Just days after JetBlue shockingly misplaced Maribel Martinez’s 5-year-old son and put him on the wrong flight, she received a phone call offering her thousands of dollars as a “gift” from the airline.
Martinez had made headlines after spending hours waiting at Kennedy airport to find out what had happened to her son after the airline presented her with a little boy who was not hers, while her son had been flown to Boston.
Shortly afterward, she received a phone call from someone who identified themselves as an airline supervisor named Joanne.
“She (Joanne) apologized for what happened and said she was a mother, too, and felt bad about what happened,” Martinez recalled, speaking through a translator. “They wanted to give me a gift of $10,000 for what happened.”
Martinez said that as soon as she heard the offer, she hung up. “I said, ‘I have a lawyer and we didn’t need to speak any further. Contact my lawyer,’” Martinez said. “I felt bad, like they were trivializing the matter.”
Martinez’s lawyer Sanford Rubenstein said that he suspects the airline was trying to buy her off and called the move “unethical.” Rubenstein has since sent a letter to JetBlue ordering them not to have any contact with Martinez.