Nadia Milleron, an independent candidate for Congress, slipped off her shoes and climbed onto the bench of a picnic table. It was a muggy August evening, and gnats and mosquitoes were swarming the 50 or so people who had gathered for a campaign event in the garden behind a pizzeria in western Massachusetts.
Ms. Milleron was nervous. A neophyte candidate, she was trying to unseat one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress. That afternoon, she had twice rehearsed her short stump speech. In the barn next to her farmhouse, she had spent 10 minutes paddling a Ping-Pong ball against a makeshift backboard, a routine she had developed to ease her jitters.
She knew she faced long odds. But she also knew she had a potent weapon: her story.
Ms. Milleron had spent the last five years on a grief-powered crusade against an iconic but troubled American company, against regulatory inertia, against a legal system that she felt was intent on thwarting her. She had been inspired and at times directed by her uncle, the consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
If there was one core belief that animated the extended Nader family, it was this: Never underestimate the ability of tireless citizen activists to change the world. Ms. Milleron’s underdog journey seemed to validate that conviction. And her run for Congress was to her about more than politics. She was fulfilling a family obligation — and channeling anger and sadness that might otherwise overwhelm her.
“We thought as a family that someone ought to challenge Richard Neal,” her local congressman, Ms. Milleron told the small crowd outside Roberto’s Pizza in Sheffield, Mass. “I’m a lawyer, I’ve passed legislation, I’ve been effective.” She urged her supporters to donate to her campaign.
Ms. Milleron was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and an ankle-length blue skirt. The skirt had belonged to her daughter. For a long time, it had carried the telltale scent of jet fuel.
A Jolt of Panic
Late one night in March 2019, Ms. Milleron awoke to the sound of retching. Her youngest son, Tor Stumo, was visiting from college, and he was sick.
Ms. Milleron, 54 at the time, wrapped Tor in a blanket, cleaned up his mess and started a load of laundry. She flipped on the radio. There was breaking news: An airliner had crashed shortly after takeoff from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
This was not the kind of news that normally would have elicited much interest from Ms. Milleron. But her 24-year-old daughter, Samya Stumo, was flying that day out of Addis Ababa. Samya was just starting a career in public health. A couple of hours earlier, she had texted her family to let them know that she would soon be boarding her flight for Nairobi.
Ms. Milleron felt a jolt of panic. The room seemed to spin.
“Samya, did you make it to Nairobi?” she texted. “There was a plane crash.” No response.
She talked to Mike Snavely, Samya’s boyfriend, who helped figure out what flight she’d been on. It was Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. The plane that had crashed.
Ms. Milleron woke her husband, Michael Stumo, who told her it couldn’t be true. He tried to go back to sleep. She shook him. “We have to go to Ethiopia,” she said. Samya might be injured and need help.
Ms. Milleron, Mr. Stumo and Tor flew 12 hours to Qatar. Before they boarded their connecting flight to Addis Ababa, they learned that there were no survivors. They had all suspected it, and now they knew. Samya was dead.
In Ethiopia, a van dispatched by the U.S. Embassy drove the family to a hotel. Ms. Milleron, an Orthodox Christian, chanted a prayer: “Give rest to the soul of thy servant Samya.” She hoped to bring her daughter’s body back to the United States to be buried. But the plane, a new Boeing 737 Max jet, had dived into the ground at more than 500 miles per hour. There were no bodies.
The family had to wait a few days before they were permitted to visit the crash site, in a remote farming region. The plane had plowed a deep crater into the earth. Around it was a plume of debris: mangled metal and clothes and passports and cigarettes and airline-branded napkins.
Samya’s boyfriend had joined the family in Addis Ababa. He curled on the ground in the fetal position, hugging himself and crying. Tor knelt by his side. Photographers started shooting pictures. Tor screamed at them to get away. It occurred to him later that having someone to be angry with made things a little easier.
He and Ms. Milleron wanted to see the plane’s crater, to do something to honor Samya’s final resting place. Rifle-wielding security guards tried to intercept them as they crossed the cordoned-off perimeter, but the two brushed past. Ms. Milleron was holding a large bouquet of white and red roses, and she threw them into the pit, one by one.
