A 68-year-old man with amputations says a United Airlines employee left him crawling on the floor during a vacation after a security agent stopped him from taking his scooter’s batteries onto a flight.
Now, the Canadian man will ask a judge next week for the nation’s human rights commission to hear his case.
“Having to crawl across the floor in front of my wife is the most humiliating thing that I can think of,” the man, Stearn Hodge, told the CBC, calling it “pathetic.”
Stearn told the network the incident occurred two years ago, in February 2017, when he and his wife arrived at Calgary International Airport for a flight to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Before boarding, a security agent asked Hodge to remove the $2,000 lithium battery needed to power his scooter, according to the CBC.
Hodge called for an agent from United Airlines, he said, noting the airline had approved the batteries in an earlier phone call. But the United employee agreed with the agent from the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, the CBC reported.
Hodge, who lost his left arm and right leg in a work accident in the 1980s, can use a prosthetic leg only for short periods at a time, he said.
Hodge said the security agent told him to “get a wheelchair,” to which Hodge scoffed: He can’t operate it with one hand, and his wife’s cancer treatment had left her physically unable to push him.
He showed the agent and United employee documents spelling out the international flight standards allowing the batteries, he told the CBC.
It didn’t matter.
The retiree spent much of the three-week vacation in his hotel room, forced to crawled across the floor to use the bathroom, he told the CBC.
A United official later emailed an apology to Hodge and his wife along with a travel voucher for several hundred dollars, he told the network, but that failed to make up for the “life-changing” moment — one of a dozen-plus battery-related hassles over two years that now leave him with anxiety.
Now, Hodge plans to take his case to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which offers up to $20,000 for “willful or reckless” discrimination and counts of pain and suffering. On May 9, his lawyer will ask a federal judge to compel the commission to take on the case.
A United spokeswoman, in a statement to USA TODAY, said it was looking into the allegations but could not comment because of pending litigation: “That said, the experience described falls far short of our own high standard of caring for our customers. We are proud of the many steps we have taken over the past few years to exhibit more care for our customers and we are proud to operate an airline that doesn’t just include people with disabilities but welcomes them as customers.”
Source: usatoday
