Robert Hall took his daughter, Mabli Cariad Hall, for a walk outside Withybush Hospital in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in June 2023. His mother was gravely ill and dying inside the hospital, so he and Mabli took a break outside never knowing the 8-month-old would die days later.
“We were saying goodbye to my mam,” Hall told Wales Online. “Mabli held her hand in the hospital room and then we decided to go outside for a stroll.
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That decision changed the family’s life forever. While they were on their walk, Bridget Curtis, 70, lost control of her car outside the hospital and hit the father and daughter. Hall instantly panicked.
“All of a sudden I heard this horrible revving and screeching. The next thing I see is this white car, airborne. That was it,” he recalled. “I was hit and thrown into a parking bay. I was on my hands and knees and the first thing I saw was the pram underneath the car. There was chaos; people running everywhere.
“Three nurses came over and picked me up because I couldn’t walk or stand. That didn’t matter. What mattered is where Mabli was,” he added. “Nobody could see Mabli. The next thing I remember is somebody walking past me holding Mabli’s lifeless body. I’ll never be able to explain what that felt like.”
Crews airlifted Mabli to University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. There wasn’t enough room on board, so the parents rode 100 miles in the back of a police car.
The parents did not see Mabli for several hours. “We kept asking if she was going to be OK but nobody could tell us. Then eventually at about 3am a doctor came in and sat down. He said that it was very unlikely that she was going to survive,” Hall told Wales Online. “As soon as I was told I just went sick everywhere. It was the most horrific thing you could ever hear in your life. At first we just couldn’t believe it, we didn’t want to believe it. It was brutal.”
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Tragically, Hall lost his mother and daughter within days of each other.
“I had nothing to do with my mum’s funeral, and I couldn’t be there when she died. All that was taken away from me,” he said. “The pain of that, the trauma of it all, is actually too much to process, to even begin to describe.”
A court sentenced Curtis to four years in jail after she admitted in September 2024 to causing Mabli’s death by dangerous driving.
“We are grateful to the judge for giving us justice. It is a bit of relief, it’s a relief that the court side of things is all over, and that Bridget Curtis is losing a little bit of her life. But nothing actually changes for us,” Hall told Wales Online. “We are still in hell. We are in survival mode every single day. You can’t see what the future is. We are all lost without Mabli but we’re supporting our other children and getting them through it all.”
