“We had to wait a long time in the hospital to see the body and I remember thinking: my daughter is dead, but where is the boy? What is happening to him? He needs me, he is live”.
Elizabeth Jimenez lost his daughter Mary in a car accident in March 2017.
The young man he is referring to is the person who was driving the car in which Maria was traveling. He was the guy she was dating.(This story was originally published in September 2021)
Nicholas Tay he was sent to prison in November of that year and was released almost two years later, at the end of 2019.
Both shared their extraordinary story with BBC Mundo: Jiménez, from her home in England, and Nick, as she calls him, from her home in Singapore.
Here are their stories:
Elizabeth
Maria was my dream come true, because we already had the boy. She was my darling girl, she pampered her a lot. We were very close, we were friends.
She was studying linguistics at the University of Brighton, and was fluent in Spanish, English, and Korean. She had made plans to go to South Korea to teach English and learn about that culture.
He also lived for a year Costa Rica. She was very proud of the Latin side of her.
A Nick she met him at the church where he served. She was one of the leaders of the youth group and was part of the choir. They were both 24 years old.
The day the accident occurred, Maria had gone to choir practice and then went out to eat with him.
They had just begun to like each other, that situation was very new. They didn’t even have a month.
She had had wine and asked him to drive her car and take her home.
But first they turned around.
Perhaps wanting to impress her, Nick began to drive very fast.
He was from Singapore and was studying at the University of Surrey. He didn’t have insurance, he didn’t know the streets here and, as he was going at a very high speed, there was a curve that he didn’t know how to take and that’s where the accident happened.
Nick
I started dating Maria in January 2017.
The first thing that brought us together was music. I told her about my passion and she encouraged me to join the church band.
It was something quite rare, very special. I came from Singapore and she from Latin America. What were the chances that we would get along?
The night of the accident we drank quite a bit. She asked me if she wanted to drive. The plan was to go to her house because in the morning we were going to get up early to go for a walk in the Surrey hills.
But for some reason I kept driving.
I was going so fast, maybe I reached 200 kilometers per hour. I saw the curve and slowed down but it wasn’t enough and I lost control of the car.
The air bags went off and the next thing I remember is hanging upside down, holding on by the seat belt.
I regained consciousness, but I was very disoriented. I was looking for Maria by my side and she wasn’t there.
I eventually managed to crawl out the passenger seat window. All the glass was shattered, everything was shattered.
When I looked up I saw a group of people surrounding someone who was on the ground.
I stood up, walked over there and realized it was Maria. I leaned down and kissed her forehead and said, “Don’t worry, everything will be fine.”
Elizabeth
Maria died at 1:13 in the morning and the police could not inform us until 6 in the morning.
At that time we were all temporarily living apart at friends’ houses, hoping to find a permanent place to move. That’s why we weren’t registered and it took them a while to find us.
Losing a son or a daughter is horrible, it’s the worst thing that can happen to you. Nothing prepares you for that, no hard experience from the past compares.
Do you know when you get a scare that you feel your soul drop to your feet? I was like this for more than a year. I couldn’t retain information, I had to write everything down, they had to explain things to me many times.
I felt as if an acid had run all over my body, something very strange.
Nick
When the emergency services and the police arrived at the accident site, they asked me questions and an alcohol test, which came back negative, that result seemed incredible to me.
One of the paramedics approached me and explained that they would take Maria away in a helicopter, that we couldn’t both go to the same hospital, because she was in a very serious condition and had to be transferred as soon as possible.
I insisted that they take me with her, but they refused.
When I found out he had died, feelings of grief, guilt, and shame washed over me. I couldn’t move, I was on the floor of the ambulance, in a fetal position.
They took me to a hospital. I remember him screaming desperately. I think they sedated me because I fell asleep, I don’t remember what happened. When I woke up I was in bed and a policeman told me:
“I am very sorry for your loss.” And I was arrested on suspicion of causing a death by reckless driving.
Elizabeth
When we got to the hospital to claim the body we had to wait a long time.
That’s when I started to think that my daughter was dead, but Nick was alive and surely needed support. His brother lived in England, but his parents were in Singapore.
I barely knew him. I only knew what Maria told me, but I think because of that, because she had shared with me how she was feeling with him, I never held any resentment towards her. My husband did, to the point of saying, from the anger he had: “I’ll kill this one.”
We had very opposite reactions, but I thought, “If it had been me, or my son, or my husband, if it had been us who made that mistake, because it was a mistake, it wasn’t that Nick deliberately killed her, How would I like the world to react?
For me that was vital, as if God had given me a strength that I didn’t even know I had, which allowed me to react like this with the boy.
I asked to see it.
