‘It Was a Wipeout’: How One Family Rebuilt Life After a Mother’s Murder

For many parents, the daily school run is a routine filled with forced smiles and casual conversation. For Stuart Green, those moments were reminders of a loss too deep to explain in passing.

When asked about his children’s mother, Green would often reply simply: “I’m a single parent.” The truth, that his wife had been murdered in front of their children was impossible to compress into a brief exchange at the school gate.

Nearly a decade ago, Green’s wife, Mia Mascariñas-Green, a Filipina human and environmental rights lawyer, was killed in an attack on her family’s car in the Philippines. Their three children were in the vehicle at the time, along with the family’s nanny. All survived physically unharmed.

Green, a British national, describes his children as “walking, breathing miracles.” After returning to the UK, however, he struggled with the fear that their lives would forever be defined by tragedy.

“I worried that our identity would be reduced to that single moment,” he says.

Determined to take control of his family’s story, Green decided to tell it on his own terms. His new book, The Regenerate Leap, published this month, reframes trauma not as an endpoint but as a turning point.

A marine biologist who works in sustainability-focused consulting, Green says the book is meant for anyone navigating crisis, parents, leaders, or individuals facing profound loss. He describes it as “the manual I couldn’t find” in the aftermath of his wife’s death.

After the killing, Green turned to books on grief and trauma but found their emphasis on resilience unhelpful. “We had lost a wife, a mother, a home, a whole life,” he says. “It wasn’t something you simply bounced back from.”

What concerned him most was the idea of intergenerational trauma, the risk that his children would carry the weight of the tragedy into their futures.

The central idea of The Regenerate Leap is “regeneration”: not the erasure of pain, but the transformation of suffering into purpose. Green uses the metaphor of a pine cone, which releases its seeds only under extreme heat, to argue that crisis can unlock hidden strength.

He is careful to stress that devastation is never a good thing. Instead, he believes that acknowledging loss honestly can create space for growth that would not have been possible otherwise.

As his children grew older, Green gradually shared the full truth about their mother’s death. He wanted them to understand not only how she died, but how she lived, fighting for justice and human rights. That perspective, he says, helped them see her legacy as something to carry forward.

His eldest daughter, Grace, now 18, played a key role in shaping the book, helping edit it to ensure it would resonate with young readers. She plans to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a lawyer.

A therapist once described Grace as having grown from a traumatised child into a young woman of exceptional clarity and purpose. As a child, she gave testimony in court related to the case, which remains ongoing in the Philippines.

Green says writing the book helped his family shift from seeing themselves as victims to becoming authors of their own future.

“The most profound change,” he writes, “is moving from being someone to whom things happen to someone who chooses what those things mean.”

He knows the book may invite renewed attention and difficult questions, but he has come to accept that reality.

“This is my life,” Green says. “This is my way of sharing it.”

The Regenerate Leap is published on 28 January.