American Airlines Sued For Negligence by Haitian Family

Keraphline and her grandmother took Josaphat to drop at the Queens airport at 3:00 am in the morning. As per Keraphline's statement, when she booked the airline ticket for her dad she had asked and arranged for special assistance. Again, when she visited the airport to help her father check-in, she disclosed every fact of her father's Alzheimer's and dementia to the American Airline attendant and also specifically did mention that he cannot do anything on his own. She and her grandmother put Josaphat in a wheelchair and watched him disappearing through the gate with the airline attendant. However, after a prolonged wait at the Florida airport the other family member realized that Josaphat is missing; he had never boarded the right flight from New York.

When Keraphline reported the fact of missing to the airline, they said her father was never listed in their system for special-assistance services. Secondly, their security video footage at the airport revealed that Josaphat never passed through that to board his flight. The police found no trace of him in the airport. The airline refunded $304.60 for the ticket that Josaphat Dupuy never used on last January 16... and no apology, no explanation. There was no trace of him; his cell phone was not responding.

The next day, the police had reported that his luggage has been found abandoned on a Brooklyn street, with his passport still inside. The bag contained a paperwork from New York University Langone Medical Center in Manhattan that states that he was treated in the emergency room for a backache -- and then "just put back out into the streets". One month later, Keraphline received a bill of $949.67 from the hospital.

Josaphat was found three days later in the freezing cold, soaking wet about 25 miles from the airport on a street in Brooklyn, without any memory of the past hours. He took two weeks to recover in an intensive care unit of New York Community Hospital on Kings Highway.

As per Peter Whitney, Keraphline's attorney, once the airline acknowledges such occurrence, this would be a text book case of negligence.

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