Ex-JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater plead guilty today to one felony attempted criminal mischief, one count of misdemeanor criminal mischief, and one count of aggravated awesomeness.
Slater captured the hearts and imaginations of millions after he quit his job at JetBlue by grabbing some beer from the food cart and busting out through the emergency door and down the emergency slide.
The folk-hero will not have to go jail. Under the terms of the agreement, he will undergo a year-long mental health program and receive drug and alcohol abuse counseling.
“While the public interest was surprising for me, at the end of the day I am a grown-up. I must accept responsibility for my actions,” Slater told reporters outside the Supreme Court steps.
Slater also has to pay JetBlue back $10,000 to repair the emergency chute he damaged.
Fed Up JetBlue Fight Steven Slater Attendant Pleads Guilty [NBC New York]
PREVIOUSLY
Zero Witnesses Back Slater’s Story
JetBlue CEO: Slide-Jumping Flight Attendant ‘Not A Hero In My Book‘
Dramatic Animated Recreation Of Flight Attendant Quitting, Using Emergency Slide
Flight Attendant Weighs In On Angry Passengers, Job Stress
JetBlue Flight Attendant Curses Out Passenger, Uses Emergency Slide To Exit Plane And Run Away
Subscribe to Ben’s posts by RSS.
Follow Ben on Twitter.
Email ben at consumerist.com
More From Consumerist
-
GlaxoSmithKline Pleads Guilty & Will Pay U.S. $3 Billion To Resolve Fraud Allegations
-
Lawyer Insists He’s Innocent Of Death Profiteering And Identity Theft, Wants New Trial
-
Report: BP Will Be Hit With Record Fine In The Billions Over Deepwater Horizon Spill
-
Lawyer Who Took Out Annuities On The Dying Pleads Guilty 1 Week Into Trial
-
Transocean Pleads Guilty, Agrees To Pay $1.4 Billion To Settle Charges Related To Gulf Oil Spill
One count of being awesome? C’mon, Ben. I thought it was long established that this guy’s story couldn’t be corroborated by anybody on the flight. How does being full of it = being awesome?
If no other part of his story was true other than saying “to hell with it”, grabbing the beers, and riding the chute out of the plane – that’s still awesome.
Yes, I’m sure any nearby ground crew whose lives Mr. Slater may have missed; any passengers who were supposed to take that plane but were delayed because of his antics; and the rest of the crew who put up with the customers yet managed to not throw a hissy fit PLUS had to clean up his share of the mess, I’m sure they all think he’s AWESOME too.
(Griping, making fun, blowing off steam…I do these myself, but all these can be done without royally f*cking up other peoples’ day.)
Everyone has fantasies about doing something exactly like he did. Except that he actually did it.
So, in the sense of having actualized a fantasy shared by essentially everybody, he did something awesome.
Sure, if he’d hit some cargo worker in the head with the slide and killed him, I’d be calling for his head on a platter. But he didn’t. So…still awesome.
I haven’t paid enough attention to the story to know what the final straw on that final flight was, did it match up exactly to the “folk story”…. but who cares? Clearly we’ve all seen front-line customer service personnel abused to no end, and this guy had had enough, and his exit was the stuff of legend.
Next beer I crack open, I do so in Mr. Slater’s honor. Hero of the People.
Umm, everybody cares. Nothing that he claimed “pushed him over the edge” was corroborated by even a single person on board that flight, who tended to describe him as becoming flustered at nothing and clearly irate. He threw a hissy fit without provocation — according to every story but his own — and that’s not nearly the same thing as being pushed over the edge by idiot customers.
It’s a sad say in Tinseltown is this whiny chump is a hero of the people.
By “who cares?” you mean, “I’ve got this awesome fake narrative constructed in my head and I don’t want your stupid facts to get in the way.”
Usually you’re supposed to have the beer BEFORE going there.
Sounds like his awesome is pretty fabricated for PR purposes. Folks on the plane didn’t seem to tell the same story he told.
He’s awesome in the same way Michael Douglas was in “Falling Down”. We are all aghast at someone flipping out and bucking society’s norms, but we all secretly want to. Someone just get’s pushed too far and has had enough.
You’re seriously going to lump this whiny little brat together with Bill Foster? Did you eve see “Falling Down”? Dude was divorced, unemployed, had a restraining order, and that was just the beginning of the movie.
I’m sorry, but Slater is nothing by comparison.
So much for journalistic integrity… it got trumped by ego stroke.
He quit his job popped the emergency shoot and walked off with beer. That is pretty awesome. That is substantiated by everyone. The rest of it is just details. “When the Legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Mental health counseling I can understand, but why the substance abuse counseling? Is it because he grabbed beer on the way out the chute or is there some backstory to this?
It takes a lot of review to establish a history of substance abuse. My money says he was high on (insert intoxicant of choice here) and that was what facilitated the outburst.
