In 2015, Brampton, Ontario’s Jennifer Neville-Lake’s nightmare became a horrifying reality when all three of her children were killed by a drunk driver.
Four years later, as a new school year started, she shared a heartbreaking photo on Facebook both to try to keep their memories alive and to remind others not to drink and drive.
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Jennifer and her husband, Ed, had sent the kids off with their grandparents, about 45 minutes away.
But when they weren’t back on time, she started to get annoyed, and then worried.
She wasn’t able to locate them on her own.
“When five o’clock hit I was like, ‘This is really late for them,'” she told ABC News .
“I tried calling their phones and they didn’t answer me. I flipped on the news and I saw the crash and I said, ‘That’s my van.'”
Jennifer sent her license plate number to police, who then told her to come see them.
By the time she and Ed got to the station, their eldest son, Daniel, and Jennifer’s father, Gary Neville, were dead.
Their other son, Harry, and their daughter, Milly, were airlifted to hospital, but died shortly thereafter.
“I remember saying to the doctor, ‘All of my children? All of my children are gone? This can’t be true.’ Our lives are pretty much over because our whole family has been taken.”
Only Jennifer’s mother, Neriza, and the children’s great-grandmother, Josefina Frias, survived the crash.
The driver, Marco Muzzo, 29 years old at the time, was found to have a blood alcohol level almost three times the legal limit for the province, according to CBC News .
Muzzo pleaded guilty to four counts of impaired driving causing death and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in March 2016.
But even when justice is served, that can’t bring the people we’ve lost back.
And so, four years later, as the kids would have been due in school, Jennifer shared a heartbreaking photo of their lunchboxes next to their grave.
“Grade 8. Grade 4. Grade 2. Or rather, should be!” she wrote. “These were the lunch bags for their 2015 school year.”
She said that Daniel and Harry had helped their young sister design hers for “practice” for when she would join them at school.
“Daniel’s is the camo one with his favorite number of 10,000 and Harry chose the name of his guinea pig for his, Fixer. Fixer died and was cremated on Sept 27 2018,” Jennifer explained.
Jennifer hopes that, by sharing this photo, it might make a difference before anyone else chooses to drink and drive.
“I share it to raise awareness of the consequences of impaired driving in the hopes that no one else has to hold all their children’s birth certificates in their hands for their 40th birthday like I did this year,” she told Fox 35 .
She wants people to keep her family in mind when they reach for the keys.
“Your choices become actions that have consequences. … I will never, ever get to watch, participate in and with, enjoy, celebrate, cry with, learn with, grow with, be with any of my children again because of another adult’s decision to drive drunk.”
