A mother was arrested on a Frontier Airlines flight and detained for 12 hours after complaining that her daughter’s seat had vomit on it.
Rosetta Swinney was arrested on a flight leaving Las Vegas. The 53-year-old and her daughter were on their way back to Raleigh-Durham, having attended a wedding during the Easter holiday.
Swinney’s 14-year-old daughter showed her a vomit covered seat on the plane.
“She jumped up to say mom! My hands are wet. She smelled it. She says ‘This is vomit, mom.’ So we went to look. It was on the bag, all over her shirt, her hands,” Swinney told ABC 7.
Swinney said she was surprised the seat was dirty since the flight had already been delayed for cleaning.
We are just trying to make it home y’all… You would not believe what happened on the plane. We arrived 2 hrs early…
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Swinney said she was never offered a seat reassignment, nor was the mess cleaned up. When she confronted the flight attendant again, that is when police were called.
“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 attend to?” Swinney told ABC.
Swinney was taken to jail and her daughter was put in protective custody.
“What really hurt me is for my child to see me getting handcuffed and taken away from her,” Swinney told ABC. “Twelve hours I was in jail. Twelve hours.”
When she was released from police custody, she paid $1,000 for a flight home from Nevada through Delta Airlines. Frontier refunded the cost of her original flight.
“I felt humiliated,” Swinney told ABC. “I felt more bad that my child had to see me be handcuffed and taken away from her.”
According to a statement issued by Frontier and obtained by ABC, that isn’t what happened. Frontier gave a different account.
“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 mother and daughter were also told that once boarding was complete they would be provided other seats if available. The daughter was also offered cleaning products and invited to use the lavatory to wash up,” reads part of the statement.
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The statement goes on to say the reasons for the arrest.
“The mother was unsatisfied with the response and became disruptive. As a result, the flight attendants determined that the mother and daughter should be deplaned and accommodated on another flight. The mother refused, and following procedure, law enforcement was called. Law enforcement then requested that everyone deplane so that the mother and daughter could be removed allowing the aircraft to be reboarded and depart. We apologized to our passengers for the inconvenience caused by the departure delay. The safety of passengers and crew is our top priority at Frontier.”
Video of the incident posted to Facebook by Nïkkï Nickole shows Swinney refusing to deboard the plane when asked by security personnel, then by police. The final video shows her getting handcuffed and taken away into the airport.
The experience left another passenger, Lynette Lipke, with a bad impression of the airline.
“Anyways….the row across and one up from us were having issues. A woman and her daughter were settling into their seats and there was puke on seat and floor. (From previous flight)..the stewardess gave the young girl Clorox wipes and gloves, the mom said you need to move us and have someone clean this up..the stewardess said…its not my job! The mom then said well we are not going to clean this up, you were suppose to be cleaning the plane before we got on. The mom asked to have seats moved (there was empty seats) the stewardess demanded they sit down, mom said no….long story short….they called tsa..whom was on a power trip, then called cops..cops agreed with mom but said airlines wanted them off plane….we all had to get off and they arrested this mom while her daughter looked on in horror. We ended up not leaving till almost 230 in the am…..I along with most of the plane will not be traveling frontier…horrible!” Lipke wrote in a Facebook post.
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Another passenger explained why Swinney could not just be moved to another seat, after her earlier post explaining what happened.
“My husband and I personally asked a different flight attendant what the issue would be with the lady simply switching seats. According to them those seats were purchased by someone else. They refused to switch her seats. There were also others who questioned the crew members in her defense,” wrote Nïkkï Nickole on Facebook.
