Thank You Peter Neffenger: You've Taught Us It's Okay to Head Slam Disabled Brain Surgery Patients

[struggle4progress]

39. My general opinions on that are entirely irrelevant to the factual questions

regarding events on 30 June 2015 at Memphis International Airport

I live at great remove from the airport and am unable to peer back through a year in time and a distance of hundreds of miles to determine what exactly happened or when what should have been obvious to who

We should, of course, feel great sympathy for the young woman and her family, given the stressful life circumstances they face. Whether that sympathy should lead us to conclude the various authorities at the airport behaved in a fashion warranting damages is less clear. They may have, but I do not know that they did

The lawsuit insists that the young woman's disabilities were obvious and claims that "acts of discrimination" by the authorities against her "were intentional." I have no idea how to gauge the validity of such assertions after reading a single-source account on the internet. The TSA currently requests that screeners be informed in advance of disabilities requiring accommodation. I do not know whether or not this request predates the incident under discussion, but since screening has now been widespread for many years, I might guess that this request has been standard for some time. Neither the media account nor the lawsuit indicate that screeners were informed in advance: the story says Cohen told us she tried to tell TSA agents her daughter is partially deaf, blind in one eye, paralyzed, and easily confused, but said she was kept at a distance by police -- which sounds as if this important information was not made available in advance, in which case policies governing immediate response might require that the non-compliant traveler first be controlled, before further interactions with compliant travelers