened when she had her own children.
“She was a super granny,” Katina says. “When I was on maternity leave, I would visit Mum every Thursday. I could talk to her about anything. I’m only really just realising how much I needed her, how much I really did talk to her.
“She would send me home with home-cooked meals for my family – she was my best friend.”
For Alexia, her mother was her rock always, but particularly during a cancer diagnosis in 2023.
“I’ve lived overseas for 15 years, but we spoke all the time. During my cancer, and also during a not great relationship, she spoke to me every single day. The thing I think about Mum is that she was just always on your side. If she loved you, all she wanted to do was take care of you.”
For Evie, a freelance arts editor, Rosemary was her “saviour” when she had her daughter Freya.
“Mum and I were always close, but we hit our stride in a different way when Freya was born. I was an older mum at 37, and I worked from home, by myself, and I had no idea what I was doing. But my mum pitched up every single day of her first year of life.
“My then-husband did help, but he had to work, so I was home alone during the day and she would arrive and say ‘How can I help? Go have a shower, go have a sleep.’ No judgment ever, just love.”
While her daughters also have their own thoughts about the young man who was allegedly behind the wheel of the car that killed their mother, Jean-Paul says he is ready to forgive whoever was responsible for his wife’s death.
While this may seem extraordinary to many, Jean-Paul says he is following his late wife’s lead.
“If somebody did something she didn’t like, she’d try to figure out why, if there was something wrong in their own lives that was behind it.”
While the maternal grandmother of the Caboolture youth allegedly driving the Audi has publicly said he came from a “loving home”, his solicitor has said that he has never met his father, and his mother was “not bothered” about his current situation.
“This young fellow, well Lord only knows how many times he was let down by so many people and organisations,” Jean-Paul wonders aloud.
“I mean, from the age of 12, he never went to school. Where is his support? Where is his community? I had an uncle in Greece who was a priest, and he said to me once that in the villages everyone knows everyone and you don’t do anything wrong because it would shame your family. There are eyes on you.
“Who had eyes on this young man? If someone goes off the rails, well, it can be caused by a whole litany of things. You can start off life on the wrong foot before you’ve even had a chance to get going.
“I do a lot of voluntary work at St Vinnies, and I see the results of chaotic childhoods all the time, I see single mums, struggling dads, I’m not saying I know if this is the case with this young man, I’m just saying that Rosemary would have tried to have understood him.” Would she have forgiven the person responsible for her death? Jean-Paul thinks about the girl in a denim skirt and a red top. He thinks about the young woman who cheekily lied about being able to make the best baklava in town. He thinks about the white-haired grandma with the twinkle in her eye.
“Absolutely,” he nods, “absolutely, she would have.”
When Rosemary Franzidis loved something, she loved it with gusto.
When she took up painting just a year or so ago, for example, she managed to produce 300 canvases in seven months.
In April this year, her family is holding an exhibition of some of those paintings, in a show titled The Joyous Art of Rosemary Franzidis. It will be held on what would have been her 70th birthday.
When Rosemary discovered her love of cooking, she took that up with gusto too. She cooked for family, friends and fundraisers, and for two years she and
Jean-Paul ran a pizza stall at their local Lawnton markets.
There are just a few of Rosemary’s pizza bases left, nestled in the freezer of her Murrumba Downs home, and the family intend to serve them on Easter’s Holy Thursday, April 17.
Alexia says it will be their own last supper. They will sit down at the kitchen table to feast, to toast Rosemary Franzidis with glasses of retsina, and talk about the way she lived, not the way she died.
Because this is a story about love. And the perfect pasta sauce. Knotty cloves of garlic. Doughy pizza bases. Syrupy layers of baklava. Plump spanakopita.
But mostly, love.
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