“Helpless. ‘I just can’t imagine what you’re going through,’ is what people say to me,” Michael Davey said. “But the truth is people can imagine what we are dealing with … they just don’t dare to.

“When we were finally taken into a room to see him, they warned us. His head was swathed in bandages to stabilise all the fractured bones. The machines had all been switched off and removed by then. Just silence. He was still dressed in his Auburn South school uniform.”

He sobbed as he said having his firstborn child stolen from him had left him broken. Addressing the driver directly, he said: “You destroyed the life our family cherished. How dare you.”

The father then used his time addressing the magistrate to hit out at the low-level charge he says his son’s killer was given.

“Failing to keep a lookout is careless driving,” he said. “Not keeping proper distance is careless driving. You crashed your car through a primary school playground hitting five children and killing our son.

“It is an insult. It hollows me. The entire process. The police investigation, the legal system. I feel ill just standing here.

“He died in front of his friends in his primary school playground.”

Jack’s mother, Jayde Davey, recalled receiving a panicked phone call telling her to get to the school, and seeing the absurdity of a car in the playground.

She later directed her son’s hearse past their Camberwell house so they could bring him home one last time.

“In the depths and pits of endless grief, I try to accept my son is gone. Killed,” she said through tears. “He died in the company of strangers trying to help him without his mum to hold him and tell him one more time I loved him.

“If there is no charge for killing Jack, where is the justice? He had big dreams and the brightest future. He has been robbed of spreading his kindness. We had 11 years of loving Jack, but we failed at the place he should have been safest of all.”

The court heard Zuhaira was on the phone to her husband when she lost control of her car while turning out of a parallel park on Burgess Street, and veered across a lane of traffic and through the school fence.

Police found no evidence that she applied the brakes before the crash.

“I lose ... control. It just worked by itself,” she later told police.

“I saw two kids – they have very serious injuries. One, I remember had blood all over him. I just killed someone.”

Her lawyer said it was likely she mistook the accelerator for the brake, after being called to the school to collect her son for poor behaviour, which she claims triggered post-traumatic stress from her time living in Iraq. The family came to Australia in 2015.

Other children injured in the crash suffered a broken collar bone, degloving of the hand and burns. One girl called her mother on her Apple Watch after crawling out from under the car with a fractured spine.

One of the injured children, who spent three weeks in hospital, told police that in a “flick of a second everything went dark”, while another said that “me and my friends were sitting on a table. Then there was a car that came right at us.”

The court hearing was initially delayed after Zuhaira tried to have her name suppressed, citing psychological safety, but the application was rejected after opposition from media outlets.

Defence lawyer Matthew Senia said his client was profoundly remorseful, as she sat sobbing and calling out, “I’m sorry” from behind him.

He said they believed impaired mental function caused Zuhaira to press the wrong pedal, and she has not driven since, despite remaining licensed.

The prosecution called for Zuhaira to be placed on a community correction order and have a conviction recorded.

Magistrate Vincenzo Caltabiano will sentence her on Wednesday.

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