United Airlines has agreed to settle a lawsuit for $30 million brought by a quadriplegic man who his family says was “violently” removed from a flight, causing extensive health damage.
United Airlines Settles Quadriplegic Lawsuit For $30 Million
26-year-old Nathaniel “NJ” Foster Jr. requires a wheelchair to travel. While traveling to a family funeral on United Express from San Francisco (SFO) to Monroe, Louisiana (MLU) in 2019, Foster purportedly encountered a hostile employee in Monroe.
The family alleged the “ramp supervisor” pushing the aisle chair jerked Monroe back and forth. When the family protested and asked for more assistance, he said:
“Fine. Do it yourself, then…I’m out.”
Next, a baggage handler strapped him to the aisle chair with a belt and “aggressively” pushed him, causing him to slump over. His mother told the court that she heard him say, “I can’t breathe,” and the agent responded by giggling.
He then entered cardiac arrest and suffered “significant” brain damage, falling into a vegetative state which he remains in today ( on a ventilator and tracheal tube, unable to eat solid foods or speak). Plaintiff medical experts predicted his lifespan would be cut 7.5 years, from 39 years old to 31.5 years old.
Per Reuters, United reached a settlement with the family after the first day of court for $30 million. $12 million would go to the attorneys defending the Foster family, $3 million would go toward other trial costs, and $15 million would go to the family.
“Our top priority is to provide a safe journey for all our customers, especially those who require additional assistance or the use of a wheelchair. We are pleased to share that this matter has settled.”
The settlement is still subject to judicial approval.
CONCLUSION
United Airlines has settled a lawsuit in which one of its contractors appears to have failed to properly secure and care for a patient in a wheelchair, causing extensive and permanent damage. This story is an important reminder that an organization is only as strong as its weakest link, but also that we must be vigilant in caring for those that we love. I hope this settlement brings about peace to the Foster family.
image: Stoll Law
People just need some compassion. I think everyone should spend a couple days in a hospice and realize what is really important.
Many people will, eventually.
It depends on the hospice. Some people will legally murder a person using hospice as an accomplish, possibly to get an inheritance faster. There are some activist hospices that will kill someone for you by over sedation until the person can’t eat or drink then ðie of dehydration. Those hospices will do so even if the person lacks a terminal disease, like cancer.
Not all hospices are like this but some are.
Good for them. They need to be held accountable. I’m sure the first thing that baggage handler thought was “I don’t get paid enough for this $%^&! Let’s get him off as quick as possible.” Just shows a lack of compassion on their part. If they’d done things right the first time, this whole thing likely could have been avoided.
I’m sure the family will put the money to good use in continuing care for NJ.
I doubt the family will spend the $15m for Mr. NJ. They should hire two doctors part time, paying them the same rate as doctors would make working in a clinic for half a day and really check on things but they won’t.
Mr. NJ’s lawyers claimed that he had a life expectancy of only 39 years old before the incident so he was in bad shape. Now they say his life expectancy is 31.5 years old.
In Canada, the awards are much smaller so settlements are, too.
All correct. The life expectancy of someone with a trach tube and using a ventilator is much lower due to the likelihood of dying from pneumonia or other respiratory infection. 15 million is miles and miles above what is fair to provide for his care. Given he was a quad on a vent before this incident, most of the cost of care should be attributed to the 2016 accident. He probably costs less now than he did before to care for.
Of course he would have been a doctor who graduated medical school and went into research. I’m sure his IQ and test scores would make this likely. I’m sure of it. The sky is pink. Men can be women. All things are possible in this new world.
Hi derek,
Can you tell us about other countries’ compensation? It’s really interesting and super relevant. How about, say, Palau’s?
$30 million is outrageous and grotesque. This was not a healthy man but a quadriplegic on a ventilator. I don’t know how anyone can leave their family member on life support during a coma with little chance of a recovery. The only hope for a miraculous recovery is being a quad on a vent. That’s not hope in my book.
The people who deserve blame are the government for forcing airlines to transport people who are disabled to this degree. People like this don’t belong on commercial aircraft. Unions and government deserve blame for making it difficult to fire bad employees as they can be sued. The individuals who dropped this man are to blame. Why should the airline have to pay for the actions of employees who didn’t follow precautions and procedure. Companies have no control over bad employees if there is no history or pattern of a problem.