Dragged Into Action
Back home in Sheffield, Ms. Milleron couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t think. She crashed her car so many times that she stopped driving.
Her one respite was swimming. A river cut through their land, and Ms. Milleron would submerge herself in the ice-crusted water. For a few hours afterward, she could feel again.
It was Uncle Ralph who dragged her into action.
For decades, Mr. Nader had been America’s foremost consumer watchdog, cajoling Congress to pass safety laws and create new government agencies to police companies. His successes inspired generations of “Nader’s Raiders,” though his star faded after the 2000 election, when many Democrats blamed his Green Party candidacy for delivering the White House to George W. Bush.
To his family, Mr. Nader was a beloved but irascible workaholic. He often snapped at Ms. Milleron’s children for offenses such as chewing noisily. “He doesn’t really give hugs,” Tor said.
Yet his anti-corporate politics and nothing-is-impossible creed had been imprinted on relatives. Trying to change the world wasn’t a suggestion; it was a family duty. As a young adult, Samya developed an interest in public health and regularly solicited her granduncle’s advice. He appreciated that she focused their conversations on weighty matters. “Maybe she did small talk with other people, but not with me,” he said.
The night before she flew to Africa, the pair had dinner — lentils, pita, olives and onions — at Mr. Nader’s home in Washington. “I talked to her about not getting diseases,” he recalled. “Don’t take any chances” were his final words to her.
Mr. Nader, now 90, had first gained fame by railing against dangerous cars — a campaign that led to the demise of two of America’s most popular vehicles, the Chevrolet Corvair and the Ford Pinto. He developed an expertise in aviation safety, too. In 1993, he coauthored the book “Collision Course,” which warned that federal deregulation of the airline industry endangered passengers.
Now, a quarter-century later, a plane crash had killed Samya and 156 others. He regretted that his attention had wavered. “We all should have been on top of it earlier,” he said.
Mr. Nader refocused.
The Ethiopian Airlines flight was not the first crash of a 737 Max aircraft, a new breed of jet that Boeing had developed amid intense competitive pressure from its rival Airbus. Five months earlier, a Lion Air plane of the same make had plunged into the Java Sea minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing everyone onboard. News reports quickly focused on troublesome software and faulty sensors that may have forced both jets into steep, fatal descents.
Within days of the Ethiopian crash, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded 737 Max planes.
Mr. Nader told Ms. Milleron and Mr. Stumo that they should sue Boeing. He helped them find lawyers, and on April 4, 2019, their wrongful-death lawsuit was filed in federal court in Illinois, where Boeing had its headquarters at the time.
Boeing, meanwhile, was racing to get the 737 Max jets back in the air. The F.A.A. appeared poised to let them. This struck Mr. Nader as a classic example of a regulator caving to a greedy corporation.
In his experience, few advocates were more powerful than grieving parents. Mr. Nader called his niece. “You can’t spend the entire time crying,” he told Ms. Milleron. “If you don’t get up, there’s going to be a third crash.” He urged her to go to Washington and push lawmakers and regulators to keep the planes on the ground.
Ms. Milleron felt in no shape to get up. But she also felt that her uncle was right: She didn’t really have a choice.
Nor did she know where to start. She had practiced as a court-appointed lawyer, but that was a long time ago, before she devoted herself to home-schooling her children. She talked to Mr. Stumo. He, too, needed an outlet for his grief, and he knew what to do. He ran a group, the Coalition for a Prosperous America, that lobbied for U.S. manufacturers and farmers. He began reaching out to contacts to arrange meetings on Capitol Hill and at the F.A.A. and the Department of Transportation.
Mr. Nader introduced Ms. Milleron to Paul Hudson, a longtime activist in the Nader network. He instructed her to get photos of the passengers on the doomed Boeing flights. Display them outside the Transportation Department and at congressional hearings. “You can talk, you can write, but a photograph people can relate to,” he explained to her. “Make it real for them. Never be without those photographs.”
