Al Haase, president and CEO of AGC, issued a statement early Sunday that, while not referring to Hundley by name, called reports of behavior by one of its executives on recent personal travel “offensive and disturbing” and said he “is no longer employed with the company.” Keeney would not say whether Hundley was fired or resigned. Hundley was president of AGC’s Unitech Composites and Structures unit.
Hundley was charged last week in federal court in Atlanta with simple assault for allegedly slapping the 2-year-old boy during the Feb. 8 flight. His attorney, Marcia Shein, of Decatur, Ga., said Saturday that Hundley will plead not guilty. The charge carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail.
When speaking to the mother, Joe Rickey Hundley reportedly told the child’s mother, Jessica Bennett, to “shut that (N-word) baby up” before slapping him, adding an extra level of messed-up-ness to the story.
Joe Rickey Hundley, of Hayden, Idaho, has been charged with simple assault. His attorney said he will plead not guilty.
Bennett, 33, told authorities her son was crying as the Delta Air Lines flight prepared for landing. Hundley, 60, was sitting next to her and slapped the boy in his face, causing a scratch under his right eye, she said.
Hundley “told her to shut that (N-word) baby up,” FBI special agent Daron Cheney said in a sworn statement. “Ms. Bennett received assistance from several people on the plane.”
The mother of the child, Jessica Bennett, says that her son has become apprehensive to strangers in the wake of the incident. Hundley, the president of Unitech Composites and Structures, was suspended by his employer in the wake of the incident, though he denies the allegations against him. The incident took place as the plane landed in Minneapolis Atlanta.
Capturing Libya: Through a Hipstamatic Lens
To photojournalism purists, it was pure blasphemy: a prestigious prize, third place for photo of the year, granted to a New York Times photographer who’d used not a 35mm to document U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but simply, his iPhone — and an app called Hipstamatic. Immediately, traditionalists went berserk: “What we knew as photojournalism at its purest form is over,” one photojournalist lamented. Using Hipstamatic in a news report, another commentator proclaimed, was “cheating us all.”
And yet, to Ben Lowy, a conflict photographer who has made a career out of a certain brand of iPhonography — and will debut the first ever photojournalism-inspired Hipstamatic lens with his namesake later this year — the award was a well-needed wake-up call for photojournalism fundamentalists. Last February, Lowy set out to capture the uprising in Libya from his iPhone (alongside millions of protesters who’d document the Arab Spring on their mobile devices) in photos that would fuel reporting from the region in outlets around the globe. In October, Lowy’s Hipstamatic images of everyday life in wartime Kabul were published in the New York Times Magazine, prompting the magazine’s photo editor, Kathy Ryan, to defend their use on the paper’s 6th Floor blog. And since then, Lowy has published an iPhone photo a day — from dramatic images of war to mundane life in Brooklyn — on his Tumblr, captured under the title, iSee.
That he’s found a home on Tumblr suggests that Tumblr is a place for new approaches.
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