‘I saw God’s face shine on him’: the family who chose to forgive
With uncommon faith and grace, Danny and Leila Abdallah have built something remarkable out of the unimaginable grief of losing three children in a car accident.
Lebanese food comes into the front lounge room, where we talk, at brisk intervals. Pastries, falafel, aromatic chicken. I’m not sure what meal we’re having. The time I spend with the Abdallahs starts just after lunch and finishes just before dinner.
I’ve known homes like this all my life. I grew up in western Sydney, a bit closer in to the city than where the Abdallahs live near Westmead. Many childhood friends (many adult friends) were Lebanese.
Danny and Leila’s home is a big house, square and proud. Danny built it and it’s a house in his image. He and Leila initially seem friendly, busy, wholesomely distracted. But there’s a difference.
You often find religious symbols in Lebanese Christian homes. But the crucifix in their home and the statue of Mary are bigger, more prominent. Perhaps they have more work to do.
The Abdallahs are not soft people. Danny was a kickboxer, then a builder. He looks it, bearded, tough, muscular. Leila is smaller, petite, long dark hair, but a ball of fire and energy.
Somewhere in this busy home there’s an absence, which is also a presence, the presence of the missing three children Danny and Leila lost in one terrible incident.
Millions of people know something of this story. On February 1, 2020, several children went out to get ice cream, just down the road from home. A young man, Sam, influenced by drugs and alcohol, took a corner way too fast and ploughed into them. Three of Danny and Leila’s kids – Antony, Angelina and Sienna – were killed, along with their cousin, Veronique.
Can any parent come back from this? Shortly before his death, Bill Hayden told me of losing his daughter, Michaela, when she was just five. Bill told me he was deranged with grief at the time, and in some sense never recovered.
My own parents lost my little sister, Mary, when she was just a few days old. Yet she was with us always after that, little Mary. She was on my father’s lips, 45 years later, when he died. It seems a reflection of God’s own love. A parent never gives up on a child, even in death.
In an act of vast, rippling consequence, reported across the world, Danny and Leila publicly forgave Sam. Says Leila: “I don’t think of forgiveness. It came to me in the moment of despair. The Holy Spirit gave it to me.”
Somehow in the hours of swirling family activity, cacophonous conversation and benign domestic chaos I share with the Abdallahs, I have a period of quiet, intense conversation with Leila. She recalls for me fragments. It started like a normal day, Leila supervising six kids, arranging birthday parties, first communions: “Leading up to that day, I was having a lot of nightmares, that bad things were happening to my kids. I said to Danny, ‘I’m scared.’ God was preparing my soul for something that was going to happen. But you never in your life think your kids will die.
“I was living three or four minutes from where the accident happened. Thinking I’ll go and pick up my kids. Danny rang and said get to Oaklands Golf Club. I got there and I saw Danny’s car and I saw my kids lying on the ground. When Danny got there I was hovering around the kids, I saw someone next to me and I said: pray with me.
“I was praying by myself. People were screaming. I had this weird calmness. I was focused on praying. I had a strong faith and I believe in miracles. I believed God will never do this, it will be all right. I think to myself, if I go to the hospital, I’ll make them better.”
Later in our conversation, Leila adds: “Danny said to me, ‘Leila, your kids are dead.’ Then I see three priests coming. And Danny. I said Antony, Angelina, Sienna. I started screaming. I said, ‘Danny, tell me it’s not true.’ The priest said: ‘Through the power of Jesus Christ, we’ll get through it.’ I was in that shocked state, I was in denial.”
Later again: “We went back the next day to the hospital. We had hundreds of people at the hospital. Danny said to someone to take me home for a rest.”
Leila ended up at the site of the accident: “I was saying: forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. When the media approached me they were all crying, they’re human beings too. They asked me to just say whatever I want to say. I said at the end of the day I forgive him, but I want the court to be fair. I was preaching the Bible.”
At that stage, Leila recalls: “My problem wasn’t with the driver. It was with Jesus. We live in a dark world. Forgiveness is God’s teaching to the world. I didn’t eat for three days. I was fainting. It took me a long time. I had dreams of Jesus and Mary. I had a lot of dreams. God always affirms that he’s with me.”