Ms. Milleron began organizing the grieving families in a WhatsApp group. They gathered photos and pieced together the flight’s seating chart. Samya, she learned, had been in seat 16J.
Meeting with senior officials at the Transportation Department, Mr. Stumo and Ms. Milleron argued that it was irresponsible for the F.A.A. to let the Boeing jets return to service without more research into the causes of the back-to-back crashes.
In June, the Trump administration decided that the planes would remain grounded indefinitely. Nearly two years would pass before they would fly again. It was Ms. Milleron’s first inkling that perhaps she could make a difference.
The Moth
A few months after Samya’s death, Ms. Milleron and some relatives traveled to Wolf Trap, a performing arts center outside Washington, D.C., to attend a Lebanese dance company’s rendition of “One Thousand and One Nights.” What should have been Samya’s 25th birthday was approaching, and Ms. Milleron, who is of Lebanese descent, thought the show was the kind of thing her daughter would have wanted to see.
One of Ms. Milleron’s cousins flew in from upstate New York. Outside Ronald Reagan National Airport, an enormous orange-and-black-striped moth attached itself to his shirt. The moth stayed on him for the drive to Wolf Trap. It remained through dinner at a restaurant. At the venue, a procession of strangers admired the unusual insect.
The dance performance began at 8 p.m. Ms. Milleron concluded that Samya would have considered the show exploitative. The moth, too, seemed unimpressed, flying off into the gathering dusk.
It was then that another cousin, having done some internet sleuthing, identified the type of moth. It was a Samia.
Ms. Milleron began to cry. She texted Mr. Snavely, Samya’s boyfriend, about what she had just witnessed. “We were all overcome,” she wrote.
“I’m glad that she is finding ways to make her presence felt,” Mr. Snavely replied.
“Samya communicated with us and let us know she was fine,” Ms. Milleron said recently as she gave a tour of her daughter’s bedroom. It had been left largely untouched in the five-plus years since Samya’s death. A piece of lined notebook paper — on which Samya had written “If you try to wake me up before 8:30 I m̶a̶y̶ will kill you.” — remained taped to the door.
In the closet, a small stack of thin white boxes contained the few items of Samya’s that workers had recovered from the airplane’s wreckage, including her fuel-soaked clothes and passport. Ms. Milleron had taken one of those salvaged possessions, Samya’s blue skirt, and hung it in her own closet.
‘This Is Completely Useless’
The more Ms. Milleron learned about the problems with Boeing’s aircraft, the more upset she became. In its haste to fend off Airbus, Boeing had been churning out planes with flawed software and poorly designed equipment, with little supervision from regulators. A rushed manufacturing process had compounded the problems — not just with the 737 Max line of jets but with the company’s 787 Dreamliner as well. Boeing employees had repeatedly alerted their superiors, to no avail.
Nothing would bring Samya back, but Ms. Milleron yearned for accountability.
She invited the other victims’ families to join her on trips to Washington. They pressed lawmakers to hold hearings, to subpoena Boeing and its executives, to require the F.A.A. to more closely scrutinize the aircraft-manufacturing process.
Over the next several months, Ms. Milleron estimated, she visited 100 congressional offices. She and the relatives of other victims attended hearings, toting poster-size photos of their loved ones.
“Turn and look at people when you say you’re sorry,” Ms. Milleron called out at a 2019 hearing after the Boeing chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, directed his apologies to the lawmakers on the dais but not to the families in the audience.
Some New England lawmakers offered Ms. Milleron assistance and condolences; Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts sent flowers for Samya’s funeral. Mr. Neal, however, met with Mr. Stumo only after Mr. Nader prodded the lawmaker’s office. “I will never forget that I did not hear from my congressman around Samya’s death,” Ms. Milleron said.
At times, Ms. Milleron bumped into Boeing lobbyists wearing expensive-looking suits and seeming to enjoy unfettered access throughout the Capitol. “What am I doing?” she asked herself. “This is completely useless.”
But lawmakers and their aides said her presence mattered, keeping up the pressure to act. In 2020, Congress passed the Aircraft Certification Safety and Accountability Act, requiring the F.A.A. to better supervise plane manufacturing and onboard safety systems.
