On February 20, 2009, Stuart Richardson slammed into the back of a family's vehicle and turned their lives upside-down. Richardson, a repeat drunk driver, had three times the legal blood alcohol level in his system at the time of the crash.
A two-year-old boy named Abdallah was left in vegetative state with damage to 80 percent of his brain. Richardson was imprisoned at the Tarrant County Jail in Texas.
Five years later, while Abdallah was still fighting for his life, his mother Loubna arrived at Tarrant County Jail to confront Richardson in person, and she bravely let a camera crew come along. Richardson said he wanted the boy's family to know he thought of Abdallah every day. He said he even kept a newspaper clipping about the accident in his cell to remind him of what he had done.
But as you're about to see, Loubna was not ready to accept Richardson's apology. In the gut-wrenching CNN video below, the devastated and anguished mother holds a photo of Abdallah against the protective glass that separates her from Richardson. The photo was taken before the day of the crash and showed her son's smiling face. But she quickly replaced the photo with a more recent one — this time, showing Richardson a bandaged and braindead boy. It's hard to watch, but it's powerful and important.
In January 2015, Abdallah passed away at Cook Children’s Medical Center. He was eight years old. As reported by CBS, his passing gave Loubna the closure she needed. “He gave me six years to deal with it day, by day, day, by day,” Loubna told reporters. "He’s not going to haunt me anymore. I also want to tell him that I forgive him because my son is in heaven.”
