Man Slaps Crying Baby On Flight, Calls It Racist Epithet, Gets Arrested

A man slapped a crying baby on an Atlanta-bound flight while yelling a racist epithet at the infant boy and, for his effort, got tossed in handcuffs and charged with assault.

The incident took place on a Delta Air flight from Minneapolis on February 8. The baby was crying as the flight was nearing its landing when Joe Rickey Hundley of Idaho grew enraged at his crying, The Associated Press reported.

The boy’s mother, 33-year-old Jessica Bennett of Minneapolis, said Hundley was sitting next to her and then slapped the crying boy in the face, giving him a scratch under his right eye.

As he slapped the crying baby, Hundley told Bennett to “shut that (n-word) baby up,” a police report said. Several passengers then came to the mother’s aid.

The 60-year old man was then arrested for slapping the baby and charged with simple assault. He also had a 2007 incident in which he was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and public intoxication.

His lawyer urged people not to rush to judgment.

“We think that it is important to let the case develop, and we’ll see how it all comes out,” Hundley’s attorney Marcia Shein said Friday.

Hundley’s child is adopted, and they were on the way to Atlanta for a funeral, the Daily Mail reported.

After the man slapped the crying baby, police also found that he was intoxicated. And his attempt to quiet the baby didn’t quite work, either. The police report noted that the baby cried louder after being slapped.

(UPDATE: A previous version of this story misidentified the man who slaps the crying baby as being charged with carrying a concealed weapon. That charge was from a previous incident.)