Douglas Pasternak, a congressional aide who led a House investigation into Boeing, said that as he grilled Boeing executives, he found himself thinking of Ms. Milleron. She “was definitely in the back of my head,” he said. “This wasn’t just an investigation about Boeing. It was also about a human tragedy.”
One day, between meetings in the Hart Senate Office Building, Ms. Milleron got a phone call from an unknown number in Ethiopia. The person on the line informed her that the authorities had finished the process of identifying human remains from the crash. They had found 122 pieces of Samya’s body and wanted to know what to do with them. Ms. Milleron’s knees buckled.
The Priest’s Warning
Ms. Milleron and Mr. Stumo had grieved before. Twenty years earlier, they had lost another child, their 2-year-old son, to cancer.
Ms. Milleron’s priest warned her at the time that parents who suffer such a loss often end up getting divorced. She and Mr. Stumo struggled, but Ms. Milleron did not believe in divorce.
In some ways, they were better equipped to handle the second tragedy. “We’re not blaming each other,” she said. “I think we have more of an understanding for the way the other person” processes grief.
Mr. Stumo was sitting by a window overlooking a flower garden that Ms. Milleron had planted in Samya’s honor. Did he agree with his wife? He hesitated and took a small bite of a Twix bar. “I don’t know,” he eventually said, and his eyes brimmed with tears. “All I know is we had four kids, and now we have two.”
For a time, the lawsuit they filed against Boeing had put Ms. Milleron and Mr. Stumo at odds. The firm that was representing them, Clifford Law Offices in Chicago, had sued Boeing on behalf of other victims’ families, too, and the cases were eventually consolidated under one federal judge, Jorge L. Alonso.
In early 2021, lawyers at the Clifford firm took the lead in negotiating a deal with Boeing. For the purposes of this specific litigation, the company would acknowledge that it was liable for the deaths of the Flight 302 passengers. Damages would be decided later, through mediators, judges or juries. The catch was that there would be no discovery process.
Ms. Milleron and her uncle thought this was outrageous. She wanted to depose Boeing’s executives and have access to the company’s internal documents about the Max jets. Under this deal, whatever secrets were lurking inside Boeing might remain hidden.
Mr. Stumo, however, had spent well over a year working with the Clifford lawyers, and he trusted them. He wanted to accept the deal.
The disagreement escalated into an intense, prolonged fight. “There were a lot of rocky times with Mom and Dad,” said Adnaan Stumo, the couple’s eldest child.
He and Tor tried to mediate between their warring parents; Mr. Nader pushed his niece to stand firm. Finally, Mr. Stumo relented. When the agreement between Boeing and the victims’ kin was announced in November 2021, Samya’s family was one of just a few holdouts.
The family soon hired a new law firm. The goal was to advance toward trial, collecting evidence and sworn testimony along the way.
But Judge Alonso granted Boeing’s requests to put the family’s lawsuit on ice so that the company could focus on resolving cases that fell under the agreement it had negotiated with the plaintiffs’ lawyers. He hasn’t allowed discovery or depositions in Ms. Milleron’s suit to get underway.
‘Grief Bends Your Body’
In early 2022, Ms. Milleron embarked on a new mission.
Boeing’s home state of Illinois, where her lawsuit had been filed, was one of about a dozen with a bizarre wrinkle in its laws. If a company injured someone, the victim could seek both compensatory damages (to make up for things like lost income) and punitive damages (to punish the company and discourage future misconduct). But if the company was responsible for someone’s death, only compensatory damages were permitted.
The laws reflected fears that juries would overreact in emotionally charged death cases, potentially bankrupting business. Ms. Milleron and Mr. Nader thought the laws invited corporate recklessness, because the absence of punitive damages removed a deterrent to bad behavior.
Now they hatched a plan: Ms. Milleron would try to change the Illinois law.
“You need to go do this,” Mr. Nader told her, even as some family members rolled their eyes.
“I thought it was crazy but figured it would help her work through stuff,” Tor said.