While I agree the quality of life is not there, he still deserves to be treated with respect and dignity. That was not shown in this case. You are correct, companies have no control over bad employees. Yet, they are still a representation of that company, good or bad.
Such a sad story. Caring for a disabled loved one is difficult, and for NJ, I am sure his life was complicated enough before this incident. For people to be so callous and disrespectful is terrible. It is a reminder to be kind.
However the attorney fees seem exorbitant, but that’s another issue.
If I’m not emistaken, it was Expressjet, which has been out of business for a couple of years, that provided service at MLU at the time. It’s not clear from the article if the employees were Expressjet employees or employees of the airport.
It’s just another example of the lunacy of our “joint and several” liability laws which, as you can see by the nearly half of the award going to the plaintiff’s lawyers who set foot in court all of one day, isn’t going to change.
Terrible story.
Based on the absence of any racial discrimination claim, it can be inferred that the perpetrators were likely of the same race as the victim.
LOL ok.
Highly likely.
Sure, dear.
Pushing a wheelchair for United Express in Monroe, LA?
Ya think?
Why else would there not a be a racial component to the lawsuit?
Mr. NJ is the victim. The ground employees are jerks but they were not hired, trained, or have the background to be hospital transport / nurses / physical therapy assistants / home health aides
. The plaintiff’s lawyers are sharks, negotiating $12m for themselves + $3m for trial expenses.
There are some things in life that you have to do yourself. After the supervisor got mad, the family should have done it themselves. Not legally obligated but smart.
The family should have also considered why Mr. NJ had to go to the funeral. The funeral is not for the deceased. It is for yourself. He ŵas a poor travel risk.
CBS News online says the complaint stated that Mr. NJ normally needs 4-6 people to transport him so one employee may find it difficult.
The last comment I make is the stories reporting this don’t explain why the man is in a coma. Heart attack from stress? Ventilator tube dislodged? They should have accepted the surgeon’s help because he realized something before Mr. NJ turned blue.
3 cheers for Matthew for reporting better and including the legal fees, something other boardingarea.com articles missed.
This is me guessing as someone who has never seen this person or read more than this story and the CBS news story, so take it with a grain of salt…
He’s a vent dependent quadriplegic at the time of the event– if he can whisper out “I can’t breathe” that suggests a problem with either his vent setup or his trach tube– could be that the circuit was kinked or tube dislodged, among other things, or even that his vent settings were adjusted in the process of transporting him. The inability to breathe properly can precipitate the heart attack, and the lack of pulse and him turning blue suggest a lack of oxygen, in which case a brain injury from lack of oxygen can happen. If the brain injury is severe enough, he ends up in his current state (anoxic brain injury is my guess).
I’m not saying this to defend the employees involved in this, but taking a vent dependent quadriplegic on a commercial flight is inherently risky.
It sounds like the man and his family are culpable in the minds of rational people. The man shouldn’t have been flying on a commercial airline but people like him pressured the government to force airlines to accommodate disabled people and that’s why he was allowed to fly.
“$12 million would go to the attorneys defending the Foster family”. Wow!!! I am definitely in the wrong business.
Aren’t we all? And the court expenses were covered, too.
The $30m payout caught my attention and was curious to read the story. At first I thought that it was another involuntary removal from a plane like that guy a couple of years ago. But then when I got to the end of the story. I was like no amount of money can compensate what happened. With that being that. Only half of the money is going to the family!!! Seriously, what did the lawyers do to earn $12m, also $3m court costs???! really? Even $3m is a shit ton of money. I bet lawyers just use that money to pay a tiny bit to paralegals and their office staff etc and pad their pockets even more.
That may be true, but it seems the man was already wheelchair-bound and at least partially on a vent before the incident occurred. That’s a lot of money – more than many healthy people will earn in their lifetime.
True, that is a lot of money. Still doesn’t answer why the family only got half of the settlement…
That’s the traditional cut for personal injury attorneys (40%). That sounds high, and it is, but from my own personal experience they do a lot, and generally do not make a return like that on 99.99% of their cases. I changed my opinion of personal injury lawyers after my own case even though it cost me a couple hundred thousand dollars.
