While traveling through Alaska on a long-planned vacation, Ike and Susan Riffel stop occasionally to place stickers telling people to “Live Fully.”
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 jetliner crashed in Ethiopia.
The Riffels and families of other passengers who died in the crash and a similar crash in Indonesia just over four months earlier are now waiting any moment to hear 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 fears that instead of taking Boeing to court, the government will offer the company another chance at corporate rehabilitation through a legal document that deferred prosecution agreementor DPA. Or that prosecutors get Boeing to admit guilt and avoid a trial.
“A DPA hides the truth. A plea deal would hide the truth,” Riffel said. “It would give the families absolutely no idea” of what happened inside Boeing if the maximum was designed and tested, and after the first crash in 2018, they pointed to problems with the new flight control software.
“The 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 studies teacher. They live in Redding, California, where they raised their sons.
Mel was 29 and preparing to become a father himself when Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 Went down six minutes after takeoff. He played sports in school and worked as a technician for the California Department of Transportation in Redding. Bennett, 26, enjoyed performing arts growing up. He worked in IT support in Chico, California, and customers still send cards to his parents.
“They were our only two sons. They were very adventurous, very independent and loved to travel,” says Riffel.
In early 2019, Mel and his wife Brittney went on a ‘babymoon’ to Australia. Brittney flew home while Mel met his brother in Taiwan to begin what they called their world tour. He and Bennett were heading to their final stop, South Africa, where Mel planned to go surfing, when they boarded the Ethiopian Airlines flight in Addis Ababa.
Back in California, Susan Riffel answered the phone when it rang that Sunday morning. On the other hand, someone from the airline told them that their sons had been on a crashed plane.
“When you first hear it, you won’t believe it,” says Ike Riffel. “You still don’t believe it after you see there was a crash. ‘Oh, maybe they didn’t get in.’ You think about all those scenarios.”
The next shock came in January 2021: The Ministry of Justice Boeing accused of fraud by misleading regulators who approved the Max, but at the same time prosecutors an agreement This meant that charges for a single crime could be dropped within three years.
“I heard it on the news. It just blew me away. I thought, ‘What the hell?'” Riffel says. “I felt pretty helpless. I didn’t know what a deferred prosecution agreement was.”
He and his wife believe they were misled by the Justice Department, which had previously denied that there was a criminal investigation. Boeing never contacted the family, Riffel said. He assumes this was based on advice from the company’s lawyers.
“I have no confidence in (Boeing) to do the right thing, and I’ve really lost confidence in the Justice Department,” he said. “Their motto is to protect the American people, not to protect Boeing, and it seems to me that they’ve been defending Boeing all along.”
The Justice Department last month reopened the possibility of prosecuting Boeing, saying the company violated the 2021 agreement. The DOJ has not publicly specified the alleged violations.
Boeing has said it has complied with the terms of the agreement, which included paying $2.5 billion, mostly to the company’s airline customers, and maintaining a program to detect and prevent violations of U.S. anti-fraud laws, among other things.
The pending decision in Washington is of interest to family members around the world.
The 157 passengers and crew who died in the Ethiopian crash came from 35 countrieswith the largest numbers coming from Kenya and Canada. Nearly twenty passengers were flying to attend a United Nations environmental conference in Nairobi.
The March 10, 2019 crash came just months after another Boeing 737 Max 8, operated by The Indonesian Lion Airbumped into the Java Seakilling all 189 people on board. The vast majority of passengers on the October 29, 2018 flight were Indonesian.
Both crashes involved software known by the abbreviation MCAS turned his nose up of the aircraft repeatedly shot down based on erroneous readings from a single sensor.
Family members of people on both flights has sued Boeing in U.S. federal court in Chicago. Boeing settled the vast majority of these cases after requiring the families not to disclose how much they were paid.
The Riffels have found strength and purpose in meeting with the families of some of the other passengers of Flight 302. Together they have put pressure on the Justice Department, the Federal Aviation Administration and Congress to ensure that airplanes are as safe as possible.
Many of them want the government to prosecute senior Boeing officials, including former CEO Dennis Muilenburg and current CEO David Calhounwho was on the company’s board of directors when the crashes occurred. They have 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 group of relatives includes Javier de Luis, an aerospace engineer whose sister, Graziella, was on the Ethiopian flight. And Michael Stumo and Nadia Milleron, who lost their daughter Samya. Canadians Paul Njoroge and Chris and Clariss Moore have made several trips to Washington to plead with government officials to take action against Boeing and demand safer planes. Njoroge’s wife, three children and mother-in-law were all on the plane, as well as the Moores’ daughter, Danielle.
Initially, the multi-group family members were connected through emails to stay together. Soon, and especially after meeting in real life, they became more determined to do more than grieve together; they wanted to make a difference.
“We want to find meaning in what happened to our loved ones,” says Ike Riffel. “If we can make aviation safer so that this doesn’t happen again, then we’ve had some wins here.”