No mention of the crash itself was made during the service, except in the funeral program that said he died at age 36 "in the airplane tragedy in the Alps on the Germanwings Airbus A320 owned by Lufthansa."
Instead, the father of two small children was remembered as a deeply religious and dedicated family man on his last regular business trip abroad for the Barcelona-based clothing store chain Desigual.
"He just didn't want to be on the road so much. He had been traveling all over Europe for years and now he wasn't going to be traveling every week or every other week so he could spend more time with his family," friend Luis Anera, who led the memorial service, said in an interview.
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His son's remains were among those of 32 victims sent to Spain this week after the remains of German victims were sent home earlier. In all, 150 people died most of them German or Spanish.
Tansill Oliver said in an interview that the crash investigation must answer why the jet's co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who has been blamed for the March 24 crash, managed to keep flying despite visiting dozens of doctors in the five years he had been flying for the low-cost division of Lufthansa.
"It's hard for me to believe something didn't happen during one of his other flights and no one noticed," Tansill Oliver said.
Lubitz, who had a history of depression, had seven medical appointments in the month before the crash, including three with a psychiatrist, and had taken eight sick days off work, a French prosecutor has said. Some of the doctors felt Lubitz was psychologically unstable, and some felt he was unfit to fly, but didn't report that information to anyone because of medical secrecy laws.