Meryn and Jon O’Brien heard the words no parent should ever hear after their son Jack boarded doomed flight MH17 on his journey home to Australia. Now, a verdict in the murder trial is due.
"The final picture of him was turning a corner and then running down the last corridor to get to the plane," Jon says.Meryn says she doubled over when she watched the footage.The trip of a lifetimeJon says he could be outgoing and loved his sport, but he was fundamentally a thoughtful person who liked time by himself. They say throughout university he came to know who he was and wanted to experience life.Jack was the big brother to his sister Bronwyn.
The couple also saw the national monument near the airport where Jack was last seen, as well as the reconstruction of the front of the plane, which Jon describes as "sobering"."All those wrongs and injustices inflicted on the 298 people in MH17 have now just been magnified, and so many other people have been drawn into that suffering," Jon says.
For Meryn and Jon, the fact that the three Russian nationals and one Ukrainian separatist are being tried in absentia - they are still at large - is still important."It's a thorough, meticulous process with reams and reams of evidence that’s been weighed up.""Even though there's not going to be a punishment, people will hear the truth, and that will be stated definitively for the whole world to hear," Jon says.