Widow offers drunk driver forgiveness

Andrea Krueger says forgiveness is a complex process. Photo / Simon Baker

About 20 years ago, Andrea Krueger read a book that influences her to this day. The title, translated from German, was: "To understand, to forgive and to reconcile."

"Those three words never left me," she told the Weekend Herald.

The teachings of that book helped her to reach a place where she can today do what many would find unthinkable - forgive the man who took her husband's life.

German-born Ms Krueger made her forgiveness public this week when Phillip Kirkwood Hamilton was sentenced in the Christchurch District Court for driving drunk and running down and killing her husband Jens Richardson, 34, on a rural Canterbury road in August last year.

Hamilton stopped his BMW after hitting Mr Richardson on his bicycle but rather than calling for help, drove on.

Despite all this, after reading a statement to the court about the devastating impact of her loss, Ms Krueger approached an emotional Hamilton and spontaneously kissed and hugged him.

In her statement, she said: "I hope and pray for Phillip Hamilton. God bless him."

Judge Philip Moran said he was moved a great deal by the act of forgiveness he had witnessed. He then sentenced Hamilton to serve 12 months' home detention rather than a jail term, with three years' disqualification from driving.

Ms Krueger's Catholic faith helps her to forgive, but there is much more to it than that. She feels she needs to do it for her own well-being.

"It's a hard word, forgiveness. It's not only that it pops up and you are this saint who can forgive. It's a long process.

"It's not only forgiving Phillip Hamilton. It's forgiving the process you are going through. It's forgiving the situations that upset you. It's forgiving the people who don't understand my grieving.

"We all want to have peace in our souls and in our lives, and not always to carry a burden and [be] blaming ourselves and other people."

She still struggles with being without her husband and the end of their dreams for the future. And she can understand how others in her shoes would find it easier just to feel hatred.

"We are all people making mistakes and faults, and sometimes taking the wrong way in life."

Ms Krueger was visiting Germany last year when she got the call to say her husband, an agricultural science graduate, had been killed.

"My whole system went nuts. You can't talk, you can't breathe, you can't cry."

Yet just a few hours later, as she sat on a bed with relatives trying to comfort her, a voice came into her head that said: "I don't want to get feelings like hating someone who did that."

Despite forgiving Hamilton, she still feels frustration at the penalty dished out to him. She thinks he should have been ordered into full-time alcohol counselling and made to pay reparations to ease her struggling finances.

ACC gives her some money, but it is not enough to pay the bills.

"I would have loved to get a note from him in the last half year ... something like that he is sorry, that he acknowledged what he had done."

The pair will meet in the coming weeks when Ms Krueger feels she has a "clear head".

She has filled two A4 pages of questions she might put to him. Depending on how she feels, she may pray with him, or just look into his eyes to see his reaction.

"It's not what I want to hear, it's what I want to feel."

When approached by the Weekend Herald at the apartment where he must serve his home detention sentence, Hamilton said there were a number of things he wanted to say to Ms Krueger, but he did not want to say these things in public.

In an earlier interview with the Press newspaper, Hamilton said he was as stunned as anyone when Ms Krueger hugged and kissed him. Listening to her read her statement had been heart-wrenching, he said.

Ms Krueger worked with the terminally ill and grieving families in Germany, but dealing with her own grief is much harder.

"But I have a corner in my brain that says 'you will get there'."