Chattanooga mom sues TSA for slamming her disabled daughter's head into the
ground
Ellis Smith On Jul 6, 2016
Source: McClatchy
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July 01--A pattern of sequins in the shape of an owl on Hannah Cohen's t-shirt
may have triggered the alarm at a Memphis airport security checkpoint, setting
in motion a chain of events that led to the disabled teen's face being bloodied
by federal agents as her mother looked on in horror.
Cohen was on her way home to Chattanooga after undergoing treatment at St. Jude
Children's Research Hospital when the alarm at the checkpoint began to sound.
Disoriented, the teen didn't immediately heed instructions to undergo further
scanning, her mother said.
Cohen is blind in her left eye and deaf in her left ear, is impaired from
radiation and removal of a brain tumor, and is limited in her ability to talk,
walk, stand, see and hear. Her mother, Shirley Cohen, says she begged
Transportation Security Administration screeners to let her help her disabled
daughter
through the checkpoint, but they called for backup instead.
"They were grabbing her from both sides," Shirley Cohen remembers. "One of them
slammed her down, hit her head on the cement, and there was blood everywhere."
As two agents thrust their knees into her daughter's back and clapped handcuffs
around her wrists, another agent grabbed Shirley Cohen and pulled her away
from her daughter, she said.
Later, in an interrogation room, a TSA agent told her that her daughter had
struck one of the agents, and the agency was going to press charges, Cohen
says..
After a night in the hospital with two guards standing watch outside the door,
officers booked her daughter into jail.
Though prosecutors eventually dropped the charges and refunded her bail bond,
Cohen says that hardly justifies the way her daughter was treated.
Though Hannah Cohen is now tumor-free, her run-in with the Memphis screeners
shattered her life. Though the 19-year-old has now graduated from high school
and started taking classes at Chattanooga State Community College, she's since
dropped out of school and is taking a semester off.
The family lives in Harrison, just north of Chattanooga.
"The stress of all this, she wasn't able to continue full-time hours so she
lost her scholarship," her mother said.
In a lawsuit filed on June 28 that named the TSA and the various agencies that
manage the airport as defendants, Cohen asked for damages not to exceed $100,000
for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as negligent
infliction of emotional distress.
In the lawsuit, Cohen alleges that the TSA didn't provide any reasonable
accommodation for screening given Hannah Cohen's disability, and assaulted her
in the airport without cause.
"They think they are above the law," she says. "The one time they let me go
back [into her daughter's hospital room] to take her some food, one of them
was grinning at me the whole time, and I was like, 'we'll see.'"
TSA spokesman Mark Howell and Jerry Brandon, chief of public safety of the
Memphis International Airport Police Department, told the Associated Press they
could not comment on pending litigation.
"Anybody can file anything, and we don't comment on active litigation,"
Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority president and CEO Scott Brockman told
The
Commercial Appeal newspaper. "Clearly there are additional facts in this
matter, and we won't comment until we address the litigation."
Copyright 2016 - Chattanooga Times Free Press, Tenn.
