Man who assaulted flight attendants gets 60 days in jail

A 23-year-old Ohio man who the authorities say groped two flight attendants and punched a third before being duct-taped to his seat amid jeers from his fellow passengers on a flight last summer was sentenced on Tuesday to 60 days in jail. Parts of the episode, which occurred during a Frontier Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Miami on July 31, 2021, were recorded on video. It was among many altercations between service workers and angry customers that have received widespread publicity during the pandemic, particularly on commercial flights. In February, the man, Maxwell Berry of Norwalk, Ohio, pleaded guilty in United States District Court in Miami to three counts of assault. In addition to the jail term, Berry was fined $2,500 and ordered to pay more than $1,500 in restitution. Berry’s lawyer, Jason Kreiss, had argued in a memo to the court that he should not go to jail for the crime, saying that what he had done that day was out of character and that he had already suffered a severe punishment in the form of damage to his reputation. But in an interview on Tuesday, Jordan Galarza, the flight attendant whom Berry struck, called the 60-day sentence “a disgusting miscarriage of justice.” “He made an enemy of everyone on that flight,” Galarza said. He also defended the way Berry was physically restrained. Although it “looked a bit barbaric,” Galarza said, “the people on that aircraft saw justice happen — more than what we saw today.”<br/>