Written by Marina Pitofsky for USA Today, April 8, 2022, updated April 11, 2022
A woman said her wheelchair was left on an airport tarmac in the rain and a piece was broken after a JetBlue Airways flight.
Yomi Wrong tweeted that she was “abandoned” by JetBlue employees at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey, after arriving from San Francisco. She shared Wednesday that “all the elevators are broken so they have no way to bring the chair up.”
Wrong told USA TODAY she has a $30,000 custom power wheelchair, which she checked at the gate in San Francisco.
But when she landed in Newark, she waited 15 minutes before JetBlue crew asked if she would be willing to deplane.
“I used an aisle chair which is a very narrow, uncomfortable mobility device that I can’t actually operate myself. Somebody has to push me,” Wrong said. “We waited and waited. My sister was getting very, very angry. She couldn’t believe that my chair wasn’t there, and nobody could tell us where it was. They kept saying, ‘well, we have to bring it up on the elevators.’ Like, well, what elevator?”
As Wrong and her sister continued to ask about her wheelchair, she said “at one point, one JetBlue employee gave my sister a lecture about respectability and the appropriate way to express her anger.”
Her sister later “went stomping off. I didn’t know where she went.”
“A little bit over an hour later, here comes my sister,” Wrong said. “She found an elevator and looked through an emergency door and saw my chair sitting on the tarmac in the rain. They had just left it there.”
Wrong shared on Twitter that the airline “broke my chair.”
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