‘The day Leila forgave this fellow was not a wow factor for me. I know Leila, I know her faith. I said to Leila we have to hear God’
And later: “I am sad and I am in pain, but I’m at peace. My kids are in a better place. I’m no longer scared of death. In some ways I’m looking forward to it. I’ll go to be with my kids and with Jesus. No one knows the hour. It’s important to make peace with it. The day of the incident, my son was praying the rosary. My son is in a safe place. Antony had a dream of Jesus. He said he wants to be a saint.
“Faith is about seeing Jesus in everyone around you. When you help someone in need, you’re helping Jesus.”
Astonishingly, Leila and Danny have built something positive out of their tragedy. They’ve created the i4Give Foundation to promote the central Christian message of forgiveness. It’s a message they’ve taken to many thousands.
Leila: “I’m a shy person who can’t really speak English very well. My dad said to me: ‘When I heard you forgiving, that word will change the world.’ I never told my kids to forgive. My kids decided to forgive the driver themselves. My daughter saw the driver in court and said she felt sorry for him. Forgiveness is for the forgiver more than for the forgiven. A woman came up to me and told me that because of my forgiveness, she could forgive the man who raped her daughter.”
It seems to me that Leila lives in God’s hand. As so many early Christians did. This doesn’t make grace and goodness easy, it doesn’t make continuing with life easy. It makes them possible.
Leila is intense in speaking of these things, different from her normal tone around the house. I find I have wept with Leila, all pretence of detachment and objectivity have fled me.
At a different point in the afternoon, I have a long talk with Danny. I’d met the couple a few weeks before. Perhaps it’s not too much to say we’ve become friends. Danny is a straightforward guy, in word, thought and deed.
After the tragedy, Danny’s life nearly spiralled out of control.
He decided he wanted to see Sam in person, in prison. He has never before told the story of that first prison encounter with Sam.
Danny: “I’m a very confrontational person. No one outside Leila, my parents and my children have impacted me like he has. I want to tell him who my kids were. The day Leila forgave this fellow was not a wow factor for me. I know Leila, I know her faith. I said to Leila we have to hear God.”
Leila wanted to accompany Danny, but he felt he should go alone: “I’m going to prison. I have to carry myself.”
Leila now feels love for the driver; she prays for him. Danny went to Restorative Justice and asked them to arrange the prison visit. Their advice was to wait until all the appeals were finalised. Sam had his sentence reduced and this upset Leila. The appeal was the only court hearing they attended.
Danny now sees the judicial process in a long perspective: “Justice for me is to have my kids back. If he got 100 years or one day, that’s nothing to me. That justice is really for the broader community.”
The Abdallahs’ forgiveness helped Sam in prison. In some strange way, the other prisoners accepted the family’s decision
Danny’s meeting with Sam was finally arranged for Father’s Day, 2023. It took place in the prison chapel.
Danny: “I requested that my parish priest and one dear friend come with me. I started second-guessing my decision. Maybe the Tempter (the devil) was there. In Cessnock prison there is a sense of eeriness. It’s not a place of warmth.”
In prison, Sam had converted to become a Maronite Christian: “I asked his chaplain, is he genuine? I told my parish priest and my friend that I wanted to go in and see him alone. I go in to greet him. He falls straight to the floor and starts crying: ‘I’m sorry I killed your kids.’ ”
Over and over, Sam repeats, while weeping: “I’m sorry I killed your kids. I’m sorry I killed your kids.” Danny wanted to hug Sam, but he just couldn’t. Instead, he gave Sam his hand, pulled him up from the floor: “I said to him, ‘Sam, God gives everyone the perfect cross. Your cross is perfect, my cross is perfect. It’s up to us to embrace it.’ I said to him, why would you become a Maronite? He said: ‘I want what you have.’ He had seen the effect of our power of forgiveness. I said to him, can we pray together? He said to me he prays every day for me, for Leila, for each of the kids. We spoke, we ate, then we left.”
Danny’s business that day wasn’t finished: “I was driving home. It was very heavy with me on my heart. But God is with us in our darkest moments. Sam has 14 years (of his sentence) left. His parents are in their 70s. We’ve met them and acknowledged their pain. I rang his mum and said to her, I’ve just met your son. And I told her he’s a good boy. She said: ‘I know he is, I just wish the world could see him that way.’ ”
Danny later reflects: “No mother can un-love her son.”
