A Twitter user has narrated circumstances that, according to him, led to the death of a Ghanaian-American at Washington D. C. in the United States of America on Sunday, February 6, 2022, between 6:15 AM and 7:30 AM EST.
The user, Eche Enziga @Echecrates explained that the Ghanaian, whose name he gave as Benson Awuah, who also goes by the name Kwabena Attah, was with him on the same United flight (Flight No. UA 997) from Accra to D. C., but upon disembarking from the plane at the Dulles Airport, he noticed something going wrong ahead of him.
“Our @united flight lands in D. C. As we get off the plane, we notice commotion on the walkway; a man has collapsed and is gasping for air struggling to breathe.
“Airport staff and United personnel are standing around frozen to the spot. Nobody was helping this man,” he tweeted.
He explained further that he took it upon himself to help out, and soon, the man lying on the floor was out of the woods, but only for a while.
“I walked over to the man and noticed he had passed out. I started applying pressure to his chest area. After 15 seconds of pressure, he comes back to life. At this point, we begging United staff to call the paramedics.
“Paramedics arrive after 20 minutes; the man is laying on his back, still struggling to breathe but unconscious. The paramedics arrive with no sense of urgency; it takes them 10 minutes to start attending to the man,” he added.
Eche Enziga added that soon, the paramedics got ready to move the man out of the place but he noticed something wasn’t right.
It was, however, too late to save the situation any longer.
“They place the man in the gurney and say ‘we’ve got it from here.’ Something bothered me about their lack of urgency. I noticed the man had stopped breathing again, and I called it to their attention. This time they couldn’t resuscitate him, and this man died.
“I’m typing with rage because this man did not have to die. The utter callousness and lack of urgency displayed by @united airline staff will stay with me for a long time. The man was an American citizen but it didn’t matter because his skin color was the wrong colour,” he added.
According to the eyewitness, the deceased who spoke Twi was travelling alone; he called on the dead man’s family to sue the airline in a way that would greatly affect them.
“This man was travelling alone, I’m not sure who his family is, but he spoke Twi. To the family of that man, I hope you bring the biggest wrongful death suit against @united.
“We used to say ‘don’t let Nigeria’ happen to you. Now we must also say ‘don’t let America happen to you’ as a black man or woman. That man held on to my hand and wouldn’t let me leave even when the paramedics arrived. Almost like he knew he couldn’t trust the system to protect him,” he said.
As of the time of going to press, GhanaWeb had made several attempts via phone calls and a text message to reach officials at the Ghana office of United Airlines for an official response, but to no avail.
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