A Nashville mother and daughter were threatened with arrest by an officer assigned to the Nashville International Airport for not leaving the secured Southwest Airlines gate after their flight was delayed.
The officer told the two Black women, Amani Robinson, 20, and her mom, Shelley Morrison, they would be charged with trespassing if they did not leave, assuming all of their flights were canceled. They argued they were lawfully in the secured gate area because they had not been notified that their flight to Cleveland, Ohio, was canceled when the officer approached them.
Morrison and Johnson said they were frustrated not only with the flight situation but with how the officer threatened and treated them. They also alleged the officer singled them out on Christmas Day.
On the day of their trip, they received an alert by text message stating that their flight was delayed. According to NBC News, many Southwest Airlines flights, one of the top four airlines in the country, were delayed or canceled during the Christmas weekend. Monday, Dec. 26, alone, 70 percent of its flights—almost 2,900— were canceled. The next day Tuesday, 63 percent of the flights scheduled across the nation were also canceled.
The delays and hiccups on most U.S. airlines, not just Southwest, were because of the holiday blizzard called Winter Storm Elliot that not only caused chaos in the sky but on the ground causing over 50 people to die from a plethora of issues ranging from accidents to freezing to death to dying by carbon monoxide.
Regardless of the reason, on its website, Southwest Airlines called the “challenges” the company encountered for “consecutive days” due to the “extreme winter weather across our network” “unacceptable.”
The company’s CEO, Bob Jordan, released a video explaining the “highly complex” system that went awry and caused so much confusion, like what happened to Robinson and Morrison.
On Wednesday, Dec. 28, the daughter posted a cellphone video on TikTok of the officer telling them to leave with the caption, “Me and my family were trying to go to Ohio, and we were threatened and followed by this police officer.”
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