In February 2022, Ms. Milleron packed her Toyota Prius with photos of crash victims and drove more than 1,000 miles to Springfield, the state capital.
One of her first meetings was with La Shawn K. Ford, a progressive state representative. When she said that she planned to stay in Springfield for as long as it took, Mr. Ford agreed to help. “That was enough for me,” he said, “the fact that she was willing to fight for it.”
Mr. Ford asked the legislature’s staff to draft a bill permitting punitive damages in wrongful-death suits. It was up to Ms. Milleron to drum up support.
She positioned herself just outside the House of Representatives’ chamber, a gathering spot for lobbyists known as the Rail.
Every day that the legislature was in session, Ms. Milleron was at the Rail or wandering the corridors of the Capitol or schmoozing lawmakers’ secretaries and trying to get an audience. She cut an unintimidating figure: dressed in black, her graying hair in a bun, her bad back causing her to hunch. “The grief bends your body,” she said.
When Ms. Milleron wasn’t at the Capitol, she was swimming at the Y.M.C.A. or holed up at a Motel 6. Some nights she called Tor. “She was really struggling and felt alone and isolated,” he said. He came to Illinois and found that the Prius was filthy and smelled like something had died inside. He worried that his mother was unraveling.
There were two main obstacles to getting the law passed. One was the business lobby, which leaned on Republican lawmakers to block the bill. The other involved Democrats. Several told Ms. Milleron that they deferred to the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association on matters related to legal policy. And the group was not backing the bill; it was focused on other legislative priorities.
Ms. Milleron wrote to ITLA’s president and staff. She got no response. Mr. Nader wrote, too. Nothing.
One day, Ms. Milleron was looking for a place to grab a bite near the Capitol. She came across a squat, Tudor-style building and realized with surprise that it was ITLA’s office. She went inside. Nobody was at the reception. Eventually one of the people Ms. Milleron had been emailing emerged. When Ms. Milleron introduced herself, he insisted that he had no time to speak to her and hurried away.
Demoralized, she went into the stairwell and let herself cry. Soon, a different staff member walked in. “I know who you are,” Ms. Milleron said the woman told her. “I know why you’re here. Just keep going. Don’t give up.”
But after more than two months in Illinois, Ms. Milleron didn’t see the point. The bill hadn’t gained traction. There hadn’t even been hearings. She drove back to Massachusetts, feeling discouraged.
That summer, though, the trial lawyers’ association named a new president, Patrick A. Salvi II. When he heard from Ms. Milleron urging his group to support the bill, he said, “I told her I intend to aggressively pursue this as a top goal.”
And he did. Mr. Salvi testified before the legislature. His group’s support made the difference, lawmakers said. In the space of a single week in May 2023, the bill moved out of committee and onto the floor, where both chambers approved it.
Ms. Milleron was jubilant. “This is one of the biggest achievements of my life and reaffirms my faith that we can make a difference,” she wrote in a WhatsApp message to the other crash families.
That August, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the legislation.
‘A Magic Button’
For years, Mr. Nader had been muttering to family members that “we’ve got to do something about Richie Neal.”
He didn’t like most politicians, especially those whose campaigns were bankrolled by big companies. And Mr. Neal, the 18-term Democratic congressman who represented Ms. Milleron’s hometown, had received millions of dollars in such contributions over the years.
Plus, personal feelings were at play. Mr. Neal had repeatedly criticized Mr. Nader, saying he cost Al Gore the 2000 election. There had been the congressman’s quietness after the crash. More recently, Tor had circulated a petition to get Mr. Neal — the top Democrat on the House committee responsible for tax policy — to hold a town-hall meeting in the district to discuss funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Mr. Neal declined to come.
(In a statement Mr. Neal said, “I commend the family for their advocacy and share their goal of holding Boeing — and all corporate negligence — accountable at every turn,” adding, “I’ve always stood up to the powerful on behalf of regular Americans.”)
