'MY POLICEMAN HUSBAND WAS A HERO'

Sonya Leeding grieved in public after her heartbreaking loss

- Megan Norris

On May 29, 2011, Sonya Leeding put her young children to bed and texted a goodnight message to her husband, who was on night duty at a busy Gold Coast police station. "Have a good night - I love you," she wrote to Damian. "I'll see you when you get home in the morning."

Tragically, it wasn't Damian who woke Sonya in the early hours of the next day, but his colleagues from Coomera Police, bearing the shattering news that the senior constable had been shot in a botched armed robbery and was fighting for his life in hospital.

While Sonya was sleeping, Damian and his partner had been dispatched to an armed robbery at the Pacific Pines Tavern, where nine people were being held hostage in a storage room.

When the officers confronted two of the robbers fleeing with their haul to a waiting getaway car driven by an accomplice, one of them shot Damian, 35, in the head at close range with his shotgun.

"As a police officer myself, I'd delivered my share of bad news and knew the moment I saw Damo's colleagues on my doorstep what was coming," Sonya tells Woman's Day.

"It was as if the whole moment was captured like a film roll in my mind - like I was watching it from above but not actually participating in it."