She would sit in the rotunda, where they wed in 2006 in front of 81 people, and talk about life, their children Hudson and Grace.

It was a place where she felt at peace and in touch with her husband. And while there on that day in May, she would hope he would give some sort of sign, or answer that he was still around and looking out for them.

Sonya’s husband, detective senior constable Damian Leeding was shot in the face on May 29, 2011 while responding to a botched robbery at the Pacific Pines Tavern. He would die three days later, aged 35.

The slaying stopped a state. Thousands attended his funeral where he was remembered as a romantic, a Broncos fan, a dogged police officer and carpenter and – most importantly – a caring father.

Gunman Phillip Graeme Abell and co-accused Donna Lee McAvoy were convicted of Damian’s murder and remain behind bars, while the getaway driver, Benjamin Ernest Power, is a free man after pleading guilty to manslaughter.

In an extensive interview 10 years on from the tragedy, Sonya Leeding, a police officer herself, talks about her darkest days, her decision to turn off Damian’s life support, coming face to face with the getaway driver at a supermarket, why she never walked away from the force, her “saving grace” children, the killers, and why she refuses to be called a victim.

HER HUSBAND’S KILLERS

DETECTIVE senior constable Damian Leeding and his partner Nicole Jackson were first to respond to reports of an active armed robbery in the dark of night at the Pacific Pines Tavern on May 29, 2011.

Abell, no stranger to armed robberies, was carrying a loaded sawn-off shotgun.

He had threatened hotel patrons and employees while McAvoy tied their hands behind their backs and put money into a bag.

Power, McAvoy’s partner, was the getaway driver.

Damian confronted Abell and was shot in the face at point-blank range. The Coomera detective died three days later in Gold Coast Hospital.

“Back then, when they (crooks) were doing the armed stick-ups a lot of these offenders were carrying firearms that weren’t loaded,” Sonya says 10 years on.

“I guess we could sit here and go, ‘oh was he being complacent?’ Maybe, I don’t know. He never put himself in danger and he certainly knew his abilities. I just think he would have gone ‘we’ve got a whole heap of hostages here, I need to get in and sort this out. We’ve been chasing guys like this for ages’.

“They were just up the road, him and Jacko (Nicole Jackson), and ‘we’re going in’. I really don’t think he would have thought about being brave or anything. He would have just gone ‘well, let’s go get these guys’.”

‘A CITY UNDER SIEGE’: WHAT COAST WAS LIKE IN LEAD-UP TO DAMIAN LEEDING’S DEATH

Sonya was told of Abell’s past violent crimes and says it plays on her mind “a little bit”.

“Perhaps had he been locked away for a bit longer this wouldn’t have happened, but you can’t change it.

“There’s certain things I sit there and I go, ‘is this a ‘me’ problem or a ‘them’ problem?”

If it was a ‘them’ problem, she says there was nothing she could “physically do about it. And that’s his (Abell’s) history. Unfortunately for us, he was out, he was armed and he’s obviously got the propensity for it. So it happened”.

TURNING OFF THE LIFE SUPPORT

SONYA turned to her father, a paramedic, during a meeting with doctors in the days immediately after Damian’s shooting and asked: “What are they saying? Does this mean there’s hope or not.”

His reply was distinct: “No love.”

“Well can they stop sugar coating it?” she asked. “I need to get my head around this, if he’s going to die. Or if there’s hope then I also need to prepare for that and what our life is going to look like.”

Amid the “mixed messages” and emotions of sadness and anger, an exhausted Sonya was prescribed Valium in the emergency department downstairs to help her sleep.

“I slept for a little bit, then woke up with a start,” she says now.

Two words came out of her mouth: “He’s gone.”

“I felt like he had come to me and said ‘It’s OK, you can make that decision now. I’m gone. I never actually was here. I died straight away’.”

LEEDING KILLER’S COLD-BLOODED PAST

She rushed back to his bedside. The family held talks with Donate Life and there was serious discussion around switching off the machines so as not to interfere with the criminal investigation.

She returned home on June 1 with an entourage of police: “We walked in. My room was next to the front of the house. I went in there, went under the covers, and just went to sleep because I hadn’t slept for days.

“I went, ‘I’m done. I’m hiding, I don’t want to be near anyone’.”

