‘I was hit by a car – next thing I remember was someone holding my baby’s body’

A heartbroken father has spoken out for the first time since losing his eight-month-old daughter in a tragic car crash.

Rob Hall, from Neath in Wales, had already been having a tough day on June 21, 2023, when he took his newborn daughter to say goodbye to his mother at Withybush Hospital in Pembrokeshire.

She had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease and only had hours to live – but on one of the last days her son would be able to spend with her, tragedy struck again – leaving the young dad devastated amid the “worst day of his life”.

Rob had taken eight-month-old Mabli for a walk around the hospital grounds on the early summer day, hoping for a brief respite from the difficult process of saying goodbye to his mother, when a “revving and screeching car” collided with his daughter’s pushchair.

In a split second of horror, Rob himself was thrown into a nearby parking space and any sign of Mabli had disappeared.

The sweet eight-month-old had held her grandmother’s hand just minutes before the family headed out on the fated walk, Rob said, in a moment that has become a lifeline to what he had taken for granted as normal before that fatal collision.

After that, everything blurred together in the kind of nightmare scenario most parents live in fear of.

“All of a sudden, I heard this horrible revving and screeching,” Rob said. “The next thing I see is this white car, airborne. That was it.

“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 [was] where Mabli was. Nobody could see Mabli.”

The next thing he remembered was “somebody walking past me holding [her] lifeless body”. Despite being uninjured himself, he said: “I’ll never be able to explain what that felt like.”

The collision of the car with the pram had thrown the eight-month-old a considerable distance away after hitting parent and child at around 30mph.

Mabli was rushed to the hospital’s A&E department, with Rob half-aware of “screaming” all around him despite still being in a dazed state himself.

She was then airlifted to the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, with the packed plane full of medical professionals – forcing her shocked parents to make the 100-mile journey in the back of a police car.

After arriving, Rob said they weren’t allowed in to see their daughter for several hours – a “heartbreaking” wait that marked “the longest time [Rob’s wife Gwen] had been away from Mabli ever”.

When they were allowed to see her, she had moved again to a children’s hospital in Bristol, and was plugged into a web of machines, tubes and wires.

“She was so unwell,” Rob said. “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. As soon as I was told, I [was just] sick everywhere. It was the most horrific thing you could ever hear in your life.”

Refusing to believe that it was true, Rob and Gwen sat with their daughter “for hours and hours”, surrounded by “horrible noises coming from [all the] machines”.

It was then that he got a call from his brother letting him know that his mother also didn’t have long left either, in her hospital bed miles away in Pembrokeshire.

During a final FaceTime call, he decided not to tell her what had happened to Mabli.

“I lied to her. I didn’t tell her. She wanted to know why I wasn’t there because I had been there next to her for the previous two-and-a-half weeks, but I wasn’t there at the end.”

Still watching Mabli fighting for her life, Rob got the call telling him that his mother had passed away.

“I’m sitting in a hospital room in Bristol, next to my baby daughter who was fighting for her life, and mourning the death of my mother,” he said. “I don’t have the words to describe that situation.”

The parents were then told that the eight-month-old had “gone” and was only being kept alive by the life support machines.

Gwen’s sister-in-law was in labour on June 24, however, forcing the pair to “plead with the doctors not to switch the machines off yet because we did not want Mabli’s cousin’s birthday to be forever associated with [her] death”, Rob said.

On Sunday, June 25, Mabli passed away. Her funeral, held later that year, took place just one day before her grandmother’s.

“It’s just another part of this story that you couldn’t write,” Rob said. “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.

“The pain of that, the trauma of it all, is actually too much to process, to even begin to describe.”

In January 2025, 71-year-old Bridget Curtis from Begelly in Pembrokeshire was sentenced to four years in prison for killing Mabli by driving dangerously.

However, the 19-month wait for justice prolonged Rob and Gwen’s pain even more, they said – with Curtis initially refusing to admit to the offence, before suffering a panic attack and being unable to sit through a hearing.

“This ordeal is a daily thing for us as a family,” he said. “The pain, the anguish, trying to learn how to live this new life. [The latest sentencing date of January] meant Bridget Curtis had another Christmas at home with her family. Mabli only ever had one Christmas.”

Describing the sentencing as “a bit of relief”, Rob added: “Nothing actually changes for us. We are still in hell. We are in survival mode every single day. You can’t see what the future is.”

“[Mabli] will always be a part of our lives, every single day,” Gwen said. “She was an innocent baby and all she knew was love. We think about her all the time. She was the happiest baby I have ever known.”