I didn’t want him to be another victim, because I know of cases where the person who survives looks very bad inside.
I said: “Yes, this is very hard, but here life is not going to be miserable for anyone. In my house and around me, that is not allowed. The misfortune is over and that’s it, that’s where it stayed.”
We met two days after the accident at a meeting organized by the church leader.
It was in that meeting that my husband was relieved of all the anger he felt.
Nick
I spent a night in a police station. The next day a friend and the pastor of the church visited me and I was released on bail.
It was a Wednesday and on Thursday I went to see them.
I was very scared, but I knew I had to do it. He knew that he wasn’t going to be able to live if he didn’t. He didn’t want someone else to tell them what had happened because he wasn’t going to give them accurate information.
When I saw Fernando and Elizabeth, I hugged them and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” She repeated them over and over again.
I needed to be forgiven.
Elizabeth
When the police filed the charges against him, Nick had to leave the dorm, so we invited him to live with us. We shared a house for a month and a half.
It was as if we had known each other for many years. We cried together, we talked about Maria, about things he wanted to know, things I wanted to know. We began to heal each other.
With my husband he also established an important relationship. He helped him fix up the house he moved into with some friends. They had breakfast together, painted, had lunch, went to buy what was needed.
With the support of my son, we also faced the judicial process together.
I was with Nick in all the meetings with the police, with the lawyers, in the courts. I read any number of papers, laws, everything, to find a way to prevent him from going to prison.
I wrote letters, what didn’t I do? I found something in the law that said that if I, as a victim, asked for mercy, the judge could consider my request.
We let everyone know our position: my husband, my son and I had completely forgiven Nick, we had nothing against him, we wanted him to continue with his studies so that he could finish them and lead a normal life. He was not a criminal, he had made a mistake, yes, a very serious one, but that did not make him a criminal.
In searching for similar cases, I realized that there were other people who thought like me, that a prison sentence is not the solution for these types of problems.
If the person is depressed or is on drugs, and it was the first offense, therapy is more efficient, because they are put in a cell and what happens is that they become more depressed and that is very dangerous.
It was not easy.
It seemed unfair to me that, on top of suffering from the death of my daughter, I had to feel the anguish of seeing him in those agonies. Instead of helping me with my sadness, they were adding more to me. He pissed me off a lot, but hey, the law is the law.
When the sentence came out I cried a lot outside the court.
But I set another goal for myself: to keep Nick from becoming depressed in that prison, to keep him motivated as long as I could.
I sent him letters, books, we went to see him to make him laugh and remind him that he didn’t belong there. We talked to him about the future, about his dreams, about the beauty of life, about what awaited him when he left.
We did everything we could to make it okay, but for the first few months when we got back in the car we would cry.
Nick
With Elizabeth and Fernando I learned what unconditional love is.
It’s one thing to forgive someone, you go your way and wish them well. But loving someone is very different and more in our case.
Elizabeth would go to the hearings with me and tell me that she was very sure that she would not go to prison, but when the verdict came out, it was as if she had broken into little pieces.
Still, he did not stop supporting me.
I remember that in my last week in prison, Elizabeth and Fernando visited me three times.
The farewell was very close, everyone knew it, he was going to be deported.
After serving my sentence, I was taken from the prison to the airport, where I was made to board a plane that took me to Singapore.
But contact with them continued.
I even traveled to Costa Rica with Fernando, and it was wonderful. I love that country, the people, the landscapes, the food, especially the pork rinds.
I am waiting for the covid-19 to pass so that they come to see me in Singapore. They already have the tickets.
Elizabeth is the same, she is constantly motivating me. I don’t know how she does it, but she knows when I’m stuck in my own mind, in my own darkness.
Elizabeth
We not only developed a relationship with Nick, but also with his parents. When they came to see their children, we always put them up. The four of us were there and we went with them to walk around London and Paris.
We also visited my daughter’s grave, they put flowers on it, they took us to eat. We have a very nice relationship, we love them very much.
And with Nick I talk every day.
I never felt like I had to forgive him, but I did tell him because he needed to hear it. Forgiveness is only one door, that of reconciliation.
The nicest thing Nick has ever said to me is Mommy. That relationship for me is a gift, every time he says that word to me it is very significant.
I always have my daughter’s face with me, in everything I do.
I can’t deny that the pain is still very strong, but I give myself a time limit to feel it, because if I don’t start to feel the world is going to end.
I say, for example, that for 10 minutes I am going to let that pain go away, I cry for her and then I start to remember the nice things about her.
I thank God for allowing me to be the mother of a daughter, I dry my tears and move on.
*Editing: Carolina Robino.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-58641197, IMPORTING DATE: 2021-09-24 21:40:06
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