if you follow the comments in the huffpo link, there is a blog link that then quotes a comment left somewhere by a relative of the woman. She apparently has terminal cancer and was trying to get home to her family for their last Thanksgiving together before she passes.
If that's true, it's very sad that she ended up missing it because she did miss her connecting flight.
My question would be however...why would you wait to fly until the actual Thanksgiving Day if you needed to be there for that reason? Even if this whole "tweeting" issue had never occured, she still should have known that flights get delayed all the time and planned to have an earlier flight. For as much of a jerk as this guy was to her (I didn't find any of it funny), she could have avoided all of it by booking her flight a day earlier.