Jury awards $28M to family of a United Nations consultant killed in Boeing 737 Max crash in Ethiopia

A federal court jury has awarded more than $24 million to the family of a woman who died in the crash of a Boeing 737 Max jetliner in Ethiopia more than six years ago.

The verdict was reached Wednesday on behalf of the relatives of Shikha Garg, a United Nations consultant, after a weeklong trial in Chicago, where Boeing used to have its headquarters. It was the first civil trial stemming from the March 2019 disaster that killed all 157 people on board Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.

“We and the family are gratified by the jury’s verdict. It provides public accountability for Boeing’s wrongful conduct,” the family’s team of lawyers, Shanin Specter and Elizabeth Crawford, said in a statement after the verdict was read in court.

Boeing will also pay an additional $3.4 million to Garg’s husband, Soumya Bhattacharya, as part of a deal between him and the company reached outside of court. That brings the total amount Boeing will pay to Garg’s family to $35.8 million.

The aircraft maker has negotiated pre-trial settlements in most of the dozens of wrongful death lawsuits filed after the crash, although details of the settlements were confidential and not disclosed. Lawyers say less than a dozen lawsuits remain unresolved.

In a statement Wednesday, Boeing apologized to all the victims’ families and said it respects their right to pursue their claims in court.

Jurors weren’t tasked with weighing the aircraft maker’s liability in the crash because Boeing has already accepted responsibility for it and for a similar 737 Max disaster five months earlier off the coast of Indonesia. Instead, they were asked to award damages for matters such as loss of income and grief suffered by Garg’s husband and parents.

Like a number of the other passengers, Garg, a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme, was on her way to attend a U.N. environmental assembly in Nairobi, Kenya.

At trial, Specter painted a picture for the jury of a young and accomplished woman who was married just months before she boarded the fatal Ethiopian Airlines flight. A citizen of India, Garg wore on the flight a sari and held flower garlands in line with Indian tradition.

The then-new Boeing Max crashed minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport. Specter called Garg’s death “senseless” and “preventable.”

Boeing lawyer Dan Webb, a former U.S. attorney, urged jurors to focus on “fair and reasonable” compensation for Garg’s family. One contentious point was whether Garg suffered pain in her final moments before death, with Boeing arguing that the passengers didn’t experience physical injury before impact.

“There would not have been time for them to feel any physical pain when they hit the ground,” Webb said.

From nearly the moment pilots flying for Ethiopian Airlines took off in their new Boeing jetliner, they encountered problems with the plane. The pilots were bombarded by alarms for six minutes as they fought to fly the plane before entering a final nosedive at nearly 700 miles per hour.

Amid the trial, a federal judge in Texas approved the Justice Department’s request to dismiss its long-running criminal case against Boeing in connection with the two 737 Max crashes. In exchange, Boeing has agreed to pay or invest an additional $1.1 billion toward fines, compensation for victims’ families, and internal safety and quality improvements.

U.S. prosecutors charged Boeing with conspiracy to commit fraud, accusing the company of deceiving government regulators about a flight-control system it developed for the 737 Max. In both crashes, the software had pitched the nose of the planes down repeatedly based on faulty readings from a single sensor.