NEW YORK (AP) — On the night Stephanie Cosme died, her sister and brother said they received a curt explanation from a U.S. Air Force official who met them at the hospital: The civilian contractor was failing to follow protocol when she was hit by an aircraft’s rotating propeller and killed.
The family would wait eight agonizing months to find out more about how the accident unfolded during relatively low-risk ground testing on a MQ-9A Reaper drone at Gray Butte Airfield in California on Sept. 7, 2023. They felt sure there was more to the story than Cosme, a 32-year-old testing engineer who worked for Air Force contractor Sumaria Systems, LLC, simply not following instructions.
A report from the U.S. Air Force Aircraft Accident Investigation Board eventually confirmed their instincts, finding that her trainer rushed the job and improperly instructed Cosme on how to take data readings from the drone, among other contributing factors.
But in a lawsuit filed last month against Sumaria, the family says they see a darker explanation.
Citing witness testimony from the Air Force investigation, the family contends that Cosme’s death was the culmination of a gender and racial discrimination campaign by the testing director, Derek Kirkendall, who they claim had a history of hostility against Hispanic employees at the company.
Saul Ewing, the law firm representing both the company and Kirkendall, said in a statement “the defendants deny any wrongdoing or liability whatsoever,” and that they will “address the allegations of the lawsuit in court through the legal process.”
The Air Force report, released in April, does not cite racial or gender discrimination as a contributing factor to Cosme’s death. But the family’s lawyers, Justin Green and Debra Katz, say they are basing their allegations on witness testimony from the Air Force investigation showing that Kirkendall deliberately isolated Cosme on the day of her death, assigned her to dangerous tasks that kept her away from the rest of the team and failed to inform the ground crew of her role. The lawsuit also says Kirkendall, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, disparaged her using anti-Hispanic tropes, describing her as “lazy.”
“Every night I would go to bed and I would look at her picture and I was like, ‘What happened? Did you get distracted? Did you trip?’” said her sister, Cassaundra Cosme. “The not knowing was terrible.”
But knowing wasn’t much comfort either: “It was a relief that it wasn’t her fault but then it was terrible that it wasn’t a just a horrible accident,” Cosme said.
The lawsuit also cites a hostile workplace complaint filed against Kirkendall by Cosme’s predecessor, who is not named in the filing but is also Latina and quit after raising her concerns. Katz and Green say Kirkendall was subjecting Cosme, who was of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, to similar abuse, ultimately creating the unsafe conditions that led to her death.
In written testimony submitted to the Air Force investigator, one testing engineer said Kirkendall told him he was “hazing” Cosme by having her stand for hours in the sun by the aircraft for a seemingly unimportant task without any way to communicate with her colleagues back in the control station. The Air Force report said that none of the ground crew knew what Cosme’s role was during the testing or that Kirkendall planned to have her approach the aircraft while its propeller was still running.
Kirkendall’s treatment of Cosme is typical of the “way gender harassment works when women try to break into male-dominated fields. They make it much more difficult and they often make them feel unsafe,” said Katz, a prominent civil rights attorney who concentrates on sexual harassment and discrimination.
“Everybody knows he’s hazing her, and this is so endemic to the culture that no one tells him to stop,” Katz added. “We felt this suit was really important to name it for what it is. This is gender discrimination that led to somebody’s death.”
In his testimony to the Air Force investigator, Kirkendall acknowledged that Cosme’s predecessor had filed a hostile environment complaint, saying it came as a shock to him because he thought he had “an excellent rapport” with the woman. Kirkendall said Sumaria completed its investigation into her complaint and “concluded that it was unfounded,” but that the woman had already quit.
The lawsuit also claims that two male Hispanic employees quit Sumaria because of Kirkendall’s mistreatment of them.
The AP could not independently confirm the details of the previous complaint against Kirkendall, or that the two Hispanic engineers also quit. Sumaria representatives did not answer detailed questions about the allegations against Kirkendall or the outcome of the previous complaint.
It is not clear what, if any actions, Sumaria has taken in response to the accident or to the findings of the Air Force investigation.
While the Air Force Aircraft Accident Investigation Board’s report findings are public, any “safety recommendations for preventing a reoccurrence” are made to the parties by a separate investigative board and kept privileged, said Anthony Roake, a spokesperson for Air Force Materiel Command, the command responsible for developing and testing Air Force weapon systems.
Sumaria has defended Kirkendall’s conduct on the day of the test in a detailed response to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, which conducted its own investigation into Cosme’s death and imposed penalties in March totaling $38,055 for several safety violations, including the company’s failure to effectively instruct employees to maintain a safe distance from the aircraft and rotating propeller. Like the Air Force report, the investigation did not cite racial or gender discrimination as a factor.
Sumaria, which is appealing the penalties, disputed that Kirkendall improperly instructed Cosme and said she “violated all of her training and direct instructions” on how to approach the aircraft.
Jennifer Mondino, director of the TIME UP’s Legal Defense Fund at the National Women’s Law Center, which helps bring sexual and gender harassment cases but is not involved in Cosme’s lawsuit, said gender harassment cases involving a victim who is deceased are not unprecedented but can be complicated. She said proving gender discrimination can be a challenge under any circumstances because it involves persuading people to speak out in a workplace culture that discourages it.
“If the person who was affected is no longer with us, it’s sort of an obvious point, but it’s a significant obstacle,” Mondino said.
From the Cosme family’s perspective, nobody has been held accountable for the failings that led to her death just a few months before she was getting married. The lawsuit demands a jury trial and unspecified damages.
Cosme’s family said her calm and enthusiastic demeanor was typical of her approach toward forging a career in a male-dominated field, starting with engineer classes in high school where she was only one of three girls in the first year and the only one left by the third year. She followed her father, Mario, into engineering and earned a Master of Science in Engineering/Industrial Management from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
The family buried Cosme in her wedding dress, which they had altered so it could cover her wounds.
“We will never get over this. We had a perfect life going on. Life was wonderful,” Mario Cosme said. “And Sumaria and Derek Kirkendall ruined a lifetime of effort of doing things the right way.”
