Stabbed and survived — Lutfiye’s fuel for change

What it did do was fortify her inner strength.

The same strength she used to stay alive as she lay motionless in a coma for five days after being stabbed repeatedly by her estranged husband on a suburban street in north Shepparton.

Three months before the attack, she had left him, exhausted by the abuse that had been escalating since their first moments of marriage.

The pair met in July 2019 through a woman unrelated to him, whom he referred to as his aunt, who was also a family friend of the Kavcis.

His ‘aunt’ had given him a shining character reference, vouching that he was a good man who, like Lutfiye, wanted to start a family and was willing to come to live in Australia.

They were married in January 2020.

He was in Türkiye. Lutfiye was in Shepparton, Australia, the city where she was born and raised.

She travelled to meet him twice while the COVID-19 pandemic was wreaking havoc across the Earth.

The second time, in August 2020, she glimpsed his heated temper when he became frustrated about being unable to join her on a flight back to Australia due to travel restrictions.

Lutfiye didn’t recognise it at the time, but, looking back, said it had been a red flag for him to blame her for something that was out of her control.

Still, she went about setting up a rental home in her name for them both ahead of his arrival in Australia just before their baby was due.

She furnished and stocked it using her own finances, but their relationship spiralled from the day he arrived.

“The day he came, he started drinking and he was having an episode where he was hallucinating and seeing things,” Lutfiye recalled.

“The first night he was here, it was really scary.”

The pair lived together for just four months, in which time Lutfiye said he threatened her and her family, tried to isolate her from her family, and used all the money she’d earned working to buy tobacco and play poker machines.

When it came time to welcome their son into the world, she had put aside $30 to buy maternity pads, which she could not do without.

He told her he couldn’t do without his smokes either and used the last of the money to buy those instead.

The day before she left him, her family had come to the couple’s home. Lutfiye said he’d grown aggressive quickly before physically fighting with her father, and making threats to kill her and her family. He ordered her family to leave.

When they left, he slapped her across her face with such force he knocked her over while their son was in her arms.

Police arrived, but Lutfiye feared telling them the truth because she said her husband and his ‘aunt’ had hidden in a nearby room, listening to the conversation.

When her family video-called her later that evening to get a visual check on whether she was physically okay after the altercation, she lied again through fear of retribution, as he sat on the other side of the camera urging her to do so.

Though he hadn’t laid hands on her during their brief marriage until that night in July 2021, she had failed to recognise early that his coercive control was also a form of abuse.

But hindsight has been a teacher.

Leaving a violent relationship is often unsafe. The period that follows can be the most dangerous time, with the instigator potentially fearing their loss of control and ramping up their abusive behaviour to try to keep it.

It’s why many people don’t leave their abusers or take the measures Lutfiye did.

The day she left him started like any other day.

But, the second he left for work, she swiftly began packing up her things with the help of her mum.

“He called me like usual in the morning when he was at work and I just pretended that I wasn’t going to leave, but then I just left,” Lutfiye said.

“I thought it was over then. I thought he wouldn’t mess with me again.”

She couldn’t have been more wrong.

However, there must have been some doubt in her mind to have made her first stop at Shepparton Police Station after fleeing to apply for an intervention order against him.

In the two months that followed their separation, Lutfiye said he continually disturbed her, despite the IVO.

“I saw him waiting around the corner from my dad’s house when I went to visit, but I didn’t realise it was him because I had the sun in my eyes and he was wearing a mask,” she said.

She said he approached her while she was getting their son out of the car and forced her back into it, taking the keys and driving her to his ‘aunt’s’ house, erratically crying while the pair tried to convince Lutfiye for three hours to return to the marriage.

“They told me he should get three chances,” she said.

“I already gave him a hundred chances.”

A week later, she was stopped at a red light. He appeared beside her car and banged on the window.

He would sit in areas she was known to frequent and appear randomly on his bike in places her three younger sisters were.

Lutfiye said he paid no regard to the IVO against him.

Two months after leaving him, she was shopping with her mum when he intercepted them, asking to talk in private and threatening to break her mum’s phone.

Members of the public noticed the scuffle and stepped in to help when they saw him forcefully gripping Lutfiye’s pram, which had their son inside it.

They told him to leave and escorted the mother and daughter to their car.

From there, Lutfiye and her mum drove to the police station, where they rapped on the door to be let in (because COVID-19 restrictions had altered common procedures) while he approached them from behind, having followed them on his bike.

