The mother of a 26-year-old flying officer who suicided broke down repeatedly as she recounted the catastrophic impact of losing her "beautiful boy" and the callous treatment by defence, which sent her into a spiral of desperation and alcoholism.
Patricia Fernandez de Viana said when she first learned her son James had killed himself at the Edinburgh RAAF Base in the early hours of 25 July 2019, she had begged them to leave her son's room untouched before she got there.
"I wanted to be able to be where he'd last been alive ... and to smell his smell in the room," Mrs Fernandez de Viana told the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide on Friday.
"By the time I arrived in Adelaide about ten days later his room had been completely sanitised. I really felt ... violated I didn't get to have that last clue as to how he was feeling."
Mrs Fernandez de Viana's harrowing testimony reduced many in the public gallery to tears as she detailed the unfolding horror for herself and her family in their desperate attempts to find out why James had suicided.
She said the ADF had blocked them at every turn, even refusing to pay for the airfare for their son's body to be returned to his family home in Mandurah, Western Australia because it exceeded their $10,000 limit for burial costs.
As a result, she said his body was delivered to them "in no fit state for viewing" after he was transported by ground across the Nullabor.
The commission heard the ADF had also failed to support the Fernandez de Viana family on every front - from grief counselling to releasing their son's medical records.
She said the family had been forced to rely on the veterans network to find grief counsellors, but the two counsellors only traumatised them further.
They were then left "dumbfounded" when a female counsellor told them its "a brave act to take your life, it is only the brave that do that".
The counsellor then proceeded to attack one of their sons, telling him his body language indicated he was "a very angry young man" who had "issues with women" and was headed for "a very unhappy life".
"It just was bizarre and out of the blue and because you are vulnerable and grieving," she told the commission.
Mrs Fernandez de Viana said after several more failed attempts to find a competent grief counsellor she gave up altogether and started drinking so heavily she had to be hospitalised.
"I ended up with the clinic with an overdose and alcoholism as a result of James's death."
Mrs Fernandez de Viana said she and her husband Michael Fernandez de Viana believed their son's mental decline had started with his failure to pass his initial pilot's training at RAAF Base East Salem in Victoria.
The commission heard James was "lost, sad, and depressed" about his failure, but the RAAF had compounded his problems when it refused to allow him to transfer to the navy where he could have used his honours degree in electrical engineering.
Instead he had been posted in an administrative role he didn't want where, in retrospect, they realised his health had quickly deteriorated.
Mrs Fernandez de Viana, a wound care specialist nurse, said she discovered the welter of medications her son was on when he died, including experimental treatments for malaria: "I was horrified, absolutely horrified."
On the night he died, the family had also desperately tried to contact him after discovering he had just broken up with his girlfriend.
Mrs Fernandez de Viana said when her husband had tried calling James he did not pick up and there was no emergency contact number on base to ask if someone could check on him in his room.
She told the commission she was still tormented by the thought that there would have been time to fly from WA to Adelaide that night if she had known the danger he was in.
"I could have got there to him and saved his life," she said.
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