52 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019
S
amya Stumo liked to ride pigs.
This was on her family’s farm, in
Sheffield, Massachusetts. Caring
for the pigs was one of her chores, so
she would hop on an old, dilapidated
Army jeep and drive a water tank to
the sty, where she would fill the troughs
and take a ride. She was nine years old.
Samya had always been precocious.
She started playing cello when she was
three, the year before her younger brother,
Nels, became ill with cancer. When her
mother, Nadia Milleron, returned from
the hospital one day, Samya told her that
she had learned to read.
Nels died, at the age of two, shortly
after Nadia had another son. The loss
played a role in Samya’s eventual choice
of studies: public health. So did the
strain of activism in her family. Her
mother’s uncle is Ralph Nader, the trans-
portation-safety crusader turned pro-
gressive advocate and third-party Pres-
idential candidate. Her father, Michael
Stumo, who grew up on a farm in Iowa,
made frequent trips to Washington to
lobby for small manufacturers and fam-
ily farmers.
For Samya and her two surviving
brothers, the family ethic was clear: seek
justice for the disadvantaged, even if it
means challenging authority. Samya
could carry this to comic extremes. On
a camping trip, she mounted a tree stump
and inveighed against the family’s pa-
triarchal dynamics, while everyone else,
suppressing laughter, hurried to set up
before dark.
In 2015, Samya graduated from
the University of Massachusetts and
won a scholarship to pursue a master’s
degree in global public health at the
University of Copenhagen. Afterward,
when she was twenty-four, she got a
job with ThinkWell, a nonprofit based
in Washington, D.C., which works to
expand health coverage in developing
nations. ThinkWell sent her to East
Africa to open offices there. The night
before she left, earlier this year, she
had dinner with Ralph Nader and his
sister Claire.
During a stopover in Addis Ababa,
the capital of Ethiopia, Samya texted
her family to say that she would arrive
in Nairobi in a few hours. Then she
boarded Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.
She sat in Row 16, beside a Somali-
American trucker from Minnesota.
There were a hundred and forty-nine
passengers, from thirty-five countries,
and eight crew members.
The plane, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, took
off at 8:38 A.M., on March 10th. A min-
ute and a half later, it began to pitch
downward. A sensor on the nose had
malfunctioned, triggering an automated
control system. The cockpit filled with
a confusing array of audio and visual
warnings. The pilots tried to counter the
downward movement, but the automated
system overrode them. Six minutes after
takeoff, the plane dived into the earth
at five hundred and seventy-five miles
per hour, carving out a crater thirty-two
feet deep and a hundred and thirty-one
feet long, and killing everyone on board.
That day, Stumo, Milleron, and their
younger son, Torleif, flew to Addis Ababa.
The crater had been cordoned off, but
Milleron and Tor rushed past the bar-
rier. “It was mostly dirt,” Stumo said
later. “Where’s the plane? Where’s the
pieces? This plane had just buried itself
right straight into the ground vertically
and just disintegrated.”
This was the second crash of a 737
MAX in five months, after a Lion Air
jet plunged into the Java Sea, in late
October, 2018. Investigators quickly fo-
cussed on the automated system that
had pushed down both jets, a feature
new to this model of the 737. But a
counter-narrative gained force, too: that
the crashes were, above all, the fault of
insufficiently trained foreign pilots. “Pro-
cedures were not completely followed,”
Boeing’s C.E.O., Dennis Muilenburg,
said, at a contentious news conference
in April.
It has been more than a decade since
a commercial-airline crash in the United
States resulted in fatalities, but airplane
disasters are an unwelcome reminder
of the inherent risk of flying. Some 2.7
million people fly on U.S. airlines every
day; we’d rather not think about the
brazenness of launching ourselves thou-
sands of miles in a fragile tube, thirty
thousand feet above the earth. The ap-
peal of blaming foreign pilots is easy
to see. For the past eight months, how-
ever, the Stumo family have dedicated
themselves to demonstrating a scarier
reality: that Boeing, the pride of Amer-
ican manufacturing, prioritized finan-
cial gain over safety, with the federal
government as a collaborator.
Since the crash, the family have made
more than a dozen trips to Washing-
ton—a routine they expect to continue:
they recently found an apartment in
town. They have met separately with
two dozen members of Congress, and
with the heads of the Federal Aviation
Administration and the National Trans-
portation Safety Board, and testified
before a House committee. They were
the first American family to sue Boe-
ing, accusing the company of gross neg-
ligence and recklessness. They have
sought out whistle-blowers and filed
Freedom of Information requests. They
got a meeting for themselves and eleven
other victims’ families with Elaine Chao,
the Secretary of Transportation. After-
ward, they held a large vigil outside the
department’s headquarters. When the
vigil broke up, I talked with Gregory
Travis, a software engineer and pilot
who has written extensively about the
crashes. “Every past crash that I can
think of was an accident, in that there
was something that wasn’t really rea-
sonably foreseeable,” Travis told me.
“This was entirely different, and I don’t
think anyone understands that. This
was a collision of deregulation and Wall
Street, and the tragic thing is that it
was tragic. It was inevitable.”
I
met the Stumos in 1996, in Winsted,
a former mill town of eight thousand
people in northwest Connecticut. After
emigrating from Lebanon in the nine-
teen-twenties, Milleron’s grandfather
opened a restaurant there. Her grand-
mother, Ralph Nader’s mother, lived in
the town until her death, in 2006, at
ninety-nine. Nader still visits from
Washington, and his family funds two
activists to monitor local affairs and
bend them in a progressive direction.
Milleron and Stumo met in law
school, at the University of Iowa, and
afterward settled in Winsted, moving
into a house on Hillside Avenue and
starting a family. First Adnaan, then
Samya, then Nels. They began attend-
ing an Orthodox Christian church in
a nearby town. Nadia worked part time,
as a court-appointed lawyer. Michael
commuted twenty-five miles to a Hart-
ford law firm, and joined the Winsted
school board.
I came to Winsted for my first job,
at the Winsted Journal, a weekly paper.
