A federal jury has awarded $49.5 million to the household of Samya Stumo, a 24-year-old world nonprofit employee killed within the 2019 crash of a Boeing 737 Max jet in Ethiopia.
The decision, reached Wednesday after a trial in federal courtroom in Chicago, resolves one of many final remaining wrongful demise lawsuits filed in reference to the catastrophe that killed all 157 people aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.
Stumo, who grew up in Sheffield, Massachusetts, had not too long ago joined a nonprofit targeted on strengthening well being techniques in growing nations. She was touring to Uganda for what would have been her first main undertaking with the group when the airplane crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019.
A 2015 graduate of the College of Massachusetts Amherst, Stumo was described by a UMass spokesperson after the crash as somebody identified “for participating others by incomes their respect, friendship and belief.”
Jurors awarded $21 million for the ache and struggling and emotional misery that Stumo skilled aboard the doomed flight, $16.5 million for the lack of companionship suffered by her household and $12 million for his or her grief, in accordance with attorneys representing her property.
“We’re gratified for the chance to attempt the compensatory damages case,” attorneys Shanin Specter and Elizabeth Crawford stated in a press release Wednesday night saying the decision.
It’s the second verdict tied to the crash. Boeing has reached confidential pre-trial settlements in a lot of the dozens of wrongful demise lawsuits filed in reference to the Ethiopian Airlines catastrophe and an analogous 737 Max crash 5 months earlier off the coast of Indonesia that collectively killed 346 folks.
The deadly crashes grew to become a defining disaster for Boeing and the 737 Max program. Investigators discovered {that a} flight-control system repeatedly pressured the nostril of the then-new planes downward primarily based on defective readings from a single sensor, and pilots in each crashes had been unable to regain management.
The decision follows a November 2025 jury award of $28.45 million to the household of Shikha Garg, a United Nations environmental marketing consultant who additionally died within the 2019 crash. That case marked the primary civil jury trial stemming from the catastrophe, with jurors equally tasked solely with calculating damages as a result of Boeing has accepted legal responsibility.
“We’re deeply sorry to all who misplaced family members on Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airways Flight 302. Whereas we’ve got resolved practically all of those claims by settlements, households are entitled to pursue their claims by the courtroom course of, and we respect their proper to take action,” a Boeing spokesperson stated Thursday in a press release.
The Ethiopian Airways crash prompted a worldwide grounding of the 737 Max that lasted greater than a 12 months and triggered a number of investigations into Boeing’s security tradition and regulatory oversight.
Federal prosecutors later charged Boeing with deceptive regulators in regards to the Max’s flight-control system, although in November, the federal decide in Texas overseeing the long-running felony case permitted a Justice Department request to dismiss it. Prosecutors reached an settlement with Boeing, requiring the corporate to take a position a further $1 billion in fines, household compensation and security enhancements.
Stumo’s household has been among the many most outspoken kinfolk looking for accountability from Boeing and adjustments to federal aviation oversight. Her father, Michael Stumo, has publicly pressed Boeing, regulators and Congress over what households considered as failures that allowed the 737 Max to maintain flying after the primary crash off the coast of Indonesia.