Sabrina Lekaj murder: Mother says husband who stabbed daughter to death isn't an 'evil person' despite him entering a guilty plea
The mother of Sabrina Lekaj, the medical student who was stabbed to death by her own father, has claimed that her husband's action came "completely out of the blue" and that he was not an "evil person."
Sabrina, 20, was found dead in the front seat of her Mercedes-Benz sedan car seat just a few meters away from her family home in Kidman Park, Adelaide at around 11:30 pm on July 21. Her father, 49-year-old Petrit Lekaj, was also found beside her with a stab wound. Officers reportedly had to smash the vehicle's window to drag the father out of the car, who had a serious abdominal injury. South Australian police took him to a hospital where he remained under police guard after being charged with his daughter's murder.
Nearly after a month after the brutal attack on Sabrina, Petrit faced the Port Adelaide Magistrates Court on Monday and pleaded guilty to his daughter's murder. After Petrit's guilty plea, Sabrina's mother Romina broke her silence saying that he never showed a violent streak before the tragedy.
"He never showed any violence toward any family member or anyone that I know," she told the ABC, adding that she continues to remain confused about what exactly happened in the lead up to her daughter's death. The mother-of-two, less than a fortnight after her daughter's funeral service, said that the pain of losing the 20-year-old was still "very raw."
"It's a lot easier if one is the evil person and one is the victim and you know who to cry for, but you don't actually know the story and you feel for both of them," she said. "I feel of course, my daughter was my daughter, it's very raw and the pain is like it will never go away."
According to authorities, the father and daughter were sitting in Sabrina's white Mercedes-Benz sedan on the street outside their family home at 11:30pm on Sunday when an argument ensued between them and the university student was stabbed to death by her father. Petrit, after killing his daughter, turned the knife on himself, stabbing his stomach multiple times resulting in grave abdominal injuries.
Sabrina, hours before the incident, had complained to her friends about her father being "controlling," which included him forbidding her to have a boyfriend.
"She said that he would often argue with her over little things, that he would try and control her life," Sabrina's close friend Katie Valstar told Daily Mail. "Her dad would ask her all the time if she had a boyfriend and it really left her feeling like she couldn't do anything without running it past them. It was very stressful for her having them on her back about everything, she told me she wanted to move out of home."
"She had been over to my place a few times, but I had never been to hers because her parents didn't even want her to have friends over. Often when we were on the phone she would suddenly hang up because she didn't want to get caught and get in trouble for not studying," the friend added.