The problem is with the insurance companies. They will not take a case seriously until you get attorneys involved, and attorneys will not get involved until they think there’s enough $$$ there to get paid.
The system sucks!
The airline should have “refused ” to board him as too many risks to him and his very marginal health.. He needed ambulance transport to wherever the funeral was taking place!!! He had a good reason to not attend the funeral and watch it on Zoom… Nuts to get $30 million for this ..Was this a family set-up???
You may be right that he medically needed a different kind of air conveyance than a commercial jet, but to jump to the conclusion that this was a set up by the family is unjustified. Putting aside the amount of damages, (damages across the board have become lottery like), his injuries (vegetative state) are profound and there is no basis to believe the family was looking to create a payout. The family (and the family member) has obviously suffered enough, reasonable people can say our damage award system is broken, but let’s not blame the family for a national problem. (Europe does not have excessive payouts like the US).
It appears that NJ normally needed multiple people to transport him (4-6). It also sounds like the family asked for more assistance (I.e. more people to help) than what they were getting from the one frustrated employee. Instead of getting it, that person threw up his hands and someone else ( also singular took over). Maybe the airline doesn’t have the manpower to provide that kind of help, but trying to force a wheelchair that you can’t manage yourself was absolutely the wrong thing for both those employees to do. A supervisor should have been called to help find a solution, either by assigning more staff to help or working with the family to find an alternate option (volunteers from the crowd? I would have helped).
And the winners are… LAWYERS!! As isual. Congrats
I’m retired from UAL as a flight attendant..
There once was an FAR that doctor or nurse had to accompany paxs that were incapable of taking care of themselves to the extent this poor man was..
If still in effect why was this man on plane? The entire story is sad.
Nina Armstrong
Further information found: https://wheelchairtravel.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Foster_v_United_Airlines.pdf
Father is a manager for the US Postal Service. Mother is an economist for the federal government. Sister was 16 at the time. The man with the ventilator was 22 years old at the time. The plaintiff’s attorneys claim that the man wanted to become a doctor. Going to medical school and residency while on a ventilator and being paraplegic is next to impossible, on first thought.
The man on the ventilator had his ventilator tube dislodged sometime between exiting the EMB145 door and when CPR was in progress. Dislodging the tube is the probable cause, in my opinion. The nasty supervisor did not cause the problem. It was when exiting the aircraft door, the wheelchair’s wheels got caught and the wheelchair tipped forward then backwards.
The man was in the hospital for a little more than a week then returned to California by air ambulance.
Traveling with a ventilator and a wheelchair seems too much, in my opinion. It may be permitted but is quite a task.
Unfortunately, America discriminates by treating disabled people better than normal (or at least the judge/jury in the trial thinks so). 30 million dollars to a quadriplegic man is more absurd than his health condition or about the same.
The family is more culpable than the employees. They brought a man who required an inordinate amount of medical care without any qualified aid, other than themselves. Then they expected untrained airline employees to assist them. The employees did the best they could given the circumstances, and hopefully they did not receive any disciplinary action.
Also, it seems being strapped to a chair is not what caused him to go into cardiac arrest. More likely, it was him not receiving adequate oxygen from his respirator. Which was due to him being moved and shifted around. Which leads back to his family should have never put him in that position in first place.
Agree ovolt. The man had a tracheal tube, which requires skill and training to manage,so that it is not blocked and does not cut off his airway so as to prevent him from breathing. Trache care is not likely part of ordinary and usual training of flight attendants, supervisors, pilots, baggage handlers or any one else likely to be present on the scene of the incident. It was unreasonable of the family to expect this skill set to be present as well as four to six trained medical transporters for a commercial flight. The telephone booking agent would not ordinary know enough medicine to ask the proper questions before assuring the family that the handicapped son could fly commercial. Only the family would have this information.
The employees were not trained to handle a situation like this. The family should have dealt with this sensitive situation on their own. But based on the cruel and humiliating way the employees behaved, I’m fine with $30m.
Such a sad and avoidable situation.
The airline should not have subjected their employees to this situation. They should have required that that passenger is accompanied by a team of medically-trained personnel to take care of that passenger, including wheelchair services. With this in mind, they deserve to fork over the $30M.