Thank you your honor for allowing us to speak. I ask the court to please bear with me as I try to find the words to describe the pain of the loss of our Abrielle. It is difficult to speak of her in the past tense, as in doing so I must face the fact that my little “mommy’s girl” is gone.

Marc and I have always joked that Abby would be the one to give us gray hair, but we never imagined it would be like this. The impact of losing our little girl is, of course, felt at all the big events in our lives, but also in the small things. Every happy moment in our lives is accompanied by the gut wrenching agony of Abby not being there. Any joy felt is filled with guilt and then replaced with sadness for what is missing. Celebration brings the pain of the void in our lives into the bright spotlight of the day, but how do you skip holidays with two other girls at home? How do you celebrate a first Christmas for Elly when it’s also the first Christmas without Abby?

I no longer know how to respond to the simple question, “How many kids do you have?” Do I answer three, knowing I will have to answer the ensuing questions? Do I say two and deal with the fact that I am negating that Abrielle ever existed? I no longer know how to sign cards from our family. It feels as if I am betraying Abby every time I omit her name.

Every day we drive by that infamous spot in the road, it cannot be avoided. Do we look and smile as we think of the sweet memories of our princess? Do we fight the tears as they stream down our face as the harsh reality hits us? Do we turn and purposely avoid looking all together? Or is it one of those days where the fog of grief envelops us and our minds keep us from even seeing that place, that horrible, tragic place.

I am familiar with the concept of survivor’s guilt and the incorrect feelings the bearer places upon themselves, but it will be a long time, if ever, before I convince myself that I could not have somehow prevented Abrielle’s death. If I had let her take the first item she chose for sharing, if we had not stopped to watch the turkeys as they flew across the road, if only we had helped her look for the scoop for her bobbycat. Would any of these precious seconds have given us enough time to make it to OO, avoiding Ryan Sundermann’s deadly path that morning?

Can you imagine arriving home to an empty house that night? No little footsteps to be heard sneaking to the fridge after being tucked into bed. No little girl climbing into bed with mommy after daddy leaves for work early on Saturday mornings. No tiny hugs and kisses. No singing and dancing. No laughter. Just silence, sadness.

My heart is now filled with such crushing pain that sometimes it is hard to draw a breath that doesn’t hurt. There are nights I feel I must wrap my arms around myself tight just to hold myself together. I now know the truth to the statement that one can die from a broken heart –– my heart physically hurts.

As I struggle to face each ensuing day, I pull on my mask and hope I can make it back home before it slips out of place. For beneath that mask lies my pain and sadness –– a depression that is overwhelming some days. The pain is unlike anything I have ever experienced and unlike anything I could ever imagine. I feel as though my heart has been shredded into little pieces by Ryan Sundermann while I was forced to stand by and watch, unable to do a thing.

Family and friends have helped me gather the torn sections and slowly stitch them back together, but gashes still remain.

Our lives have been destroyed. Our family is forever different. We have been robbed of the opportunity to see Abby grow into the beautiful young woman she would have become. Elly will never get to know the little girl who was so excited to say she was going to be a big sister. She will just hear us talk about Abby and how much she is like her. Madyson has had to grow up before her time. She has been ripped away from the innocence of childhood and into the world of confusion and uncertainty. She has yet to grieve the loss of Abrielle. No tears have been shed. Instead, Mady prays to God every night that he would send Abby back from heaven. How do you make a now 8-year-old understand that the absence of Abby is now our life –– she can’t come back.

Abrielle even had a boyfriend. To this day he still responds to the same question, “Do you have a girlfriend” with “No, Abby died.” No preschooler should have to cope with the heavy matter of the death of a classmate.

Sleep is still next to impossible without medication. I try so hard to think of the happy, smiling face of Abrielle before I shut my eyes at night, but that happiness quickly turns into one of the nightmares I relive nightly. I see the green pickup speeding toward me on my side of the road. I see the driver swerving back and forth as if losing control or finally realizing I am there. I hear the horrendous boom of the impact and then see blackness. The silence I hear is slowly penetrated by the hissing sound as my head spins thinking it is just a dream and I am still lying in bed. I hear the screams from Mady saying, “Mommy, mommy wake up.” I slowly lift my head with my eyes still filled with darkness even though they are open. I take long blinks as my eyes slowly begin to focus. I feel that no-this-can’t-be-real feeling in the pit of my stomach as the moments before come flooding back to me. I manage to ask, “Are you OK?” Not yet knowing if I am as my head is still spinning and ears ringing. I slowly register the response of, “I am mommy, but Abby’s hurt really bad.”

I feel the cloud abruptly lifted from me as my mommy instinct takes over and I spin around to see my little girl slumped over in her car seat, a deep gash down her forehead, blood coming from her mouth and nose. The nightmare continues just as vividly as that day as I struggle to free a hysterical Madyson from the crumpled wreckage. Every detail replays itself, from me holding Abby’s head up and wiping the blood from her face to me raising her shirt to watch her chest rise and screaming her name as the gurgled breathing stops momentarily. Sometimes the nightmare begins with the priest meeting me at Children’s Mercy Hospital with a wheelchair and continues on until I have to tell my little girl, “It’s OK to stop fighting and go to heaven,” even though my heart does not want to see her go.

Sometimes the nightmare begins with a tiny white casket surrounded by flowers and stuffed animals in front of me and ends with me kissing its cold, hard surface before my little Abby is lowered into a pink vault, a part of my soul going with it.

Ryan Sundermann did not think about the consequences of sliding behind the wheel of that green pickup on the morning of March 29, 2007 with the alcohol still plaguing his system. He was merely concerned with not being late to work. When he put that truck into gear, he forever changed the lives of all of us. He ripped the heart from caring parents, family, relatives and friends. We did not deserve to live our lives with this pain and without our Abby. Driving with alcohol in your system is a willful, irresponsible criminal act with a deadly weapon not much different than murder with a gun.

Someday we hope that Ryan Sundermann realizes how much he stole from us. We hope that he is one day blessed with a conscience so that he can feel for himself all the pain he has created. We would like a true, heart-felt apology even though he will have to seek his forgiveness from God. I feel my grief has hollowed me out to such an extent that I do not have the strength for anger or vengeance.

However, we do feel that if Ryan Sundermann is not able to make the simple right/wrong decision of getting behind a wheel while still intoxicated, even after reprimands, society needs to be protected from him. No matter the sentence, it will never be enough. God can’t send Abrielle back from heaven and the gash in our hearts will forever bleed. But if the longest sentence allowed by law keeps Ryan Sundermann from robbing another family of the joy of their little princess, that is what needs to be done. We have but one request and that is that Ryan Sundermann have to hang a picture of our Abrielle in his prison cell to look at her smiling face every day. There are no tomorrows for us as a whole, complete family. Our hopes and dreams have been yanked away. We have been handed a life sentence –– a life without our Abby. However, we are determined to ensure as much good as possible comes from this horrible tragedy so that when we meet our Abrielle again, she can smile and say, “See, it be OK.”

The brief words I have had the opportunity to share can only give a glimpse of what her life meant to all who knew her. How greatly she will be missed and how lovingly she will be remembered. How do I end this statement, as there is no end to the impact, except to say we all loved Abrielle Lauryn Neff from the day she opened her big brown eyes until the day Ryan Sundermann’s poor decisions forced them closed.

We will continue to carry our love for her with us forever.