OK, I read the ABC article (sorry, Freeper purists!), and it sounds like there’s plenty of blame to go around. Assuming the article is accurate (which may be a big assumption, I don’t know), the family tried to eat during the layover in Houston, but the daughter refused her food. The mother brought some snacks aboard the plane in hopes that this would work, but apparently not. So far, it sounds like she was doing what she could to stave off a problem.
I agree that she shouldn’t expect to be provided a service for which she did not pay. But why couldn’t the attendant warm up one of the snacks she brought? THAT just seemed really petty and heartless to me.
Where the mom went wrong is issuing her “warning” about her daughter’s behavior in a way that sounded like a threat. Under those conditions, I think the Captain did the prudent thing by making an emergency landing. Furthermore, the mom does herself no favors by threatening to sue over “discrimination.” That just makes her sound like an entitled attention whore.
But if what I’ve read is accurate, I must put the lion’s share of the blame on whichever attendant it was that refused to warm up the woman’s snack for her. Had this been done, it seems likely that the daughter would have been fine, and none of this would have happened.
If the daughter refused her food, they shouldn’t have boarded. They knew how she was. The world doesn’t revolve around her.
We live in a 47-53 country, about half of us manage to not expect everyone to bend to our needs, and about half of us are gimme dats.