A woman is facing charges in Nevada after a confrontation about vomit on her daughter’s airplane seat.
Rosetta Swinney, 53, and her 14-year-old daughter were leaving Las Vegas after Easter weekend when their Frontier Airlines flight was reportedly delayed so the crew could clean the cabin. When passengers boarded, Swinney’s daughter jumped up out of her seat.
“She said ‘Mom, my hands are wet,’” Swinney recalled to ABC 7 News. Her daughter smelled her hands and they determined it was vomit, she said. “We went to look. It was on the bag, all over her shirt, her hands.”
The incident escalated after the pair alerted a flight attendant that their seats were still dirty. “She turned around to me and said ‘That’s not my job,’” Swinney told ABC.
Other passengers on the plane posted about the incident on social media, recalling that the flight attendant gave Swinney’s daughter “Clorox wipes and gloves” to clean the mess. The mother and daughter asked to be switched to any number of empty seats, according to Swinney and other passengers.
Frontier Airlines offered a different version of events in a statement, writing that the flight attendant apologized, asking the pair to move to the front or back of the plane so the seat could be cleaned, and offered cleaning products to Swinney’s daughter. They were told they would be given other seats if available after boarding was complete, the statement said.
The conversation turned heated and the Metropolitan Police Department was called. In a clip posted to Facebook, an officer is seen telling Swinney that the airline is “willing to rebook” their flight home the next day. “What they have decided is that you’re not flying tonight,” the man says. “If you don’t get off the plane, everybody’s getting off the plane.”
Eventually, all passengers were forced to deplane and Swinney was arrested in the terminal waiting area. In another Facebook clip, her daughter is seen crying while Swinney is handcuffed and escorted out.
“This is not right,” she says in the clip. “They’re going to try and arrest me because they had throw-up on that plane?”
Swinney, whose flight was refunded, reportedly faces a misdemeanor trespassing charge and is due in a Las Vegas courtroom in June.
In its official statement, Frontier said the company apologized to passengers for “the inconvenience caused by the departure delay.” “The safety of passengers and crew is our top priority at Frontier,” it said.
