“Knox’s parents have paid . . . or somebody funded . . .for sending their daughter to Italy. And somebody is paying to fly her home. Who?:
I just found a one-way fare from Seattle to Rome for $899.00. Those are today’s prices. That certainly isn’t very expensive.
Let's figure $1300 round trip. $2600 for the two parents. This was their 24th trip, so airfare was around $62,000. Hotel for 24 one week stays (I'm sure it was longer than that during the trial) at $200 a night (at least) comes to $34,000. So lets call it $100,000. Then eating would come to at least $100 a day, which is $17,000. That gives us a travel bill of roughly $120,000.
Legal fees for a murder trial and appeal over four years? At least (I'm really lowballing) $1500 a week...for 200 weeks for a lawyer's tab of $300,000.
Grand total...a minimum of $420,000. And they still had to pay their regular bills at home during all this.
I know the grandmother spent $250,000 of her own money, so one can imagine the true cost.
This family is broke.
My parents paid for me to go to school in Spain for a year, back in the 70s. With tuition, flight, room, and board they about broke even with what they would have paid for the school year if I’d lived at home and attended school as a day student. For parents paying for college tuition it’s not out of line. A lot of the state schools offer and encourage programs abroad for a term, which appears to be exactly what she was doing.