- A federal jury ordered Boeing to pay $49.5 million to the family of crash victim Samya Rose Stumo.
- The 2019 Ethiopian Airlines disaster killed all 157 people aboard the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft.
- This verdict represents the largest civil jury award to date stemming from the 737 MAX litigation cases.
(NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS, UNITED STATES) – A federal jury ordered The Boeing Company on May 13, 2026, to pay $49.5 million in compensatory damages to the family of Samya Rose Stumo, a 24-year-old United States citizen who died aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.
Judge Jorge L. Alonso presided over the case in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The verdict came after a legal fight that lasted seven years.
Stumo’s estate, represented by attorneys from Philadelphia-based Kline & Specter, rejected Boeing’s liability stipulation that was offered to most other Flight 302 families. Her family instead pursued a full jury trial.
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, crashed near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, on March 10, 2019, shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa. All 157 people on board were killed.
The jury’s decision marks the second civil jury award against Boeing tied to the two fatal 737 MAX crashes. The other crash involved Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018.
Last year, the same court heard another closely watched case from Flight 302. In November 2025, an Illinois federal jury awarded more than $28 million to the family of Shikha Garg, a United Nations environmental worker who also died on the flight.
Garg’s family ultimately received $35.85 million under a post-verdict deal that included 26% interest. Boeing agreed not to appeal that case.
The Stumo case drew particular attention because her family remained among the most publicly visible holdouts in the Flight 302 litigation. While most families resolved claims without a jury, this case tested damages in open court and produced a larger award than the earlier 2025 verdict.
Boeing has settled more than 90% of the 150-plus wrongful-death lawsuits filed over the two crashes. Total payments across fines, penalties, settlements, and compensation funds have exceeded $3.8 billion to date.
That litigation has unfolded across years of scrutiny for the Boeing Company and the 737 MAX program. The two crashes, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, became the defining disasters for the aircraft model and triggered waves of legal claims from families who lost relatives.
Stumo’s family chose a different path from most plaintiffs. Boeing offered a liability stipulation to most other Flight 302 families, but Stumo’s estate refused it and forced the case to a jury on compensatory damages.
The result gives the family one of the largest courtroom awards to emerge from the crash cases. It also extends a pattern that has taken shape in Chicago federal court, where juries have now returned two substantial verdicts against Boeing over losses tied to Flight 302.
Samya Rose Stumo was 24 when she boarded the flight from Addis Ababa. She died when the aircraft went down near Bishoftu minutes after takeoff, one of 157 victims from more than three dozen countries.
The case did not stand alone. It sat within a wider body of wrongful-death litigation arising from both fatal crashes, with families pressing claims over the design and failures linked to the 737 MAX 8. Boeing resolved most of those disputes through settlements rather than trials.
Even so, the handful of cases that reached juries have carried unusual weight. Each verdict set a public benchmark for how a federal court values the deaths of passengers on Flight 302, and each one gave holdout families a fresh point of comparison with private settlements.
The $49.5 million award to Stumo’s family now exceeds the jury award returned in the Garg case before post-verdict interest raised that family’s recovery. Taken together, the two verdicts place renewed attention on the remaining unresolved claims from the two MAX crashes.
Boeing’s broad settlement record has limited the number of courtroom tests, but it has not closed the book on the disaster. Seven years after Flight 302 fell from the sky near Bishoftu, the legal and financial reckoning tied to the Boeing Company and the 737 MAX 8 is still playing out in the Northern District of Illinois.
