John Makita

was the fact of seeing the emotion also on the first responders who had arrived in the scene.

There are a couple of instances where we had police officers and they were quite visibly shaken, even 25 years later, in how they felt when they had been on the scene.

And also hearing what they had said, hearing what they had seen and what they had found.

that was really hard for us to hear.

And I think foreclosure, we needed to hear it.

It'll be something that we'll never forget.

But when we did get the jury decision, there was, I can say, this huge amount of weight that was lifted off my shoulders walking out of the courtroom knowing that after so long that we had got...

these two convictions of manslaughter against these two offenders.

Yeah, it wasn't easy also.

You know, you have to sit there calmly.

You can't have any outbursts like you see on TV, you know, people screaming out and wailing and that sort of stuff.

So being in the courtroom with the two offenders on a daily basis was quite hard to do because you just feel as though that you do need to say something, but they very rarely ever gave us a glance.

Yes, absolutely.

I think I've asked most of the family, if possible, if anybody would like to be involved.

I think this is an opportunity for each of us to share what our experiences were like.

And especially considering that during the jury's deliberations, we got the feeling that there was potentially a bit of toying with the difference between murder versus manslaughter.

And therefore, I think the judge needs to know, Justice Mossop going forward, that how this has affected each and every one of us for so long when he makes his decision as to what he's going to sentence these two offenders to.

that it is going to be commiserative with what they have actually done.

In our eyes, it's always going to be is that they went in there, you know, with their, I'll call them weapons or, you know, and therefore we believe that they had every expectation that potentially something would happen to my grandparents.

of a terrible nature.