A father who lost 2 sons in a Boeing Max crash waits to hear if the US will prosecute the companyFILE - Protesters hold the photographs of victims, including Melvin Riffel, left, of the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash, outside Boeing's annual shareholders meeting in Chicago on April 29, 2019.
Ike Riffel fears that instead of putting Boeing on trial, the government will offer the company another shot at corporate probation through a legal document called a“A DPA hides the truth. A plea agreement would hide the truth,” Riffel says. “It would leave the families with absolutely no idea” of what happened inside Boeing as“The families want to know the truth. Who was responsible? Who did what?” the father says.
In early 2019, Mel and his wife, Brittney, took a “babymoon” to Australia. Brittney flew home while Mel met his brother in Taiwan to start what they called their world tour. He and Bennett were headed toward their last stop, South Africa, where Mel planned to do some surfing, when they boarded the Ethiopian Airlines flight in Addis Ababa.
He and his wife believe they were deceived by the Justice Department, which until then had denied there was a criminal investigation going on. Boeing has never contacted the family, according to Riffel. He assumes that's based on advice from the company's lawyers. Boeing has said it lived up to the terms of the deal, which required it to pay $2.5 billion, most of it to the company's airline customers, and to maintain a program to detect and prevent violations of U.S. anti-fraud laws, among other conditions., with the largest numbers from Kenya and Canada. Nearly two dozen passengers were flying to attend a United Nations environmental conference in Nairobi.in U.S. federal court in Chicago.