One day in early 2023, Mr. Nader called Adnaan, Ms. Milleron’s 30-year-old son, with an idea. All over the country, charismatic young progressives seemed to be toppling members of the old guard. Adnaan should run against Mr. Neal as an independent, he said. Mr. Nader was taken by the idea of Adnaan, who is a violinist, wowing crowds with an anti-corporate stump speech and a musical performance.
“He thinks the music thing is like a magic button,” Adnaan said. “He’s also 90 and maybe a little out of touch with what’s hip.”
But Adnaan was intrigued, and he told his granduncle that he would consider it. First, though, he was going on a five-month Arctic expedition aboard a 72-foot schooner, the Marie Tharp.
Since Samya’s death, her family had been trying to spend more time with one another, “to hold ourselves more closely,” as Adnaan put it. That fall, Ms. Milleron flew to Greenland to meet up with the Marie Tharp.
The boat sailed toward Canada, and mother and son sat in the pilothouse doing night watches together. They discussed his potential candidacy, listened to political podcasts and debated.
As storms lashed the boat, a thought nagged at Ms. Milleron. Though the family had decided they were going to take on Mr. Neal, her son had “never had a household or a mortgage or a car payment or had a child in the hospital,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘I am so much more qualified to do this than you are.’”
When he returned to the United States, Adnaan decided against running. “I’m far too radical,” he said.
Ms. Milleron knew what to do. Early this year, Mr. Nader became one of the first to contribute to the Nadia for Congress campaign committee.
Doing Impossible Things
One morning this month, Ms. Milleron made a cup of tea, sat down at her kitchen table and logged into a Zoom meeting with the F.A.A.
For a while after the crash, the agency’s representatives had held monthly calls for the families of the Boeing crash victims. The meetings eventually dwindled to once a quarter. Then they seemed to peter out altogether. This was the first one since January, when a fuselage panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight.
Katie Thomson, a deputy administrator of the F.A.A., provided updates on the agency’s oversight of Boeing and began answering questions. Things immediately grew combative. Ms. Milleron and other family members took turns slamming the F.A.A. for a litany of perceived shortcomings, such as not having enough employees stationed at Boeing manufacturing facilities.
Toward the end, a woman who had lost her daughter on the Ethiopian Airlines flight asked Ms. Thomson whether she would be surprised if another Boeing plane were to crash. Yes, Ms. Thomson replied, because the F.A.A. was on the ball.
“This shows you’re totally out to lunch,” Ms. Milleron erupted. “It’s really, really concerning. You have many warning bells that you’re not attending to as an agency. You need to grasp reality.”
“Nadia, you might not believe it, but we care very much about aviation safety,” Ms. Thomson responded.
“I know you care,” Ms. Milleron interjected. “But you are complicit in the deaths of our loved ones.”
The meeting ended, and Ms. Milleron drove her Prius an hour or so east to Springfield, the largest city in Massachusetts’s sprawling First Congressional District, to do some campaigning. She was not deluding herself about her chances. Mr. Neal’s campaign had nearly 100 times the cash on hand that hers did, and the incumbent had barely acknowledged Ms. Milleron’s existence.
Yet Ms. Milleron said that her fund-raising had recently picked up and noted that no Republican was in the race. “That means I have a chance,” she said. She held out hope that her message — including resuscitating local manufacturing and training more doctors — would resonate.
Mr. Stumo, for one, had overcome his earlier doubts about the wisdom of his wife’s campaign. “I didn’t think the punitive damages thing in Illinois was a good idea, but she made it happen,” he said. “She and we have done some impossible things throughout this process, and who am I to say otherwise?”
It was a sunny afternoon, and Ms. Milleron walked through a low-income neighborhood of semidetached homes, knocking on doors and handing out campaign fliers.
She approached a man on a stoop. He was wearing a pink shirt, smoking a cigarette and holding a bottle in a brown paper bag. When Ms. Milleron’s campaign manager asked if he was a voter, he replied that politicians belonged in the trash. Then he looked at Ms. Milleron.
“I know who you are,” he said, his eyes widening. He had seen her TV ads. “I’ve heard the story about your daughter. It’s really bad.” He said he would vote for her in November.
Ms. Milleron thanked him and moved on to the next house.
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