A North Carolina mom has hired a civil rights attorney after being charged with misdemeanor trespassing following a confrontation on Frontier Airlines.
According to WTVD, Rosetta Swinney, 53, says she will never fly Frontier again after the mortifying incident over Easter weekend. Swinney claims she and her 14-year-old daughter was removed from the flight after she complained about vomit on the teen’s seat.
“She jumped up and said, ‘Mom, my hands are wet.’ She smelled it. She said, ‘This is vomit, Mom.’ So, we went to look. It was on the bag, all over her shirt, her hands,” Swinney told the news station.
Swinney, who said the flight was delayed out of Las Vegas for cleaning, was surprised at the state of the plane, so she alerted the flight attendant to the issue but was met with a rebuff.
“I don’t know if she got offensive about it, but she turned around to me and said, ‘That’s not my job.’ If it wasn’t her job, why wasn’t it attended to?” Swinney said.
Meanwhile, Frontier claimed in a statement that “the flight attendants apologized and immediately invited the mother and her teenage daughter to move to either end of the plane so that the seat area could be cleaned.”
The statement also claimed that the mother-daughter duo were told “they would be provided other seats if available.”
Swinney insisted this was not true, saying that the flight attendant never offered to clean the seat or reassign their seats. According to WTVD, witnesses aboard the flight also posted on Facebook a story similar to Swinney’s.
The airline accused Swinney of becoming “disruptive” which prompted them calling authorities to remove her and her daughter from the plane.
“I felt humiliated,” Swinney said. “I felt more bad that my child had to see me be handcuffed and taken away from her.”
The mother would spend 12 hours in jail, and her daughter was place in child protective custody.
After being released, Swinney chose to buy a $1,000 ticket home on Delta Air Lines.
Frontier has refunded Swiney the cost of her original flight, but Swinney still intends to fight her case. She is scheduled to be in court in June.