BTW, I’m sure they did a blood toxicology on this guy and found what ever was there, coupled with admissions of said use and BAM: He’s a victim.
He probably pulled the Twinkies defense and admitted to main veining the creamy filling.
Is that a Gay Joke?
Was it funny? If so, then sure. It wasn’t meant to be a joke though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_entendre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suddenly_I_See
I love this thread tree so much.
The mental health counseling was the part I didn’t understand.
Well, he did (allegedly) scream at a passenger, declare that he had had it with work, tell everyone to go to hell (IIRC), open an emergency hatch, grab beers and slide his way to freedom (and unemployment).
Oh no, that’s just normal.
Sorry, but angry != mentally unstable to me.
Just because you get mental health counseling doesn’t mean you’re unstable. People see psychiatrists and don’t have to be mentally unstable. Sometimes it means you’re unhappy with your lot in life and it’s affecting you mentally and emotionally.
Mental health counseling is not limited to the mentally unstable.
I can see how you’re making that connection, but it’s too far of a logical leap.
OK, angry != need counseling then
I’m sure Mr. Slater underwent a thorough mental evaluation in the process of this trial.
For you to say just “angry” is a gross over-simplification.
Let’s say this was an office, not a plane. If he was angry enough to yell at strangers from the budget department and jump out a window to hop through the shrubs to freedom instead of use a door to exit his workplace, you don’t think he might need some counseling? You don’t think someone would want to evaluate him and talk to him to make sure that he was of sound mind?
Douche-bag.
So so true.
>>”While the public interest was surprising for me, at the end of the day I am a grown-up. I must accept responsibility for my actions,” Slater told reporters outside the Supreme Court steps.
While I may never know the true facts of what happened, the fact that Mr. Slater stepped up to make things right gives him a ‘double-plus-good’ in my book.
Perhaps his ration of chocolate went up.
Well, he could have fought it but there wasn’t really a point – he definitely, irrefutably opened the emergency door and slid down the chute. What he got was a more lenient sentence – the alternative was one to three years of jail.
Seems fair. There doesn’t seem to be any point in sending him to jail, nor should he have gotten away with it.
He may be smiling now, but his career options are pretty limited with that felony on his record. Forget working in the travel industry and a lot of other places. Most real employers won’t hire you if you have a felony conviction, and that’s what he’s got now thanks to his guilty plea.
After a year, if his record is clean and he has completed the programs sentenced to him, he can appeal to have his felony withdrawn and replaced with a misdemeanor. Then again, all anyone has to do is Google him to figure out he was that guy.
So true and you generally can’t expunge a felony conviction. Heck, anymore if a background check reveals even an arrest you are considered a criminal.
Well, Im sure he could get a job at a pizza shop.
This guy is a big douche bag.
How long till he lands a gig on a reality show?
Big Brother inc!
I still don’t understand why people think what he did was awesome. As soon as I read an account of what happened and saw a photo of him, I knew it was a drama queen event. How is that awesome, exactly? Its not about his job, because drama queens go crazy over anything that doesn’t go their way. Someone could have hit him at a grocery store, and he would’ve done the same exact thing, triggering the fire alarm and running out the back door.
Partially, I think it’s because we have all wanted to slide down the big inflatable chute but did not ever want to be in the kind of situation in which sliding down the big inflatable chute is necessary.
I was going to refute your statement, then I realized that I WOULD like to slide down a big inflatable yellow chute.
So, you make a good point.
Just go to a bouncy castle place for like $6.
http://www.aquadome.ie/img/gallery-outdoors6.jpg
He just got a $10k chance to ride one. I assume there are cheaper options out there somewhere.
Ol’ stupidass is now a felon. Good luck, stupidass. And you were never a hero to me, just a ten-year-old.
He really couldn’t muster up enough lawyering to get out of a felony conviction? Ouch. Gonna regret that in a few years, buddy.
Anyone pulling stunts should be automatically jailed. No “my son is in that balloon”, no stopping a bus on the 405 to play a song about traffic jams, no deploying slides, no streaking by Obama. This stuff is asinine.
I was open to streaking Obama for a million cash. But really, does America really want to see a 40-year old fat white guy naked??
So I called it off.
They need to charge him an additional $10 for the beers.
as long as we see this in a movie soon.
He’s not awesome; he’s a jerk. How many times have I wanted to do something like this? Every damn day. I hate my job but it’s all I’ve got right now. I’d like to say “Fuck it” and walk out every day, but I don’t. I have bills to pay. I’m sure there’s someone out there who was happy to get the job he walked away from. There are other ways to quit without resorting to dramatics.
Aren’t there legal ways to prevent him from profiting from his felony? I hope so. He doesn’t deserve all the attention.
Good job, moron!
This guy has to be the biggest douche bag of 2010. I can’t believe that somebody would actually hire him anymore. He is seemingly unemployable for any professional, career job now.