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Los Angeles teachers sue Delta after jet fuel dump over schools, playgrounds
“Students began screaming and crying because their eyes and skin were burning. Fear, dread, panic, and helplessness ensued,” according to a teacher.
Four Los Angeles teachers sued Delta Airlines less than a week after a China-bound plane dumped fuel over playgrounds and schools, citing emotional anguish and distress and accusing the pilot of failing to follow protocol.
The teachers, who have not been identified, say the airline was negligent by allowing the plane to depart in the first place.
In their suit, the teachers from Park Avenue Elementary School in south Los Angeles County, some 17 miles from Los Angeles International Airport, said they could feel fuel on their clothing, skin and eyes. The exposure caused the women to feel dizzy, nauseated and sick, attorney Gloria Allred said. Young students screamed and cried, she said.
“They also suffered severe emotional distress from the knowledge that they had involuntarily ingested toxins,” Allred said in a statement Friday. “Their severe emotional distress includes the reasonable fear that the exposure to and ingestion of jet fuel might produce serious health consequences in the future.”
The teachers are seeking compensatory damages.
Delta Airlines did not respond to a request for comment Friday, but has previously said the fuel dump was “required as part of normal procedure to reach a safe landing weight.”
On Tuesday, Delta Flight 89, which was headed to Shanghai, experienced engine trouble shortly after takeoff. The pilot declared an in-flight emergency and notified air traffic control personnel that the plane needed to return to LAX. The pilot did not inform the control tower that the plane would need to dump fuel to lighten its load, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The teachers’ lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleged that the Delta pilot “was specifically asked” by air traffic control personnel if he needed to dump fuel and the pilot allegedly replied “negative.”
“We’ve got it under control,” the pilot said, according to the lawsuit.
Allred said that if the pilot had properly alerted air traffic personnel on the ground, the flight would have been directed to a safe location and altitude from which it could dump fuel without posing a risk to the general public.
The pilot dropped fuel at around 2,000 feet, hitting several schools in its path.
One of the teachers in the suit said her fifth-grade students initially thought the jet fuel was rain. The children looked up “only to have noxious liquid then overwhelm [their] eyes, mouths, noses, lungs and skin,” the teacher said in a statement.
“I immediately began to rush my students indoors, as the fumes were stifling,” she said. “Students began screaming and crying because their eyes and skin were burning. Fear, dread, panic, and helplessness ensued.”
Article via NBCNews
Four black men accused of 1949 rape of white woman in Florida are pardoned
Four black men accused of 1949 rape of white woman in Florida are pardoned
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — After a dramatic, hour-long meeting that recalled events from nearly seven decades ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s three-member Cabinet granted posthumous pardons Friday to four African-American men accused of raping a white woman in a 1949 case now seen as a racial injustice.
The case of the men known as the Groveland Four has been documented in a book and is considered a blight on Florida’s history. One of the four was killed before he could be charged and the other three were convicted on dubious evidence.
The families of the men accused of the assault told DeSantis and the Cabinet — meeting as the clemency board — that there is overwhelming evidence the men were innocent and there was no rape. The woman who was 17 when she said she was raped, sat in a wheelchair and later told Gov. DeSantis and the Cabinet the rape did indeed happen, saying she was dragged from a car, had a gun put to her head and was told not to scream or they would “blow your brains out.”
At one point, the two sides briefly clashed. Beverly Robinson, a niece of one of the Groveland Four, was speaking to the governor and the Cabinet when she turned to the woman and her sons.
“It never happened. You all are liars,” Robinson said.
“That’s enough out of you,” the woman said.
“I know it’s enough out of me. It’s always enough when you’re telling the truth,” Robinson replied.
The unanimous vote to pardon came almost two years after the state House and Senate voted to formally apologize to relatives of the Groveland Four and to ask then-Gov. Rick Scott to pardon the men. Scott, now a U.S. senator, never took action. DeSantis replaced Scott on Tuesday and made the pardons a priority.
“I don’t know that there’s any way you can look at this case and think that those ideals of justice were satisfied. Indeed, they were perverted time and time again, and I think the way this was carried out was a miscarriage of justice,” DeSantis said.
The ordeal began in Lake County in 1949, when the then-17-year-old said she had been raped. Three of the men were arrested and severely beaten; a fourth, Ernest Thomas, fled.
A posse of about 1,000 men was formed to hunt down Thomas. He was shot 400 times when they found him sleeping under a tree. White residents also formed a mob and went to a black neighborhood, burning houses and firing guns into homes in a disturbance that took days to quell.
Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd were convicted by an all-white jury. Other evidence that could have exonerated them — such as a doctor’s conclusion that the teen probably wasn’t raped — was withheld at their trial. Greenlee was sentenced to life, and Irvin and Shepherd to death.
Thurgood Marshall, later the first African-American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, took up Irvin and Shepherd’s appeals for the NAACP, and in 1951 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered new trials.
Just before those trials began, Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall shot Irvin and Shepherd, claiming the handcuffed men tried to escape as he transferred them from prison to a jail. Shepherd died. Irvin was shot in the neck and survived despite an ambulance refusing to transport him because he was black. He was again convicted, even though a former FBI agent testified that prosecutors manufactured evidence against him.
Charges were never brought against any white law enforcement officers or prosecutors who handled the cases.
Irvin was paroled in 1968 and found dead in his car while returning to Lake County for a funeral a year later.
Greenlee was paroled in 1960 and died in 2012.
Greenlee’s daughter, Carol Greenlee, told DeSantis and the Cabinet that there was overwhelming evidence that her father was innocent.
“He was accused, put in jail and tortured for something he didn’t do,” she said.
The woman who said she was raped disputed the families’ stories.
“Y’all just don’t know what kind of horror I’ve been through for all these many years,” she said. “I don’t want them pardoned, no I do not, and you wouldn’t neither. I know (Robinson) called me a liar, but I’m not no liar.”
Afterward, state Sen. Gary Farmer, who sponsored the 2017 resolution apologizing to the families, said the woman’s comments were disappointing.
“She’s now here at the end of her life and she had a chance to come clean, to seek forgiveness for herself and to support the justice these four families and these four men deserve,” Farmer said. “It’s very said that she lost this opportunity and continues to perpetuate this lie. This crime did not happen. The evidence is overwhelming.”
Article via NBCNews