An unhinged Florida man horrifically pummeled a deaf and nonverbal passenger while he was sleeping until the cabin was spattered with blood on a cross-country United Airlines flight this week.
The brutal beatdown happened about two hours into United Airlines Flight 2247 from San Francisco to Washington Dulles on Monday.
It started when Everett Chad Nelson, 44, got up to use the bathroom, according to a criminal complaint.
While returning to his seat, Nelson stopped at seat 12F and “without notice, began physically attacking a sleeping male passenger by punching him repeatedly in the face and head until blood was drawn,” the complaint states.
“The next thing I know, I just hear these blood-curdling screams,” Sandhya Gupta, who was sitting a row behind the victim, told ABC 7 News.
“He was just very violently and very aggressively just pummeling the guy who was in the window seat who was in front of me and it was vicious. This wasn’t like a barroom, ‘I’m going to throw a couple of punches around,’ I mean this was vicious,” he said.
Nelson rained blows on the defenseless man for a full minute, officials alleged. Finally, a good Samaritan jumped in and ripped him off the victim.
Nelson split the man’s nose open, causing blood to splash all over his seat, the cabin wall, the window and the sleeves of Nelson’s green windbreaker, the complaint claims. The victim was also left with two black eyes.
After the two were separated, a doctor who happened to be onboard treated the man for his injuries — which is when passengers and the crew discovered the man could neither hear nor speak.
“When he was trying to communicate with us in sign language, that’s when we realized he was deaf and non-verbal,” he said.
He was able to communicate with United crew members through phone messages.
“He also just kept texting, ‘I’m so scared.’ Like it was just awful,” he said.
Nelson escaped unscathed and “there was no indication that [the alleged victim] struck him in defense,” the complaint says.
Flight attendants moved Nelson to a seat up front and put the same good Samaritan who got involved in charge of keeping watch over him until the plane landed.
The complaint does not describe a motive and does not say whether the two men had any prior relationship before the attack, which seemingly came out of nowhere.
Gupta told ABC 7 that during the text exchange with the victim, a flight attendant wrote that the suspect had claimed the victim attacked him in the street earlier — but the victim responded that he had never seen the man before in his life.
There were 82 passengers and six crew members aboard the flight, United Airlines said.
The TSA contacted the FBI mid-flight and indicated there was a “Level 2 disturbance” onboard, which constitutes “physically abusive behavior,” according to the Federal Aviation Administration. That places the incident a step above “Level 1,” which is “disruptive behavior” but before “Level 3,” which is an “attempted or actual breach of the flight deck.”
“Thanks to the quick action of our crew and customers, one passenger was restrained after becoming physically aggressive toward another customer on a flight from San Francisco to Washington Dulles on Monday,” a United spokesperson said in a statement.
“The flight landed safely and was met by paramedics and local law enforcement.”
Nelson was charged with one count of assault by beating, striking, and wounding in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States.
He faces up to a year in prison if convicted.
The FAA reported 1,748 instances of unruly passengers so far in 2024, slowly approaching last year’s total of 20,76 according to the agency’s website.
That’s still significantly down from a peak of 5,973 unruly passenger incidents in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
