My awakening was back in 2001, and it was one of those years, If it can go wrong, it will go wrong, type of year. We had just moved into our home (rental) and everything was breaking down, all our appliances (we owned those) and both our vehicles. To top it off my eldest son at the time was only 5, was having some serve medical issues, that required him to be hospitalized.
Fortunately, our appliances were still under warranty, and the man who sold them to us came to our home to repair them. While he was there we got to talking and told him about what was going on. He (not a JW) said that his wife has a saying, she would say when you have a lot of things going wrong, someone or something in the universe is trying to tell you something.
A couple of days later I was reading through the bible when I came across the scripture at Deuteronomy 18:21 & 22 where it talks about false prophets, and something clicked in my mind like a light bulb turning on. My mother became a JW back in the early 1970s to survive Armageddon and to be reunited with my older sister (who died at the age of 5) in the fall of 1975. After that, I really dug into really researching everything, and 3 months later my husband and I sent in our DA letters. It was shortly after that 9-11 happened, I learned about the Watchtower NGO/UN connection, and a news article on TV came out about the pedo issue in the Watchtower. If I was still in by the time the pedo issues were being exposed, I would have for sure left it at that point.