And: “I told my parish priest I saw God’s face shine on him (Sam) this morning. How can I say that about the man who took my children? But God makes every man in his image. I saw God in this man.”
There is joy and energy in the Abdallah household, but nothing of Danny and Leila’s life has been easy since the children’s death. Even their marriage, the rock-solid basis of their family and life, seemed vulnerable.
Danny struggled, really struggled: “We were on the brink of separation many times. Grief magnifies everything. Many couples who lose a single child this way will separate. Leila said to me: ‘You look like Antony, you act like Angelina, you remind me of Sienna – how can I leave you?’ Losing three kids means there’s three birthdays every year to remember. Even this year, it flared up again.
“We’ve had a miscarriage. We’ve had a robbery at our house.”
They almost lost their business, which Danny has worked at hard their entire married life: “I was advised by my accounting team, by everyone, to fold up, your business is going down, you can’t salvage this.”
If he had done that, they would have lost the business but probably saved their house. Saving the business was much riskier: “I’m grieving. I haven’t worked properly for 2½ years. I need to pay all these people. I told Leila we’ll have to sell all our assets, remortgage the house, start again, there’s an 80 per cent chance it won’t work.”
But Leila had faith in Danny, who says: “The biggest decision you make in life is who you marry. They make you men or they make you mice. Leila said just do it, do everything to save the business, pay these people who deserve to be paid. She says if she has to she can go back to a two-bedroom unit in Blacktown.
“I learnt a lot about suffering, I learnt a lot about my faith, I learnt about just showing up every day.”
They saved the business. And they had two more children. Danny: “Having more kids was the best thing we did. They fill up the house, they give us purpose. You’ve got to keep going. Otherwise you lose everything. Your past has to be the size of the rear-view mirror. Your future should be as big as the front windscreen.
“Always remember, always honour, always love, but move forward. You grow so close to God in suffering.”
Living for their kids is part of Danny and Leila’s story. Living for someone else. A purpose outside themselves. Love redeems the recipient; love redeems the person who gives it. Just like forgiveness.
They speak regularly to Sam over the phone. Sometimes they pray together.
The Abdallahs have grown in religious faith through everything they’ve been through. Leila, born and raised in northern Lebanon, has been intensely religious, with a strong streak of mysticism, all her life. As a child she considered becoming a nun to honour God, but she had such a strong feeling for children.
The two first met at a family function in Lebanon. Says Leila: “I did think he was handsome. I didn’t think he even noticed me. The next day Danny came to my house. His first question to me was: ‘Do you pray?’ I told him I pray all the time … Danny was my first kiss. I wanted to keep myself for my husband. When Danny asked me if I pray, that was a sign to me.”
Danny’s journey to personal friendship with God was more helter skelter. A rough kid growing up in a rough part of Sydney’s western suburbs, in his own estimation lucky not to have found real trouble, Danny drifted away from belief, then tentatively circled back. When he met Leila he fully returned to faith.
Danny and Leila worship God not only in their sorrow but in their whole lives. They live the central feature of Christianity – the power and necessity of forgiveness. Christians believe that every human being is in need of God’s forgiveness, and is called to offer forgiveness, to forgive and to be forgiven.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul talks of the “God of endurance and encouragement”. Endurance and encouragement. I’m sure Danny and Leila, like everyone else, are not perfect. But there’s no distinction between what they believe and how they live. Their traffic with God is constant. Through unimaginable pain, they’ve never lost faith in God. And he’s never lost faith in them.
This is an edited extract from Greg Sheridan’s How Christians Can Succeed Today: Reclaiming the Genius of the Early Church (Allen & Unwin).
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Danny and Leila Abdallah’s home flows and bubbles, erupts and subsides, whizzes around, then comes to rest, but is only ever still for a moment. Grandparents come and go. Children come and go. So do friends. Phones ring. There’s a rugby league game with the Bulldogs – the team Danny and I fanatically support – on the TV in the next room. Danny sometimes sneaks out for an update.