On 13 May 2026, an Illinois federal jury ordered The Boeing Company to pay $49.5 million in compensatory damages to the family of Samya Rose Stumo, a United States citizen who perished when Ethiopian Airlines (ET) Flight 302 crashed near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, on 10 March 2019. According to Law360’s courtroom report, Judge Jorge L. Alonso presided over the case in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois — the same federal venue that has hosted years of Boeing 737 MAX wrongful-death litigation.
The Seattle Times, which broke the verdict, confirmed that Stumo’s attorneys from Philadelphia-based law firm Kline & Specter brought the compensatory damages case before the jury. Stumo’s family has been one of the most publicly visible holdouts in the otherwise largely settled landscape of Flight 302 civil litigation. Rather than accepting the liability stipulation Boeing extended to most other ET302 families, Stumo’s estate chose to pursue a full jury trial. The verdict is the second civil jury award against Boeing in connection with the two 737 MAX crashes, following a November 2025 ruling that ordered the company to pay more than $28 million to the family of Shikha Garg, a United Nations environmental worker who also died aboard Flight 302.
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Who Was Samya Rose Stumo, And Why Her Case Stood Apart
Samya Rose Stumo, 24, was a health financing analyst from Sheffield, Massachusetts, travelling to Nairobi, Kenya, on 10 March 2019 to begin a new assignment with ThinkWell, a nonprofit organisation focused on health systems development. She boarded Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport (ADD) for what was intended to be the first leg of a field deployment connected to a Gates Foundation health initiative.
She was the niece of veteran consumer activist Ralph Nader, and her parents — Michael Stumo and Nadia Milleron, both attorneys — filed the original wrongful death lawsuit in federal court in Chicago as early as April 2019.
The Stumo family’s case stood procedurally apart from those of other ET302 families from an early stage. The Seattle Times reported that when Boeing’s lawyers presented most ET302 families with a stipulation admitting liability for compensatory damages, the Stumo family was among only two families who declined to sign. The other being that of a Kenyan married couple.
Signing that agreement would have limited proceedings to compensatory damages while explicitly foreclosing any future pursuit of punitive damages. The family’s refusal reflected a consistent and publicly stated insistence on broader corporate accountability, not merely financial redress.
Nadia Milleron, Stumo’s mother, did not moderate her position even as Boeing negotiated its way out of criminal exposure. When the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed in May 2025 to abandon a criminal prosecution of Boeing in favour of a non-prosecution agreement, Clifford Law Offices — one of the firms representing crash families — quoted Milleron as saying:
“Pam Bondi is afraid to try a case. She is reinstituting the coddling corporate criminals policy. Boeing remains a criminal corporation, and Bondi is enabling them.”
The Crash Of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302: What the Investigation Found
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 departed Addis Ababa Bole International Airport (ADD) at 8:38 local time on 10 March 2019, operating a Boeing 737 MAX 8 registered ET-AVJ to Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (NBO). The aircraft, which had been delivered to Ethiopian Airlines just four months earlier on 15 November 2018, crashed into farmland near the town of Bishoftu six minutes after takeoff, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew members. The crash came less than five months after Lion Air (JT) Flight 610, a nearly new 737 MAX 8, plunged into the Java Sea on 29 October 2018, killing all 189 people aboard.
Ethiopia’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau published its final accident report in December 2022, concluding that the probable cause was “repetitive and uncommanded airplane-nose-down inputs from the MCAS due to erroneous AOA input, and its unrecoverable activation system which made the airplane dive with the rate of -33,000 ft/min close to the ground ” from Boeing’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), triggered by a faulty angle-of-attack sensor.
MCAS had been designed to compensate for the aerodynamic characteristics of the MAX’s repositioned, larger engines by automatically pushing the aircraft’s nose downward when it detected a high angle of attack. But the system read input from only a single AoA sensor — a design decision that meant a single point of failure could and did trigger a catastrophic, unrecoverable sequence.
As NPR reported, the left and right AoA sensors on Flight 302 differed in their readings by 59 degrees at the time of the incident, yet MCAS acted on the erroneous data regardless, activating repeatedly and driving the aircraft’s nose down during the six minutes it was airborne. The crew attempted the prescribed corrective procedure but were unable to physically overpower the stabiliser trim forces at the aircraft’s increasing speed, and the plane struck the ground at a steep angle with all souls lost.
A damning New York Times investigation cited by AVweb later revealed that Ethiopian Airlines had sent an urgent request to Boeing for MCAS information in late 2018, following the Lion Air crash — and that Boeing declined to respond. The Ethiopian accident report stated that if Boeing had answered those questions, the second crash might not have happened.