Lutfiye said her fear grew greater every time she reported him in breach of his IVO.

“Exactly a month after that day, he planned to end my life,” she said.

The day he tried to kill her had been fairly uneventful until the attack.

“I woke up that morning; I got ready; I fed my son and I headed out to my dad’s to take him some lunch while he was working,” she said.

When Lutfiye arrived in her father’s street, her estranged husband was waiting.

He approached her while she was in the car with their son and said he wanted to talk.

He came to the driver’s side, reached in and pressed the button to lower the window further before diving headfirst into the car.

“He stomped all over me,” Lutfiye said.

“He told me to drive. I said ‘no’, so he unbuckled me.”

He forced her into the passenger seat and snatched her phone, where he discovered she’d created a Facebook account the day before. Lutfiye said that had heightened his anger and he began driving.

“I was trying to get attention from the people we saw, so I was beeping the horn,” she said.

“He punched me across the face when I did that.”

Louder alarm bells started ringing when he turned back towards her home.

“I thought he was just going to drop me off, but he turned into the first left in my street, parked in front of a house and told me to wait in the car,” Lutfiye said.

She made to send her family an SOS alert from an app she’d recently downloaded, but he saw her reach for her phone and demanded to know what she was doing.

Thinking quickly, she told him she was checking the time before snapping candid pictures of him exiting the car and digging around in the stranger’s home’s garden.

“I also took photos of myself because he’d punched me and I was upset and crying,” she said. The images were later used as evidence in court.

When he returned to the car, she noticed something concealed in his sleeve, with a blue handle exposed at the cuff.

“You can tell quite obviously that something’s a knife,” she said.

“He saw I was about to get out, and he literally moved with me; he came so quickly I couldn’t even run past my car.

“He just got me from my back, and he laid me on the ground. Everything happened so quickly that I thought I was still running. It was really confusing.

“I looked to my left and I could see my hand and I can see something sticking out the other side and that’s when I realised he’d stabbed me.

“I started saying, ‘Please stop, please stop’, and he took the knife out.”

She remembers then putting her hand up in an attempt to deflect further blows but he plunged it in again.

“Unfortunately, he didn’t stop,” she said.

“He stabbed me in the chest, then my right arm, in my abdomen.”

As she kicked around, pleading for help, he all of a sudden retreated to her car and drove away with their son, leaving her bleeding on the street.

“I was confused as to why he stopped,” she said.

“After I got out of hospital, I found out that the knife had actually snapped.”

The blade had remained embedded in her body.

As he sped off, she found the strength to stand up.

“I said to myself, ‘Lutfiye, if you stay here, you’re going to die’,” she said.

“So I got up and I just prayed for God to look after my son.”

She was in shock. The blade had pierced her lung and collapsed it.

“I’m breathing and it’s feeling really weird, just so incomplete,” Lutfiye said.

“I thought, this is how I’m going to die.”

She couldn’t recall all of the words in the death du’a her Islamic religion requires Muslims to recite when they know they are going to die.

Maybe that was a veiled beacon of hope that her time on Earth wasn’t up just yet.

While the hospital was close, it wasn’t close enough for someone who had been stabbed multiple times to walk to, so Lutfiye approached the residence she was stabbed in front of because she saw a car in the driveway and a TV on in the lounge room through the window.

She had hoped the resident would drive her to the hospital but had worried they might not want to get blood in their car.

“I tapped the window with my phone and called out, ‘Excuse me, please help me, I’ve been stabbed’,” she said.

She waited for some time before walking back out into the street, watching her own blood drip profusely from her wounds.

“I bobbed down and put my hand flat on the ground, and that’s where they found my handprint in blood,” Lutfiye recalled.

You might wonder why she didn’t just call 000 if she had her phone.

It wasn’t until returning to the footpath she contemplated doing so.

Selflessly, as she crouched alone, she struggled to decide whether her injuries were bad enough to call emergency resources away from a possible higher-priority patient.

All the while bleeding to death.

“I asked myself, ‘Should I call the ambulance? Is it bad enough?’,” she said.

As she struggled to open her phone, made slippery with blood, a woman on a bike approached.

“I don’t even know how bad I looked at that point,” Lutfiye said.

“But I quickly got up and I said, ‘Excuse me, please help me’.“

The woman immediately called an ambulance.

In a desperate attempt to impart vital information that would help apprehend her attacker before she possibly died, she told the woman he’d taken her car with her son in it, describing its colour and make, and suggested places and addresses he might have gone.