DARK DAYS AND THE BOTTLE

THE mother-of-two admits that in her darkest days she found peace at the bottom of up to three bottles of wine a day.

At one point she says she could have been classified as an alcoholic and on occasions the kids would make jokes about “mummy being drunk” or “mummy’s having a wine again”.

“I suppose that’s what you could have called me, at a point. I certainly wasn’t having it for breakfast, I just needed it at the end of the day to cope.”

It became a “part of escaping from the reality that was our life at the time.

“At some points it was three bottles of wine a night, and other times it was one, depending on how I felt. I’d get up and go to work and do it all again the next day.

“When you’re operating like that you don’t know any different – you feel like crap all the time. I was still training and going to the gym, but obviously it was not effective at all. It was just burning all the booze from the night before.”

Sonya says she has had the drinking under control for two years, enabling her to have one or two glasses on occasion without it being a “crutch”.

“The answer is not at the bottom of the bottle. It might make you more fun for a little while, but the hangover is not worth it.”

I’M NOT A VICTIM

BAR MANAGER’S SHOCK WHEN SHOTS RANG OUT

THE community support and enormous outpouring of grief over Damian’s death made Sonya feel a sense of “responsibility”.

“If someone gave me an easy option out, I would go ‘No, no, no. I’m doing this the same way everyone else does. I don’t want any special treatment’.

“I just didn’t ever want to be perceived as a victim. I wanted to show people that we’re OK; this really horrible thing happened to us, but there’s still life to be lived.

“As much as it still hurts, and as much as we miss him all the time, and there’s plenty of times where I’m just like, ‘I just want to run something by him because he was always my sounding board and my voice of reason’.

“Everyone’s story is different. Ours as much as it’s tragic, I want it to be a happy story. I want people to see us and go, ‘Oh, wow. OK, you can still do these things, even though you’ve gone through this loss’.”

REASON TO LIVE

SONYA Leeding hates the word closure in homicide cases.

“We’re still without Damian,” she says. “We still can’t undo that day back on May 29, 2011.”

Instead, she sees life now as a series of steps in a long journey to finding peace.

Step one: The initial shock of police coming to your door. Officers showing up on your door only meant one thing, she says.

“Even that night I remember getting up out of bed and shining my mag torch at the window pane and going ‘I’m not opening that (door), they’re not coming in here. I know what they are here for’.”

Step two: Leaving the bubble of the hospital and realising the father of your children isn’t coming home.

Step three: Getting used to him not being there. No more phone calls, no more sharing anecdotes about the kids.

‘THERE IS NO CLOSURE’: DAMIAN LEEDING’S MOTHER ON LOSS OF HER SON

She says the concept of death is sickening. One minute the person you love is here; the next they are not.

And then there are the constant reminders of his death – the court trial, the first anniversary, the naming of a park and a police boat.

“Every time we have to do something it brings it all back again to the surface. It’s moving forward, not moving on. The loss is still ever present and it doesn’t ever change, but it’s being able to cope with that.

“We live with my folks now so that I can work the hours that I want and the kids are helped out here, there and everywhere.

“In the beginning my mum lived with us for the first few months. She was my second set of hands. After a while you’ve got to look at the positives, and that we’re still here, the kids are still here, they still needed a mum or someone to help them with things and grow up as best they could.

“They’ve been my saving grace and my reason to get out of bed every morning for the most part.”

DAMIAN’S GREAT LEGACY, HIS CHILDREN

GRACE was four months old and Hudson a toddler when their father was killed.

It doesn’t happen often, but in a moment of sadness, Grace, who never truly knew her dad, breaks down and cries.

“She just says ‘I just want a cuddle with daddy’ and what can you do? You can’t do anything because he’s not here. We obviously cuddle her and comfort her and remind her that he’s here and that he’ll always be with her.”

Sonya says she and her family have never shied away from telling them what happened.

Her children have always been her priority: “To make sure that they’re looked after, their needs are met, and even though they’re missing out on their dad, that they haven’t missed out on anything else.”

After Damian died Sonya made photo books for their children depicting the story of their lives. It included the robbery and shooting.

She framed it with a happy ending, that their father died a hero.

“I didn’t want to hide anything from them. I didn’t want it to be a secret, particularly given the public nature of it.”