Boeing’s Deception of the FAA
Every wrongful death civil action brought against Boeing in connection with the two 737 MAX crashes rests on a finding of corporate fraud that Boeing itself admitted to. In January 2021, the DOJ filed a criminal information charging Boeing with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, specifically in relation to the company’s deception of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Evaluation Group during the certification process for the 737 MAX.
Boeing simultaneously entered into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) that obligated it to pay $2.5 billion across various funds and implement a corporate compliance programme, in exchange for the criminal charge being held in abeyance.
Investigators and Congressional hearings had established that Boeing deliberately withheld the existence of MCAS from regulators and crew manuals during certification. FAA had approved Boeing’s request in 2016 to remove references to MCAS from the flight crew operations manual entirely, meaning pilots operating the aircraft had no knowledge of the system’s existence or its failure modes. Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas, the federal judge who oversaw the criminal proceedings, described Boeing’s conduct in a 2023 order as “the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history,” as Yahoo News reported.
Boeing’s criminal liability was ultimately never formally adjudicated. The 2021 DPA lapsed when the DOJ found in May 2024 that Boeing had breached its compliance obligations. Boeing briefly agreed to a guilty plea in July 2024, but Judge O’Connor rejected that agreement in December 2024.
By May 2025, under the Trump administration’s DOJ, the government abandoned the prosecution entirely in favour of a non-prosecution agreement, which required Boeing to pay a further $243.6 million penalty and an additional $444.5 million to victims’ families — but carried no criminal conviction, as the DOJ’s official case page confirms.
Judge O’Connor’s Scathing Criticism
The dismissal of the criminal case provoked a remarkably pointed judicial critique. Judge O’Connor granted the DOJ’s motion to dismiss but made his contempt for the outcome unambiguous. His written order, as quoted in detail by the Volokh Conspiracy legal blog hosted at Reason, summarised the DOJ’s tortured legal history with Boeing:
“The Government’s position in this lawsuit has been that Boeing committed crimes sufficient to justify prosecution, failed to remedy its fraudulent behavior on its own during the DPA which justified a guilty plea and the imposition of an independent monitor, but now Boeing will remedy that dangerous culture by retaining a consultant of its own choosing.”
Judge O’Connor made clear he was acting reluctantly and only because he concluded he lacked the legal authority to override the executive branch’s prosecutorial decision. He concluded that the crash victims’ families’ arguments against dismissal were “compelling,” and he characterised the families’ position as “correct” — that the NPA “fails to secure the necessary accountability to ensure the safety of the flying public.”
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling issued on 31 March 2026, ultimately declined to disturb the dismissal, holding that the DOJ had not violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act in the manner it had negotiated the NPA. Boeing thus arrived at May 2026 having never entered a criminal conviction for crashes it admitted caused 346 deaths.
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How Shikha Garg’s Precedent Set the Stage
The Stumo verdict follows directly from the precedent-setting November 2025 trial of the Shikha Garg family’s case — the first jury verdict in any of the dozens of civil wrongful-death lawsuits connected to the two 737 MAX crashes. An Illinois federal jury ordered Boeing to pay more than $28 million to the family of Garg, a United Nations environmental worker who also died on Flight 302. Under a deal struck between the parties on the day of the verdict, Garg’s family ultimately received $35.85 million — the full verdict amount plus 26% interest — and Boeing agreed not to appeal.
Shanin Specter and Elizabeth Crawford, the Kline & Specter attorneys who represented both the Garg family in 2025 and the Stumo estate in 2026, stated after the Garg verdict that it “provides public accountability for Boeing’s wrongful conduct.”
Simple Flying noted that Boeing has now settled more than 90% of the 150-plus wrongful death cases following both crashes, and that total payments across fines, penalties, settlements, and dedicated compensation funds have exceeded $3.8 billion to date.
Boeing’s Broader Legal Landscape
Boeing registered 284 net new orders in the first four months of 2026. The Stumo verdict, coming on the same day that company’s first-quarter 2026 deliveries outpaced Airbus for the first time since the MAX crisis began, also coincided with LOT Polish announcing that it would be taking Boeing to a jury trial over the 737 crisis.
The aircraft manufacturer’s admitted deception of the FAA produced two crashes within five months, grounded 387 aircraft globally, disrupted more than 8,600 weekly flights operated by 59 airlines, and ultimately cost the company more than $3.8 billion across all liability tracks.