Her memory of that day ends soon after she was put into the ambulance.

Maybe the blood loss caused her delirium, or maybe her mind went into survival mode to block the sensation and erase any traumatic recollection before it could be created.

But upon watching body-cam footage, she was shocked to see herself injured on the gurney, passing in and out of consciousness, but coherent enough to relay to police an account of events, her vehicle’s details and her parents’ addresses.

She also asked paramedics if she could still breastfeed.

“All I was thinking of was my son,” Lutfiye said.

Her attacker was arrested in a supermarket three hours later while she was undergoing emergency surgeries at GV Health.

Her injuries were too significant to be fully handled locally, however, and she was flown to Melbourne’s The Alfred, where she spent her first five days in a coma.

“In the notes from the hospital, they said that they resuscitated me,” she said.

Lutfiye received transfusions of 19 red blood units and four plasma units.

“When I woke up, they transferred me to a trauma unit for a week and then I started developing blood clots in my lungs from the trauma, and I also had COVID on top of that,” she said.

She spent three weeks alone in the Melbourne hospital (because pandemic times didn’t allow visitors), connected to her family only via video calls.

After being fed countless medications, having daily blood tests — taken from the right hand every day because her left one was bandaged after being fully penetrated twice by her attacker’s weapon — and enduring uncomfortable needles in her stomach, Lutfiye was provided with a breast pump to aid her in bringing back her milk to prepare for her return home to her unharmed son.

Though it hurt, she persisted.

“As a mother, I would feel guilty if I was able to do it and then I didn’t do it,” Lutfiye said.

In ICU, the already small 25-year-old lost more than seven of the 55kg she was admitted with.

Now 28, she looks healthy.

She exudes grace. Calmness, happiness, kindness.

“People say to me, ‘You don’t look like a person who’s gone through such thing’, but how should I look?,” Lutfiye said.

When she’d recovered as much as she would physically — pain exists constantly in her left hand and sporadically under her chest — she asked herself what kind of person she was supposed to be after this.

“Do I still be the same as what I was before or do I be a really mean or angry person who’s hating life now because of what happened?” she said.

“I can’t do that (the latter) because no-one else has anything to do with what happened to me; it’s only him who’s done this to me.

“He’s the one that’s at fault, no-one else, so no-one else deserves to be treated negatively by me just because I went through something like that.”

Though she suffered flashbacks and nightmares, she tried to stay positive and met regularly with a counsellor.

“I said to myself, I have to have a positive mindset. It’s okay if I get upset; it’s normal, but not to lose myself in that, so I just kept going,” she said.

She said she had wanted to share her story since life wrote it, but she’s not sure she’d feel that way if her attacker were an Australian citizen and not destined for immediate deportation at the end of his 15-year sentence for her attempted murder.

She believes it wouldn’t matter how long he was jailed for; he would come for her afterwards and finish what he started.

“Even now, just talking about it is scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Lutfiye said.

“But I still talk about it because I want to change the system.

“The police need to listen to us; the government needs to fund us for things we need in order to keep ourselves safe.

“They don’t do anything until something serious happens.”

Lutfiye has vowed to share more about herself and what she’s done to heal in the wake of the attack rather than focus on what her attacker inflicted on her.

“No matter how bad your situation is, if you change your mindset, I believe we can push through things positively and continue life,” she said.

“Not normally, not like before, because that is impossible.

“You can’t forget what you’ve gone through, but if you just find a way to go through it positively and make that into your strength, I believe you can get through anything.”

Lutfiye said it wasn’t painful telling her story over and again despite what people thought.

“If I denied it myself, then I would struggle. If you accept it happened, it will help you get through it,” she said.

“Time will also heal as well.”

Now fully aware of actions that fit neatly into the different forms of abuse, Lutfiye is using her own trauma to fuel change for others.

She said before the assault, she had been shy and withdrawn, traits exacerbated by the freedom her husband had stolen from her.

Now, she accepts guest-speaking roles to talk publicly about her ordeal.

She says it forms part of her healing and contributes to her voice for change and to help other victims of abuse identify it.

She sits on the Victims of Crime Commission Advisory Group that meets in Melbourne every two months and is on the committee of the recently formed Goulburn Valley Against Gendered Violence group, which held a rally in Shepparton in July.

∎ If you are experiencing violence, phone 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or visit 1800respect.org.au