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?
Yeah, I mean, what we want is for nobody to die on an airplane in a preventable death, where there is negligence and a lack of care in the manufacturing process or otherwise in the design process. So that's what we want, is for no one else to die in the same way, and so we kept reliving the crash, the details of the crash, and my daughter was not really about how she died, the six minutes and 40 seconds, that last six minutes and 40 seconds of her life were not what she was about, but we couldn't celebrate her life and try to help with causes that she might have pursued in her life, because we have kept trying to fight to prevent future deaths. And Boeing could have just taken care of that by attending to the problems that are at issue here, but instead of that, they fought it tooth and nail, and they avoided responsibility and airing information about how did this all happen. So, it's just a constant reliving, and then the last 10 days during the trial were a more excruciating form of that, where we were basically on trial about our relationships with our daughter to try to prove that we had a relationship with our own daughter. And our sons also were on the witness stand about that. And then also her suffering- The question was, did she suffer? And then we got not a judgment but a jury verdict, so the jury heard all this evidence, and they said yes, she did suffer, and now Boeing tries to say they didn't have enough evidence, the jury, they weren't exposed in the trial to sufficient evidence to say that she did suffer, which is absolutely crazy as I was there during the reliving the whole thing.
Now you're preparing for this next step of the journey, where Boeing is already trying to overturn this verdict- Can you talk to us a little bit about the fight ahead, having to face another chapter of this legal battle? I mean, this sounds like it's been gut-wrenching so far. Where are you at right now, looking into this next hurdle with Boeing?
Well, I never even knew all of the details of the horrific six minutes and 40 seconds that we have had to relive over and over with four expert witnesses, some from us and some from Boeing, going over the details of these last minutes of my daughter's life. So, the plane, there's a graph that comes from the black box -- which is actually orange -- but all of the data that comes from the plane is all available. And so, the jury was able to look at this graph, in which the plane is going up and down and up and down since the beginning of the flight, and these oscillations are getting more and more intense, closer together, and extreme. The experts are saying, okay, at this point, the plane dropped 284 feet in this amount of time, and it would be like as if you were in a building three times this size of this building, and then you were in the elevator, and the cable broke, and that's what it would feel like, right? So, we are having to relive all that, and then you think to yourself, why, why would Boeing contest the best effort that a jury made to look at this evidence and determine how much suffering? Well, to me it's just about being parasitic. The executives, [Boeing CEO] Kelly Ortberg, the lawyers, the expert witnesses- Their expert witness got $64,000 for the course of the trial, and $450,000 for the whole case. These people are earning money off of this case, and so why would they want it to end? So, you just have to look at the reality of Boeing as an amazing producer of airplanes and other important equipment for the United States, and that's all on the back of the workers, and then who is extending this case and who is evading responsibility? The parasites of the company that are the executive and the lawyers.
I want to give you space to share anything you want to share about your daughter, about this experience, about what you've learned about America from this long and painful journey- Give you sort of a free space to express that. Is there anything I have not thought to ask you that you really want to make sure that people understand?
That we think we have a justice system to keep perpetrators -- whether they be individuals or corporations -- accountable to prevent future harm to the public. That's the purpose of our justice system. So, when you go to the criminal side, you see that no matter how hard we tried and said to judges, you have to pay attention here, future plane loads of people could be at risk, and we can see pilots fighting the reality of the bad production in factories of this plane today. So, lots of defects on this plane because of shorting production, using the money to buy back stocks, which then gives a bonus to the executives, so they have that incentive to short the production of their own product, which is not capitalism. We try to keep them accountable through the criminal system, but then you have prosecutorial discretion, and then you have the DOJ saying, well, we're just, after five years of litigation, and the company still continuing to risk people's lives, and having a blowout on the plane, and clearly continuing to produce defective claims that risk people's lives, what we're just going to randomly, because we're the prosecutor and we have this discretion, we're just, for no reason, we're going to tell the public we're just going to stop litigating. And there was nothing we could do about that. We appealed it to the Fifth Circuit, and we couldn't do anything about it. And then on the civil side, you think, okay, well, we're going to get accountability there, but no. Boeing avoids accountability just by saying we did it, we did it, we're not going to tell you how, we're not going to have depositions on the executive, we're not going to reveal any of our problems that we have in the company so as to avoid future problems. So, what it does is, because we have these faults in our justice system, it allows a corporate perpetrator who killed 346 people just to continue on risking people's lives. And so ultimately, we don't have a responsible FAA, we don't have a responsible justice system, we don't have these people that we believe were in place keeping us safe, and so we have to take responsibility for our own lives. And that's what my daughter didn't have a chance to do, because she didn't know the plane was dangerous, and so she didn't have a chance to avoid it. But people can do that now- They can avoid a MAX plane. MAX planes, if you look at the pilot reports and the problems that pilots are having with this plane, 7,8, 9, and 10 MAX planes, you can see that they are a problem, and you can avoid them as consumers. And ultimately, as a consumer, that's what we have to do. We have to protect ourselves. My daughter knew nothing about aviation, and she just cared that everybody has health care in the world, and that everybody would be entitled healthcare, and that people be accountable for money spent on health care, which often don't even go for health care. They go for all the infrastructure bureaucracy of insurance companies, and so that's what she had dedicated her life to. And we intend to push that as hard as we can, funding young women to help get health care for their communities.