Sonya says she would read the book to a young Grace before bed. Sometimes, when she would check in on Hudson, the book would be sitting out from underneath his bed.

She says Damian would be extremely proud of his children.

“Grace is a little firecracker like he was. She’s quite funny and is constantly laughing at just about everything, especially when my father makes jokes.

“My dad’s ended up being Hudson’s role model, which is great. So Hudson loves camping and Jimmy Barnes and if he could drink beer he probably would too, but he’s not allowed.

“From day one, I didn’t want anyone to give them special treatment, or (allow them to use losing) their dad as an excuse to misbehave or carry on like a pork chop at school and not do the right thing. I’ve always tried to teach them kindness, and humility.”

FACE TO FACE WITH THE GETAWAY DRIVER

SONYA had only ever seen Benjamin Power in newspaper clippings and court sketches. A guilty plea to manslaughter meant she never saw him at trial, where his two co-accused fought a murder charge and lost.

That changed at a Nerang supermarket in July 2019 as she and son Hudson, now 11, contemplated dinner.

“I’ve walked in and seen a man with tattoos,” she remembers. “I looked at him again, and gone ‘oh, he’s got a distinctive nose’.”

Her instinct was confirmed moments later when she looked down and saw an electronic monitoring device.

“This was all in the space of a few seconds and I started to feel sick. I looked at his face again, and he’s just done the bolt. He had, I assume, his granddaughter in a trolley and he just took off.”

Hudson tried to shake her from her shock by ushering her to hurry up so they could get the groceries and go home.

Clearly shaken, she remembers telling him “I don’t know what I need,” to which he replied: “You got the list in your hand.”

“I was really shocked to come face to face with (Power),” she says today.

“I’m assuming he registered (who I was) as well, which is why he took off. That was a bit of a shock. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do about it, if anything.”

WATER POLICE VESSEL NAMED AFTER LATE DETECTIVE

Sonya never wanted to say anything to him even if she had the chance.

Being a police officer she knew why he would have been released on the Gold Coast, as it was where his support network resided.

She notified the Victims Register of the encounter. Power’s parole was varied to stop him from going to that area.

She never ran into him again.

When Power initially applied for parole she objected to him residing on the Gold Coast. He ended up living about three kilometres away.

Power has finalised his manslaughter sentence and is believed to be living in New South Wales.

WHY I NEVER LEFT THE POLICE SERVICE

SONYA returned to work in September 2011 at the conclusion of maternity leave, just three months after her husband’s death.

She knew it would be tough, but it’s where she needed to be.

The couple never spoke about the dangers of the job. If you live in fear it’s “probably a bit of stress that you don’t need to start with”, she says.

She spent about a month in an office job before returning to the beat at Runaway Bay.

“A lot of it was trying to find my place in the world and where I fit as Sonya as opposed to Damian’s widow.

“For the first few years, I was back on the road at Runaway Bay, and that took getting used to.

“Even going to firearms and having to re-qualify on my gun, and the bangs and loud noises and different things like that, I was quite heartened by those things.

“I still had to go through the hoops like everybody else and be qualified to the same level. I didn’t get free passes. Being back on the road was good. It was where I needed to be because I was back serving the community, which is what I’ve always wanted to do.”

There were times, however, when she thought about leaving the force, especially when recognised in public.

“Oh, you’re that man’s wife,” some would ask. “You know that coppa that got shot … we’re sorry for your loss.”

“That’s how they would refer to him,” Sonya says. “I would always say ‘thank you’. I’m thinking ‘I’m here to do my job, what were we doing again?’”

She got bored of general duty police work and considered a change.

She began a psychology degree and was contemplating to stay in the job or study full-time.

That decision was made after a relieving shift in the Child Protection Investigation Unit. It had been her passion since the age of 15 and she knew that’s where she needed to be.

Sonya believes her own trauma has helped with her job in dealing with vulnerable victims.

“I still think I could have done this even if Damian was alive, but maybe I would have had a different perspective. I really feel like I’ve found my feet in this job. It’s the place for me, I love dealing with our victims. They absolutely go through the most horrific things that no-one should ever have to go through and I just feel like I’m able to help give them that voice.”

jacob.miley1@news.com.au