Four weeks have passed since the devastating July 10 plane crash near San Andros Airport that claimed 10 lives, including Giovanni “Geo” McKenzie – the only son of Apostle Dr. Jan Jones. Today, the heartbroken mother continues to be swallowed by overwhelming waves of grief, saying she is adrift in a fog of sorrow that she cannot navigate on her own. “We pray, but this is not easy,” Dr. Jones shared in a recent interview. “We may start laughing and talking like everything is normal, but the pain is always there, cutting through any moment of lightness.”
The family alternates between small moments of calm and days crippled by sadness, clinging to their faith to carry them through, even as unanswered questions about the crash continue to hang over them. Dr. Jones revealed that McKenzie’s youngest sister – a teenager he helped raise – constantly asks why her brother had to die that way. The young girl also struggles to accept that he will not be there to walk across the stage with her at her high school graduation next year.
For Dr. Jones, the void left by her son’s death is a permanent, aching absence. “If you let this grief consume you, you could literally lose your mind,” she explained. “Some days I don’t eat. Some nights I can’t sleep. I’m just… gone. I don’t know how to explain it – I’m in a place where even I don’t know where I am right now.”
Dr. Jones described her bond with McKenzie as unbreakable. Her three daughters often teased that McKenzie was her favorite child, and while the mother of four says she loves all her children equally, she acknowledged McKenzie held a unique place in her heart. The two shared endless common ground, and countless first experiences together. “We talked about everything,” she said. “Even though his father was in his life, he always came to me with everything. I taught him how to drive. I bought him his very first musical instruments.”
The way Dr. Jones learned of her son’s death only added more trauma to the tragedy. She first saw the news on social media, as friends messaged her telling her to check Facebook for updates on the crash, rather than receiving an official notification from government or airline authorities. “It was wrong,” she said of the experience. “We should have gotten a call from officials first, not finding out that your only son is dead from a random Facebook post and people messaging you about it.”
When the news hit, she said the pain felt identical to the labor contractions she experienced when giving birth to McKenzie. “I couldn’t even cry at first,” she recalled. “All I could do was speak in tongues – that was the only language my body and soul knew in that moment. I just asked God what His answer was to all this pain. I just needed to hear something from Him in the middle of that horror.”
Now, as the family prepares to lay McKenzie to rest this weekend, her symptoms of grief have only intensified, with many sleepless nights and lost meals. At 35 years old, McKenzie was a talented keyboardist and beloved bandleader with big dreams for his future. In one of their final conversations before he boarded the doomed Flamingo Air flight, he shared his ambitious plans for the year, all centered on his lifelong passion for music. He had recently purchased new instruments, was developing his music project Da Pond with dreams of touring internationally, and hoped to open a music school alongside launching several other small businesses.
“Wherever music was, that’s where you’d find him,” Dr. Jones said of her son. “He was always so ambitious, he always believed he would make it to the top – that’s how I raised all my children, it comes from the work I do too.”
The crash has also left a deep gap in McKenzie’s church family at Revolution Church, where he worshipped regularly and played keyboard for services. Congregation members remember him as a warm, kind person fully devoted to his faith. Dr. Jones remembers her son as a visionary and a builder of people, someone who dedicated himself to bringing out the best in everyone around him.
To this day, Dr. Jones says she still has many lingering questions about the crash that killed her son – some she is not ready to share publicly. So far, representatives from Flamingo Air have not reached out to meet with the families of the victims, but Dr. Jones says she holds onto hope that she will get the answers she seeks eventually. “The only thing I need to do right now is lay my son to rest, give him peace,” she said. “Anything else I have to handle can wait until after that.”