CHICAGO (AP) — Boeing reached a settlement Friday with a Canadian man whose wife and three children were killed in a deadly 2019 crash in Ethiopia, averting the first trial connected to a devastating event that led to a worldwide grounding of Max jets.
The jury trial at Chicago’s federal court had been set to start Monday to determine damages for Paul Njoroge of Canada. His family was heading to their native Kenya in March 2019 aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 when it malfunctioned and plummeted to the ground. The wreck killed all 157 people on board.
Njoroge, 41, had planned to testify about how the crash affected his life. He has been unable to return to his family home in Toronto because the memories are too painful. He hasn’t been able to find a job. And he has weathered criticism from relatives for not traveling alongside his wife and children.
“He’s got complicated grief and sorrow and his own emotional stress,” said Njoroge’s attorney, Robert Clifford. “He’s haunted by nightmares and the loss of his wife and children.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed publicly.
Clifford said his client intended to seek “millions” in damages on behalf of his wife and children, but declined to publicly specify an amount ahead of the trial.
“The aviation team at Clifford Law Offices has been working round-the-clock in preparation for trial, but the mediator was able to help the parties come to an agreement,” Clifford said in a statement Friday.
A Boeing spokesperson said via email Friday that the company had no comment.
The proceedings were not expected to delve into technicalities involving the Max version of Boeing’s bestselling 737 airplane, which has been the source of persistent troubles for the company since the Ethiopia crash and one the year before in Indonesia. A combined 346 people, including passengers and crew members, died in those crashes.
In 2021, Chicago-based Boeing accepted responsibility for the Ethiopia crash in a deal with the victims’ families that allowed them to pursue individual claims in U.S. courts instead of their home countries. Citizens of 35 countries were killed. Several families of victims have already settled. Terms of those agreements also were not made public.
The jetliner heading to Nairobi lost control shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport and nose-dived into a barren patch of land.
Investigators determined the Ethiopia and Indonesia crashes were caused by a system that relied on a sensor that provided faulty readings and pushed the plane noses down, leaving pilots unable to regain control. After the Ethiopia crash, Max jets were grounded worldwide until the company redesigned the system.
This year, Boeing reached a deal with the U.S. Justice Department to avoid criminal prosecutions in both crashes.
Among those killed were Njoroge’s wife, Carolyne, and three small children, Ryan, age 6, Kellie, 4, and Rubi, 9 months old, the youngest to die on the plane. Njoroge also lost his mother-in-law, whose family has a separate case.
Njoroge, who met his wife in college in Nairobi, was living in Canada at the time of the crash. He had planned to join his family in Kenya later.
He testified before Congress in 2019 about repeatedly imagining how his family suffered during the flight, which lasted only six minutes. He has pictured his wife struggling to hold their infant in her lap with two other children seated nearby.
“I stay up nights thinking of the horror that they must have endured,” Njoroge said. “The six minutes will forever be embedded in my mind. I was not there to help them. I couldn’t save them.”
FILE - Rescuers work at the scene of an Ethiopian Airlines flight of a Boeing 737 Max 8 plane crash near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, March 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene, File)
FILE - Paul Njoroge testifies during a House Transportation subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 17, 2019, on aviation safety. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
The Trump administration has said it is freezing child care funds to all states until they provide more verification and administrative data about the programs in a move fueled by a series of alleged fraud schemes at Minnesota day care centers run by Somali residents.
All 50 states will be impacted by the review, but the Republican administration is focusing most of its ire on the blue state of Minnesota.
Minnesota will face additional hurdles to restart child care funding by needing to provide even more verification for child care centers in the state that are suspected of fraud. The administration is also calling for an audit of some Minnesota child care centers after a series of fraud schemes involving government programs in the state in recent years.
It is unclear how much more robust the verification process for states will be than it was before the new measures were implemented.
Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill called it a response to “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country” in a social media post announcing the change on Tuesday. Officials are also requiring all states to provide additional verification to get child care funds.
Here are some things to know about these moves:
All 50 states will have to provide additional levels of verification and administrative data before they receive more funding from the Child Care and Development Fund, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson. However, before Minnesota can receive child care funds again, it will have to provide even more verification for child care centers in that state that are suspected of fraud, such as attendance and licensing records, past enforcement actions and inspection reports.
In his post on Tuesday, O’Neill said all Administration for Children and Families payments nationwide would require “justification and a receipt or photo evidence” before money is sent, but the HHS spokesperson said Wednesday that the additional verifications only apply to CCDF payments.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, said in a social media post that fraudsters are a serious issue that the state has spent years cracking down on but that this move is part of “Trump’s long game.”
“He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans,” Walz said.
State Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy condemned the move in a statement Wednesday.
“Republicans are playing sick games and winning devastating prizes,” Murphy said. “And now, tens of thousands of Minnesota families will pay the price as Donald’s Trump’s agents strip away crucial funding. Our day care system is already stressed; this reckless decision could force a collapse that affects all of us.”
The administration launched efforts in recent weeks to track down fraud in other programs in Minnesota and is looking at fraud in other states. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an interview with “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday that the administration is considering similar fraud investigations in other blue states, such as California and New York.
The administration will continue to send officers to investigate “potential fraud sites” in Minnesota and deport undocumented immigrants, Leavitt said, adding that the Department of Homeland Security is considering plans to denaturalize citizens.
The Department of Labor is also investigating the state’s unemployment insurance program, Leavitt said. The administration this month threatened to withhold SNAP food aid funding from Democratic-controlled states, including Minnesota, unless they provide information about people receiving assistance. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in December sent Minnesota a letter threatening to disqualify it from SNAP and cut funding unless it recertified the eligibility for over 100,000 households and interviewed them in-person within 30 days, according to a lawsuit filed by Minnesota’s attorney general, who Leavitt criticized.
The announcement came a day after U.S. Homeland Security officials conducted a fraud investigation in Minneapolis, questioning workers at unidentified businesses. Trump has criticized Walz’s administration over the cases, capitalizing on them to target the Somali diaspora in the state, which has the largest Somali population in the U.S.
In his post Tuesday, O’Neill, who is serving as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referenced a right-wing influencer who posted a video last week claiming he found that day care centers operated by Somali residents in Minneapolis had committed up to $100 million in fraud.
Meanwhile, there are concerns about harassment that home-based day care providers and members of the Somali community nationwide might face amid the vitriol, including Trump's comments earlier this month, referring to Somali immigrants as “garbage." Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown released a statement about home-based day care providers being harassed and accused of fraud, saying, “Showing up on someone’s porch, threatening, or harassing them isn’t an investigation. Neither is filming minors who may be in the home.”
FILE - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, June 12, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
FILE - State Sen. Michelle Benson reacts at a news conference on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul to a report by the state's legislative auditor on combatting fraud in Minnesota's Child Care Assistance Program. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski,File)
