The charges were all dropped two days later, and the court refunded the $250 in costs the family had paid. “The judge’s eyes got big and round,” Shirley said.Īfter inquiring if the pair were from Memphis, the judge recommended they get legal representation. That’s when Hannah looked up and her hair fell back from her face, revealing her unseeing eye, surrounded by cuts and contusions. When Hannah responded, the judge said: “You’re going to have to speak up.” The next morning – now two days without their belongings, which had made the flight home – the pair appeared before a local judge, who asked the accused to explain herself. Shirley said she held her daughter, who sobbed, “I’m sorry, Mama.” ![]() After 24 hours apart, the mother and daughter were reunited in the parking lot of the jail. Hannah disappeared behind a door, then went to a hospital, and finally to the Shelby County jail. ![]() The TSA has not yet responded to the complaint. It calls for a “reasonable sum not exceeding $100,000 and costs”, and an undisclosed punitive amount. It names the TSA and the Memphis-Shelby County airport authority and seeks damages that include medical expenses and for personal injury, both physical and emotional. The lawsuit alleges that the TSA did not give Hannah adequate accommodation to screen her, and discriminated against her because of her disability. I sat down on a bench facing away so I couldn’t see what they were doing to my daughter.” “Another guard pushed me back 20ft, in my boot, and told me I couldn’t be nearby,” said Shirley, a professor of nursing at a university in Chattanooga. Shirley had just picked up her phone from the conveyor belt, and she snapped a photo of Hannah on the floor: handcuffed, weeping and bleeding. The guards slammed Hannah to the ground, her mother said, smashing her face into the floor, which the complaint alleges left her “physically and emotionally” injured. The brain tumor had left Hannah blind in one eye, deaf in one ear and partially paralyzed, so when the guards grabbed each of her arms, it startled her, she said. If I could just help her, it will make things easier.”īut soon, a voice on the public address system requested more agents to report to the checkpoint, Shirley said. “She is a St Jude’s patient, and she can get confused,” she said. Seeing the scene begin to unfold, Shirley hobbled to a supervisor standing nearby. She was afraid, Shirley said, and offered to take off the sequined shirt as she was wearing another underneath, but a female agent laughed at her. ![]() She stood to the side, watching, wearing an immobilization boot on a broken foot.Īgents told Hannah they needed to take her to a “sterile area” where they could search her further. “You could see on the screen what it was pointing out,” Shirley said. “My shirt – it had sequins,” Hannah told the Guardian, laboring to speak. Hannah attributed the alarm to her shirt’s design. Shirley would usually go through the scanner first and wait for Hannah on the other side, since Hannah’s tumor, and numerous surgeries and treatments since she was two years old, had left her easily confused and frightened in unfamiliar situations.Īccording to the complaint, the warning alarm was triggered when Hannah passed through the body scanners. Hannah and her mother, Shirley, told the Guardian that the pair had made the trip hundreds of times, and knew the airport security routine well. Hannah Cohen, 18, at the time of her arrest on 30 June 2015, and her mother had been on their way home to Chattanooga from St Jude’s hospital in Memphis, where Hannah underwent her final treatment for a brain tumor. A disabled teenage cancer patient was injured during a violent arrest by security agents at Memphis international airport, her family has alleged in a lawsuit filed against the Transport Security Administration.
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