The family of a pedestrian left seriously disabled after she was mowed down by a taxi has expressed its despair after the court handed the speeding driver a three-year driving ban as punishment.

“At the end of the day, the system is screwed up. When legislation and punitive measures aren’t strict, the message out there to drivers is: you can do as you please,” Peter Cauchi tells Times of Malta. The life of his family was turned upside down after his wife, Moira, was hit by a vehicle driven at 110km per hour.

On September 16, 2016, just after 8pm, the 50-year-old bank manager arrived at the Gżira seafront with a friend to go for dinner. She was walking on the zebra crossing when she was hit by a car, driven by 20-year-old taxi driver Renald Aquilina. She was flung into the air, over the centre strip and landed on the other side of the road. The collision left Moira in ITU for over five weeks.

She suffered from a broken spine, jaw and collarbone and her knees were crushed. The hit caused her a brain diffusion injury, which impacted her speech and memory.

Seven years after the incident, Moira lives at home with her husband Peter and her 26-year-old daughter, Valentina, who became her carers. Last month, the court handed Aquilina a three-year driving ban and a suspended sentence, which left the family of the victim fuming.

The magistrate convicted Aquilina of causing grievous injuries, with dangerous and reckless driving, gave the driver a suspended sentence, ordered him to pay a €1,683 fine and was placed under a three-year treatment order for drug addiction.

“There need to be harsher punishments. It’s not right that I can run over someone and just get away with four years probation and the rest is c’est la vie,” Peter Cauchi says. “We asked for five years without his licence, but he was given three instead.”

During the interview, Moira sits between her husband and daughter, occasionally nodding.

Born and raised in Germany, Peter said the car in Germany is seen as a weapon. “Over there, if something like this happened, the first thing they would do is take away your licence.

The victim’s daughter Valentina adds: “People will continue doing what they want if these penalties remain unchanged”.

The family’s motive to speak out is to hope for change.“The legislation, the punishments need to be harsher; these guys need to learn a lesson,” Peter says.

“There were other accidents like this before Moira’s, and many afterwards, but nobody says anything. Our justice minister has done nothing. Someone has to wake up and do something.”

The family’s lawyer has written to the attorney general to reconsider the sentence.

A year-long waiting game

Peter was in Germany for work when he received the dreaded phone call on the evening of the incident. Valentina and her brother went straight to hospital to find their mother sedated.

“I remember there was blood everywhere,” says Valentina, who was 18 at the time.

“At the beginning, all we were told is that she was critical. It was a very emotional time with my father travelling back and forth to Malta and Germany, and my brother and I spending time with her at ITU.”

Moira’s mother caught the bus every morning to be by her daughter’s side. “It was a year-long waiting game.”

While Moira slowly showed signs of improvement in her movement, it took longer for her to recover cognitively. She suffered from a brain diffusion injury, a tearing of the brain’s long connecting nerve fibres.

“Her brain shook, and it affected her memory and her speech,” Peter says. In the beginning, Moira did not recognise her family.

“She started off from the beginning, learning how to eat, how to move, how to get out of bed, how to make sounds because she could not speak. Moira was like a computer which literally shut down and you had to restart everything.”

Moira was like a computer which literally shut down and you had to restart everything- Peter Cauchi

After hours of physiotherapy sessions, she can now walk for short distances before needing rest. The road to her memory recovery was longer. The family would take her out to their favourite restaurants and swimming spots to help jog her memory.

“Now we are in the process of the brain regenerating. It’s a long process to find its own way back and while she has made a lot of improvement, she is still far away from who she was.”

Moira has speech therapy sessions once every fortnight.

During the interview, she would occasionally speak: “Here, and here, and over here,” she says, pointing to her ankle, knee, and collarbone, indicating where she was injured.

Her husband intervenes: “She is here, but not in her usual state. She repeats a lot, and she has a short attention span.”

From devouring books to learning how to read again

Peter and Moira before the accident.

Prior to the incident, Moira was a manager at Bank of Valletta, could speak four languages, and would “devour books”, her husband recalled. She used to run the household, take care of the bills and cook.

“Now she doesn’t know how to write properly, and she can speak broken Maltese and she would repeat to you something she told you half an hour ago.”

She could no longer remain working at the bank, and when COVID-19 hit, he decided to also quit his job of travelling back and forth to Germany.

“In a way, because of the accident, we both lost our jobs,” he says. Moira keeps herself busy by doing small jobs around the house and doing word search puzzles.

“It’s a good sign that her brain is functioning, we would sit down together, and while I might give up on finding a word, she will persist and look for it, even if it takes her days.”

When the conversation turns to word searches, Moira stands up from the table and brings her word-search puzzle books. “Look, look,” she says, pointing out the pages of puzzles she filled out. “It gives me something to do, so I don’t sit down at home and do nothing. Good, no?” she says, as she continues to flip through the pages.

When the couple travel, Peter prepares large, laminated cards with emergency details and numbers, in case anything happens to them.

While thanking friends, family and the police, Peter says: “Life has completely changed because of what happened. But we move on, we have to.”