A father who lost two children in a Boeing Max crash waits to find out if the US will sue the company

As they travel through Alaska on a long-planned vacation, Ike and Susan Riffel stop every now and then to put up stickers directing people to “Live Riffully.”

It’s a way for the California couple to honor the memories of their sons, Melvin and Bennett, who died in 2019 when a Boeing 737 Max jet crashed in Ethiopia.

The Riffels and families of other passengers who died in the crash and a similar accident in Indonesia just over four months earlier, are waiting to find out at any moment whether the U.S. Department of Justice, all these years later, will sue Boeing in connection with the two disasterswhich killed 346 people.

Ike Riffel worries that instead of taking Boeing to trial, the government will offer the company another chance at corporate probation through a legal document called deferred prosecution agreementor DPA. Or that prosecutors will allow Boeing to plead guilty and avoid a trial.

“A DPA hides the truth. A plea agreement would hide the truth,” says Riffel. “This would leave families with absolutely no idea” of what happened inside Boeing as maximum it was being designed and tested, and after the first crash in 2018, it pointed to problems with the new flight control software.

“Families want to know the truth. Who was responsible? Who did what? the father says. “Why did they have to die?”

Ike is a retired forestry consultant and Susan is a retired religious educator. They live in Redding, California, where they raised their children.

Mel was 29 years old and preparing to become a father when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 went down six minutes after takeoff. He played sports in high school and worked as a coach for the California Department of Transportation in Redding. Bennett, 26, loved performing arts growing up. He worked in IT support in Chico, California, and clients still send cards to his parents.

“They were our only two children. They were very adventurous, very independent, they loved to travel,” says Riffel.

In early 2019, Mel and his wife, Brittney, took a “babymoon” to Australia. Brittney returned home while Mel met her brother in Taiwan to begin what they called a world tour. He and Bennett were heading to their last stop, South Africa, where Mel planned to surf, when they boarded their Ethiopian Airlines flight in Addis Ababa.

Back in California, Susan Riffel answered the phone when it rang that Sunday morning. On the other side, someone from the airline told them that their children were on a plane that crashed.

“When you first hear it, you don’t believe it,” says Ike Riffel. “You still don’t believe it after seeing that there was an accident. ‘Oh, maybe they wouldn’t get along.’ You think about all these scenarios.”

The next shock came in January 2021: The Department of Justice accused Boeing of fraud for misleading regulators who approved the Max, but at the same time prosecutors approved an agreement this meant that the single felony charge could be dropped within three years.

“I heard it on the news. This simply surprised me. I thought, what the hell? Riffel says. “I felt very helpless. I didn’t know what a deferred prosecution agreement was.”

He and his wife believe they were deceived by the Department of Justice, which had previously denied that there was a criminal investigation underway. Boeing never contacted the family, according to Riffel. He assumes this is based on the advice of the company’s lawyers.

“I don’t trust (Boeing) to do the right thing, and I’ve really lost trust in the Department of Justice,” he says. “Their motto is to protect the American people, not protect Boeing, and it seems to me that they spent the entire time defending Boeing.”

The Justice Department reopened the possibility of suing Boeing last month when it said the company had violated the 2021 agreement. The DOJ has not publicly specified the alleged violations.

Boeing said it complied with the terms of the settlement, which required it to pay $2.5 billion, most of it to the company’s airline customers, and maintain a program to detect and prevent violations of U.S. anti-fraud laws. among other conditions. .

The pending decision in Washington is important for family members around the world.

The 157 passengers and crew who died in the crash in Ethiopia came from 35 countries, with the largest numbers coming from Kenya and Canada. Nearly two dozen passengers were traveling to attend a United Nations environmental conference in Nairobi.

The March 10, 2019 crash occurred just months after another Boeing 737 Max 8, operated by Lion Air of IndonesiaHe collided with the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. The vast majority of passengers on the October 29, 2018 flight were Indonesians.

In both failures, the software known by the acronym MCAS fixed the nose from the plane down repeatedly based on incorrect readings from a single sensor.

Relatives of people on both flights sued Boeing in U.S. federal court in Chicago. Boeing settled the vast majority of these cases after demanding that the families not disclose how much they received.

The Riffels found strength and purpose in reuniting with the families of some of the other passengers on Flight 302. Together, they lobbied the Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration and Congress to ensure that aircraft are as safe as possible.

Many of them want the government to prosecute senior Boeing officials, including former CEO Dennis Muilenburg and current chief executive David Calhoun, who was part of the company’s board when the failures occurred. They asked the Justice Department to fine Boeing more than $24 billion for what one of their lawyers, Paul Cassell, called “the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history.”

The family group includes Javier de Luis, an aerospace engineer whose sister, Graziella, was on the flight from Ethiopia. And Michael Stumo and Nadia Milleron, who lost their daughter, Samya. Canadians Paulo Njoroge and Chris and Clariss Moore made several trips to Washington to implore government officials to take action against Boeing and demand safer planes. Njoroge wife, three children and mother-in-law They were all on the plane, as was the Moores’ daughter, Danielle.

At first, the disparate group of family members connected via email just to check in on each other. Before long, and especially after meeting face to face, they became more determined to do more than suffer together; they wanted to make a difference.

“We want to find some meaning in what happened to our loved ones,” says Ike Riffel. “If we can make aviation safer so this doesn’t happen again, we’ll have some wins.”