Security officers fired for United dragging episode

Two airport security officers in Chicago have been fired for their roles in an episode in which a screaming passenger was violently dragged from a United flight in April. Chicago’s inspector general, Joseph Ferguson, announced in a quarterly report released Tuesday that, after an investigation, two of the four Chicago Department of Aviation employees involved in the matter had been discharged. The other two employees remain suspended. The investigation found that three aviation security officers and one aviation security sergeant “mishandled a nonthreatening situation that resulted in a physically violent and forceful removal of a passenger,” Dr. David Dao, on United Flight 3411 on April 9. “The investigation also uncovered that the employees made misleading statements and deliberately removed material facts from their reports,” the report stated. As a result, the department terminated the security officer “who improperly escalated the incident” and the sergeant for deliberately removing facts from an employee report. The aviation department did not release the names of the employees. The people who were fired are appealing their discharges, a spokeswoman for the inspector general said on Tuesday. <br/>