My kids ‘paid for your drinks with the price of their blood’
Mom’s powerful message at sentencing hearing for drunk driver who killed four members of her family:
They were the sentences that had a packed courtroom sobbing and underscored the depths of a family’s grief over the loss of their loved ones to a drunk driver.
“I don’t have anyone left to call me Mom. Not one left. You killed all my babies.”
Jennifer Neville-Lake confronted the killer of her three children and her father for the first time Tuesday, giving an emotional victim impact statement at the sentencing hearing of Marco Muzzo.
The 29-year-old pleaded guilty this month to four counts of impaired driving causing death and two counts of impaired driving causing bodily harm that left Jennifer’s 65-year-old father, Gary Neville, and her three children, Daniel, 9, Harrison, 5, and Milly, 2, dead. Neville-Lake’s mother and grandmother were seriously injured in the crash.
Muzzo had nearly three times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood at the time of the collision last September in Vaughan, court heard. He had trouble keeping his balance and had urinated in his pants by the time police arrived on scene.
Neville-Lake was the final person Tuesday to read her statement in court before Newmarket Superior Court Justice Michelle Fuerst, who will decide on Muzzo’s punishment.
“What hope is there when your entire world is gone?” she told reporters afterward. “If I could figure out a way to crawl into my children’s coffin, I would do so. That would be fine for me. Because it’s all I want.”
Muzzo, who sat in the prisoner’s box with his back to the spectators, sometimes hung his head as statements were read Tuesday morning. He had been released on $1-million bail after his plea Feb. 4 but surrendered back into custody before the hearing Tuesday. Court heard that he is being kept in segregation in jail.
Marco Muzzo, who pleaded guilty this month to four counts of impaired driving causing death, is expected to make a statement today in court
Muzzo’s mother, Dawn, seated behind him, was visibly emotional when Neville-Lake took the stand to express her loss.
“I had to (come and speak),” Neville-Lake told reporters. “I’m their mother. They have no more voice because of a drunk driver, so I’m their voice. This is my chance to advocate for them.”
Edward Lake spoke in his statement of seeing his two youngest children, Harry and Milly, hooked up to machines at the Hospital for Sick Children, being kept on life support long enough for their parents to say goodbye.
He’s been unable to work since the crash and has been having suicidal thoughts, he said. There will be no more playing dress up with the kids, watching TV with them and taking them to school.
“I will miss their laughs, their giggles and arguments amongst each other,” he said.
Neville-Lake’s mother, Neriza Neville, who had been driving the family minivan that day, said in her statement that she lost the love of her life and no longer has anyone with whom to grow old.
“It would have been easier if Gary had died of a disease because then I would have been able to say goodbye,” she said in her statement, read by Crown attorney Kellie Hutchinson.
Other family members, including Neville-Lake’s brother Jonathan and sister Josephine, spoke of the eerie quiet that now permeates their lives since the children’s deaths. They told the court of how Neville-Lake was a “supermom,” who is a shell of her former self.
As one relative put it to Muzzo: “You destroyed the purpose of our happiness. Regrets? Too late.”
There were also statements, read by the Crown, from a Catholic school board trustee, touching on how active the boys were in school and parish activities, and from Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey, who spoke of a community in mourning that rallied around the family.
Neville-Lake’s statement was by far the longest and the most emotional. She spoke of rushing to Sick Kids hospital to see Harry and Milly, who were effectively brain dead, and of not knowing initially where Daniel and her father’s bodies had been taken. She related how Edward had tried to jump out of the car on the way to the hospital.
“I remember crying out ‘All of them? All of my babies are gone? Not one left?’ ” Neville-Lake said, crying on the stand.
The parents asked hospital staff to move their children’s beds next to each other so they could die together.
She finished her statement by saying she would not wish the horror she’s living on anyone, “anyone but you.”
“You deserve to know exactly what it feels like to have every single child you created meet someone like you,” she told Muzzo. “One day if you have kids and are blessed enough to have a child with special needs (referring to Harrison), you might be able to understand what you took from me.”
Then she read out the names of every person Muzzo killed that day in September.
“Those are the names of the ones who paid for your drinks with the price of their blood.”
The sentencing hearing continues Wednesday with submissions from the Crown and defence. Muzzo is also expected to make a statement in court.