OC Woman Claims Inept Southwest Flight Crew Killed Husband

A Newport Beach woman who works for Southwest Airlines filed a wrongful death lawsuit today against her employer and the crew who worked a flight from Oakland to John Wayne Airport in which her husband fell ill and later died.

A representative of Southwest Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the suit, which was filed on behalf of Kelly Ilczyszyn, whose financial trader husband was a frequent guest on the CNBC “Futures Now” show, their 6-year-old daughter and his two adult children.

The lawsuit was filed in Alameda County Superior Court because most of the flight attendants named in the complaint live in the Oakland area, according to her attorney, Andrew J. Spielberger.

Richard Ilczyszyn suffered a pulmonary embolism on a Sept. 19 flight that originated in Chicago and stopped at Oakland before heading for the Santa Ana airport, Spielberger said. About 10 minutes before landing, Ilczyszyn, who was 46, fell ill and went to the bathroom, he said.

“The guy’s in there fully clothed, he’s moaning and crying,” Spielberger told City News Service. “They tried to open the door, but his foot’s in the way, so they just closed the door and then they tell the police he’s a troublemaker. And they say, ‘OK, let’s deplane everybody.’ During that whole process, he’s not getting oxygen to the brain.”

Instead of having paramedics meet the ailing passenger at the plane, sheriff’s deputies arrived because the flight crew indicated he was causing a disturbance, Spielberger said.

Paramedics were able to get Ilczyszyn breathing again in an ambulance as it raced to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, Spielberger said, “but he had gone so long without oxygen his brain swelled and ultimately his organs started shutting down.”

He was taken off life support the following day.

Her attorney said Kelly Ilczyszyn, who is on leave from Southwest, has worked for the airline for 16 years and, coincidentally, met her husband while working as a flight attendant on the Chicago-to-Oakland route.

“I feel let down by my work family,” she said. “They dropped the ball. This crew made horrible decisions and came to conclusions that weren’t based on accurate assessments.”

Friday flights from Oakland to Santa Ana are notorious, Spielberger said.

“The Friday night flight from Oakland to Orange County is called the booze cruise,” he said.

The flight crew apparently mistakenly thought Richard Ilczyszyn had been drinking, but an autopsy showed he was not drunk and had no drugs in his system, Spielberger said.

Ilczyszyn “had been cleared to fly and flew multiple times” before he got sick on the flight to John Wayne Airport, Spielberger said.

Notifying authorities that he was a “troublemaker” prompted Orange County sheriff’s deputies to spend 30 to 40 minutes getting all of the passengers off the flight before treating the passenger, the attorney said.

He faulted the airline’s training of flight crews and alleged “their conduct delayed the appropriate medical care.”

If paramedics had been able to treat him right away it’s likely Ilczyszyn would have survived, Spielberger said.

“I’ve gone over this time line with several medical experts who have said in no uncertain terms that it was this delay in getting appropriate medical care that killed him. He didn’t have to die,” Spielberger said.

He said his client was driving around the airport with her daughter, waiting to pick up her husband, “nut he wasn’t answering the phone ... Finally, she gets a call from her husband’s phone and it’s a police officer on the other end asking her, ‘Does your husband do drugs?”’

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, also names Southwest employees individually, including Kristina Lynn Koester, Jenna A. Harrison, Cynthia L. Jenkins, Christina Green, Joe Walker and Chris Krawec.

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City News Service

Photo Credit: Patch Archive

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