Disabled Man Forced To Crawl Off Delta Airlines Plane Wins Lawsuit

A wheelchair-bound man won a lawsuit he filed against Delta Airlines for making him crawl on his hands and knees to get off the plane, twice.

Baraka Kanaan is to be awarded a substantial amount for the July 2012 incidents, Hawaii News Now reported.

Kanaan, whose legs were paralyzed after a 2000 car accident, was traveling from his home in Hawaii to Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. When the plane landed, a Delta flight attendant said they could not help him off the plane, leaving Kanaan no choice but to crawl "hand over hand" down the plane's aisle, down a flight of stairs and across the tarmac, the Daily Mail reported.

Kanaan was forced to do the same on his return flight home.

The terms of Kanaan's settlement have not been released but reports say it is a generous amount, according to Hawaii News Now.

"I think this does send some kind of message that this conduct, this kind of situation is not supposed to happen again," Louis Erteschik, executive director of the Hawaii Disability Rights Center, told the station. "People with disabilities do incur some difficulties and so it's important that airlines be held accountable."

Kanaan, a former professor, said a Delta customer service representative told him weeks before his trip that he would be accommodated with a lift and aisle chair to get to his seat, the Daily Mail reported.

But when his flight landed in Massachusetts, he was told there was no aisle chair or lift to help him. Kanaan asked a flight attendant how he can get off the plane.

"I don't know, but we can't get you off the plane," Kanaan was told. So he crawled off, the Daily Mail reported.

"I can feel literally my spine was like someone had a sledgehammer and they were pounding a ten-inch spike in my sacral, hammering away," Kanaan told Hawaii News Now last year. "My thoracic, I could hear pops and clicks."

The defendant was forced to do the same when he returned to Hawaii.

"My initial feeling was absolute shock, kind of like Twilight Zone feeling," Kanaan previously told the station.

Both the airline and the defendant did not offer a comment due to a confidentiality agreement, Hawaii News Now reported.