A federal jury has awarded $49.5 million to the family of Samya Stumo, a 24-year-old global health worker who was killed in the 2019 crash of a Boeing 737 Max in Ethiopia, resolving one of the few remaining wrongful death lawsuits tied to the disaster that killed all 157 people aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. The verdict, returned Wednesday in federal court in Chicago, breaks down into $21 million for the pain and suffering Stumo experienced during the flight’s final moments, $16.5 million for the loss of companionship suffered by her family, and $12 million for their grief, according to attorneys for her estate.
The damages-only trial is the second to reach a jury verdict in the case. Boeing has accepted liability for the crash and settled most of the dozens of wrongful death lawsuits filed by families of the victims, but the Stumo family chose to seek a jury’s determination on the value of the harm. In November 2025, a jury awarded $28.45 million to the family of Shikha Garg, a United Nations environmental consultant who also died on Flight 302. “We are gratified for the opportunity to try the compensatory damages case,” attorneys Shanin Specter and Elizabeth Crawford said in a statement after Wednesday’s verdict.
Boeing, which has long faced scrutiny over the 737 Max program, expressed sorrow in a statement Thursday. “We are deeply sorry to all who lost loved ones on Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. While we have resolved nearly all of these claims through settlements, families are entitled to pursue their claims through the court process, and we respect their right to do so,” a Boeing spokesperson said.
Stumo, a 2015 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was traveling from Addis Ababa to Uganda for her first major assignment with a nonprofit focused on strengthening health systems in developing countries when the plane went down minutes after takeoff on March 10, 2019. The university described her as someone known “for engaging others by earning their respect, friendship and trust.” Her father, Michael Stumo, has publicly pressed Boeing, regulators, and Congress over what families viewed as failures that allowed the 737 Max to keep flying after the first crash off the coast of Indonesia. That crash, Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018, together with the Ethiopian Airlines disaster killed 346 people and plunged Boeing into its deepest crisis in a century.
Investigators determined that in both crashes a flight-control system repeatedly forced the nose of the then-new planes downward based on faulty readings from a single sensor, and pilots were unable to regain control. The Ethiopian Airlines crash prompted a worldwide grounding of the 737 Max that lasted more than a year and triggered multiple investigations into Boeing’s safety culture and federal oversight. Federal prosecutors later charged Boeing with misleading regulators about the flight-control system; a Texas judge dismissed those charges in November 2025 after the Justice Department reached an agreement requiring Boeing to invest an additional $1 billion in fines, family compensation, and safety improvements.