While this goes back a couple of years, video footage has just recently emerged of an incident that occurred on July 21, 2015, between a United employee and customer at Houston Airport. In the video you can see a United customer service agent intentionally shoving a 71 year old man to the ground after he asks a question. Even after being shoved and lying on the floor motionless, he’s ignored by all United employees. While the passenger had already pressed charges, he’s now suing over what happened.
It might sound like he’s just trying to piggyback on what happened with Dr. Dao in terms of the lawsuit, but this is actually really disgusting, especially as there’s video footage. Per Click2Houston, here’s what unfolded:
Hoke claims this all began with Tigner simply asking Anastasia for a new boarding pass because the one he had was garbled. The suit claims Anastasia laughed at him and cursed at him.
“Anastasia was looking at Mr. Tigner and started smiling and said, ‘Can’t you see we’re busy?’ and there’s no one in the vicinity of these two employees,” Hoke said. “And he tells Anastasia to wipe that smile off his face. That’s when Anastasia says, ‘I’ll kick your (expletives)’ and shoves Tigner to the ground.”
Anastasia was later charged with the felony crime of injury to an elderly individual, ordered to pay a fine, write a letter of apology and attend anger-management classes.
That’s bad enough, but equally bad is that he’s ignored by all other United employees in the area, while on the ground. Un-freaking-believable. Do these people not have hearts?!
United issued the following statement regarding the situation:
We have seen the video from 2015 that shows completely unacceptable behavior by a United employee. This employee is no longer with our company. The conduct shown here does not reflect our values or our commitment to treat all of our customers with respect and dignity. We are taking a thorough look into what happened here and reaching out to our customer to profusely apologize for what occurred and to make this right.
Terrible! While this situation happened before the recent Dr. Dao incident, I think we’re slowly reach a turning point when it comes to abusive employees in the airline industry. There’s more awareness of this kind of stuff than ever before, and also more people filming everything. Stuff like this simply can’t be allowed to happen anymore.
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