FILE - Protesters hold photographs of victims, including Melvin Riffel, left, of the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines plane crash, outside Boeing's annual shareholders meeting in Chicago on April 29, 2019. Families of the 346 people who died in two crashes of Boeing 737 Max jetliners are waiting to hear if the Justice Department will prosecute the U.S. aerospace company
The Riffels and families of other passengers who died in the crash and a similar one in Indonesia a little more than four months earlier are waiting to learn any day now whether the U.S. Justice Department, all these years later, will prosecute Boeing in connection with the two disasters, which killed 346 people.
Mel was 29 and preparing to become a father himself when Ethiopian 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, loved performing arts while growing up. He worked in IT support in Chico, California, and clients still send cards to his parents.
"When you first hear it, you don't believe it," Ike Riffel says. "You still don't believe after you see that there was a crash. 'Oh, maybe they didn't get on.' You think of all these scenarios." "I have no trust in to do the right thing, and I really lost my confidence in the Department of Justice," he says. "Their motto is to protect the American people, not to protect Boeing, and it seems to me they have spent the whole time defending Boeing."
In both crashes, software known by the acronym MCAS pitched the nose of the plane down repeatedly based on faulty readings from a single sensor.