Someone else has gone all Roger Stephens on a screaming kid, but apparently Joe Hundley decided to raise the bar by also being a drunken racist.
The boy’s mother, Jessica Bennett, 33, told the FBI their flight was on final descent into Atlanta when her 19-month-old son started to cry due to the altitude change. Hundley “told her to shut that (N-word) baby up,” FBI special agent Daron Cheney said in a sworn statement. She said Hundley then slapped him in the face, scratching the boy below his right eye and causing him to scream even louder.
Bennett told Twin Cities television stations Saturday that the incident has caused her family a great deal of trauma and that her son, Jonah, had been outgoing but had turned apprehensive of strangers.
Hundley became increasingly obnoxious and appeared intoxicated during the flight and complained that her son was too big to sit on her lap, she said.
“He reeked of alcohol,” Bennett told KARE-TV. “He was belligerent, and I was uncomfortable.”
Bennett said she was shocked by the racial slur she says Hundley used when Jonah started crying.
“And I said, ‘What did you say?’ because I couldn’t believe that he would say that,” she told WCCO-TV. “He fell onto my face and his mouth was in my ear and he said it again but even more hateful. And he’s on my face, so I pushed him away.”
Bennett and her husband are white, while Jonah, whom they adopted, is black.