Just days before a highly anticipated trial was scheduled to start, Boeing and Paul Njoroge—a Canadian man who lost his entire family in the tragic 2019 Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash—have reached an eleventh-hour settlement.
Njoroge initiated a lawsuit demanding millions in damages, referencing the significant emotional distress he has experienced since the tragedy. In March 2019, his family was en route to their home country of Kenya when the Boeing 737 MAX encountered a catastrophic malfunction shortly after departing from Addis Ababa. The aircraft crashed minutes later, resulting in the deaths of all 157 individuals on board.
Among those who lost their lives were Njoroge’s wife, Carolyne, and his three young children: six-year-old Ryan, four-year-old Kellie, and nine-month-old Rubi—the youngest victim on the plane. Additionally, Njoroge's mother-in-law passed away; her family is pursuing a separate case.
Njoroge, who met his wife while attending college in Nairobi, was residing in Canada when the crash occurred. He had intended to reunite with his family in Kenya at a later date. In 2019, he testified before Congress about how he continuously imagined the suffering experienced by his family during the flight that lasted merely six minutes.
He has imagined his wife trying to hold their infant on her lap while two other children sit nearby. "I lose sleep thinking about the horror they must have gone through," said Njoroge. "Those six minutes will be etched in my memory forever. I wasn't there to help them, and I couldn't save them."
Njoroge mentions that he hasn't been able to go back to his family home in Toronto because of the intense grief he's experiencing. He's had difficulty securing a job and has faced criticism from extended family members for not joining his wife and children on the trip.
The settlement terms are confidential, but the case was anticipated to bring renewed focus on Boeing’s safety procedures and issues surrounding the 737 MAX aircraft. The Ethiopian Airlines crash, coupled with a similar incident involving a Lion Air flight in Indonesia only five months prior, resulted in a total of 346 fatalities and prompted worldwide grounding of the MAX fleet.
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