Posted on 12/29/2017 9:44:57 AM PST by Morgana
FULL TITLE: Family sues Alaska Airlines after wheelchair-bound grandmother fell down airport escalator and died following surgery to amputate her leg due to wounds from her accident
A family is suing Alaska Airlines and a contractor after a disabled 75-year-old grandmother suffered a fall down a Portland International Airport escalator in June and later died.
Video captured the moment that Bernice Kekona, seat-belted to her power wheelchair, tumbled and crashed down an escalator, landing near the bottom with the heavy chair on top of her.
After her flight from Hawaii landed in Portland in June 2017, the family says they hired a contractor to make sure Kekona arrived safely to her connecting flight. But now they argue the airline and its contractor did not provide the service as promised.
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(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
In before the Hillary pics.
No, she fell down the escalator, not up it.
Grandmas and Grandpas escape all the time. Grandma told them to go away. And she thought the escalator was an elevator.
American Airlines has deep pockets.
That's all that's needed for a lawsuit. Someone with lots of money.
Hillary is the new Helen Thomas?
The idiot was completely by herself. There was no attendant there.
Good news is that she died, cutting the airline’s cost from millions to hundreds of thousands (a death claim for a 75 year old, not worth much).
The stories I read on DM and from FReepers last summer made it sound like you had to pay just to exhale.
Complaints of size or weight of luggage or customers flying. Then they, and by they I mean the airline just goes and boots you off because they sell your seat to someone else. The seat you bought and paid in advance. They give you crappy service, and if you/and your your luggage gets to where you are going it’s a bloody miracle.
Now I don’t recall which airline was spoken of and what snacks and food had to be paid for but just remember FReepers complaining it used to be free now it’s not. The airlines have done a nosedive in standards and just not what they used to be.
You see I’ve come to expect anything and everything from airlines. They are like Ma Bell of the past “They don’t care they don’t have too” mentality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ_BwnbSrWs
“put herself on the escalator.”
I watched the video a number of times and I didn’t see anyone within reach of her. She appears to have just driven the thing on to the down escalator.
But the contractor, apparently hired by Alaska Airlines, was hired to see that an old woman was moved safely to her next flight. If he wasn’t watching her at that particular moment, and at her age, she may not even have known what she was about to do.
The elevators are normally a good distance from the escalators so she never should have been there at all. And if she was a safety risk, and the contractor was in charge, why was she even in a motorized chair? He should have stowed the chair, if hers, and moved her with a manual chair. They will get a lot in the suit.
rwood
“Do you think an airline would allow someone to travel if she is not in her right mind?”
Dude! Please! Not only did they let sheila jackson lee fly but United Airlines bumped that bitch up to first class booting a paying costumer out!!
sheila jackson lee in Queen of Crazy!
I think you are close to the answer. The family was attempting to arrange care for her during her trip due to the fact that she was disabled. Evidently the disability was not just that she was dependent upon a wheelchair.
A vendor who proposes to handle the disabled has a responsibility to understand the disability sufficiently to plan for success. This is what the family was expecting.
I would guess that any court case is going to hinge on whether the vendor was reasonable in letting the woman go on her own simply because the woman asked to. That is a foreseeable problem.
I can imagine such a vendor contracting to care for a seven-year-old. Would it be reasonable for the vendor to allow such a child to go on its own in a case like this? I don't think so.
How then did it happen that some employee thought it reasonable to allow this disabled lady to go on her own? The woman was an adult. The family had a responsibility to inform the vendor of the true extent of her disability and the vendor had a responsibility to act accordingly, even if that meant that the family needed to provide a custody agreement with the vendor or something similar to a "power of attorney".
It may turn out that several of the parties must share responsibility for what happened. Many accidents can be traced to a chain of failures.
You’re getting sensationalized stories that are mostly wrong.
They don’t boot you off for “sell your seat to someone else.”
People get pulled off for various reasons but it’s never for selling the seat to someone else.
Crappy service: maybe. Have you ever tried Southwest?
Luggage: 98% of the time it gets with you on the flight. When it misses, it’s usually because of the TSA.
With the cost of inflation, your ticket is way down from what it used to be. Again, check the government fees to see the real problem.
When is the last time you’ve heard of a major crash in the US? I can get anywhere in the US in a matter of hours because of the airlines—cut them some slack.
“Oh Mears. You may be old, but I reckon you wouldn’t put your wheelchair on an escalator that the wheels don’t even fit on and tumble down to the bottom cracking your wonderful old skull in the process.
Even as a scheme to get money for your family. “
I certainly wouldn’t——I’d just run down the escalator wearing clogs.:-)
.
:)
Well I think that is in cases of shared negligence. But if you can’t prove causation, there’s no negligence in common law. Judges who rule otherwise are unjust unless there is an unjust statutory law in that particular state allowing for such nonsense, but I doubt the majority of people in very many states would go along with such a law.
You take an escalator down to the lower level, then you walk outside and go up the stairs to the smaller plane. However, if she was in a wheelchair, I don't know how she would've gotten up the stairs into the plane.
The "they say" will be the crux of the case. If they have a paid-for contract that states what was agreed to, AA better call their insurer.
Sad but probably true.
All that would have been required from an attendant was to be cherry, interested willing to walk along side her to the next gate.
How was your flight?
Was the weather nice in Hawaii?
How are you off to visit? Oh, I have an Aunt Tilly too.
I think we might want to go the right here.
Perfect. Ah, I see Gate 23 up ahead.
We’ll get you checked in.
You get the idea. She could refuse my help, but could not get me to go away.
I'm just saying that people sue people or entities who have lots of money.
And filing a lawsuit is not predicated on having a winnable case.
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