The Manhattan mother of a 5-year-old boy who was mistakenly put on the wrong international flight by himself has rejected a $10,000 "gift" offer from JetBlue and is instead suing their airline for negligence. In a lawsuit filed today, Maribel Martinez is seeking unspecified damages after her son Andy was placed on the wrong flight leaving the Dominican Republic and ended up at Boston's Logan Airport when he was supposed to arrive at JFK.
"I thought he was kidnapped," Martinez, 38, told the Daily News earlier this month. "I thought I would never see him again." After it became clear that Andy was not on his intended flight, a panicked Martinez alerted JetBlue staff, demanding to know where her son had gone. The airline's staff then reportedly presented her with a different young boy who was carrying her son's passport. The child was a stranger to Martinez.
In her lawsuit, Martinez describes her experience as one of “emotional distress, extreme fear, horror, mental shock, mental anguish and psychological trauma."
It took three hours until the mix-up was solved—Martinez's son and the other young boy were mistaken for one another at Cibao Airport in Santiago, and Andy was ultimately found safe in Boston. Following the incident, JetBlue launched an internal investigation into how the mistake took place at the request of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Attorney Sanford Rubenstein, who is representing Martinez, told the News his client's lawsuit was filed out of a lack of faith of the company's own self-inquiry and aims “to shine a light on what occurred to prevent it from happening again."
"Any parent can understand the terrifying fear a mother goes through knowing that her child is missing," Rubenstein told the tabloid in a previous interview. "This never should have happened and the JetBlue employees should be ashamed of themselves."
When asked about the incident, a spokesperson for JetBlue told Gothamist the company does not comment on pending litigation.
