Boeing reaches settlement with man who lost entire family in 737 MAX Crash

Just days before a high-profile trial was set to begin, a last-minute settlement has been reached between Boeing and Paul Njoroge, the Canadian man who lost his entire family in the deadly 2019 crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.

Njoroge had filed a lawsuit seeking millions in damages, citing the profound emotional trauma he has endured since the tragedy. In March 2019, his family were flying to their native Kenya when the Boeing 737 MAX suffered a fatal malfunction shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa. The plane crashed minutes later, killing all 157 people on board.

Among those killed were Njoroge’s wife, Carolyne, and three small children, Ryan, age 6, Kellie, 4, and Rubi, 9 months old, the youngest to die on the plane. Njoroge also lost his mother-in-law, whose family has a separate case.

Njoroge, who met his wife in college in Nairobi, was living in Canada at the time of the crash. He had planned to join his family in Kenya later. He testified before Congress in 2019 about repeatedly imagining how his family suffered during the flight, which lasted only six minutes.

He has pictured his wife struggling to hold their infant in her lap with two other children seated nearby. “I stay up nights thinking of the horror that they must have endured,” Njoroge said. “The six minutes will forever be embedded in my mind. I was not there to help them. I couldn’t save them.”

Njoroge says he has been unable to return to his family home in Toronto due to the overwhelming grief. He has struggled to find employment and has faced criticism from extended family members for not accompanying his wife and children on the trip.

The terms of the settlement remain confidential. However, the case had been expected to draw renewed attention to Boeing’s safety practices and the troubled 737 MAX aircraft. The Ethiopian Airlines crash, along with a similar incident involving a Lion Air flight in Indonesia just five months earlier, claimed a combined 346 lives and led to a global grounding of the MAX fleet.