Samya Stumo, who was raised in Sheffield, Massachusetts, was 24 and on her way to work on expanding affordable healthcare in Kenya in 2019 when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 fell to the earth just six minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. Months earlier, another Boeing 737 MAX crashed in Indonesia, killing 189. Subsequent investigations have found Boeing cut production corners, inadequately trained staff, left holes in safety protocols, and avoided regulatory oversight while producing its planes. For the last seven years, Stumo’s family – including her mother Nadia Milleron, who is currently running for the 1st Massachusetts Congressional District seat as an independent – have fought in court and in Washington for Boeing to be held responsible. Well, this month, a Chicago jury ruled that Boeing must pay Stumo’s family nearly $50 million. Milleron spoke with WAMC.
MILLERON: So, we actually have approached Boeing and accountability for their behavior and the killing of 346 people from two court systems. So, through the criminal side, in which we went all the way up to the appellate court level and were denied, and then also through the civil court side. In civil court, you cannot get your loved one back. You cannot put a Boeing executive in jail. All you can do is ask for damages, and Boeing, in order to protect themselves from scrutiny, public scrutiny, they just said, we are responsible for these crashes, and by saying that, then it wasn’t an issue that we are arguing over, and they could protect themselves from any details about that. So, by saying, we admit responsibility, then no scrutiny on executives, what they did, the documents involved, who made decisions, how the plane was malfunctioning- All of that is remains secret, remains private to Boeing, and the only issue is how much compensation to give the family and the estates of the deceased. But we did push this through the court system as far as we could.
WAMC: Now, a jury in Chicago has ruled in favor of an almost $50 million award to your family as a result of this process. Before we get to the immediate response of Boeing to that ruling, can you talk about what it means to see all of this, this seven years of fighting for your daughter and for those who perished with her, end up being a sum of money?…