It seems unlikely that the pilot would care that much. However, it's possible that one of the flight attendants asked the pilot to kick the family off the plane on their behalf. As with a conductor on a train the pilot has final say on who stays and who goes. Presumably American Airlines could have chosen to replace the pilot, but that may have created other difficulties and would have been an unlikely course of action unless the pilot was behaving in a manner that implied he was incapable of piloting the aircraft safely. All I can say is that I find the story curious and would like to hear the other side as well. Maybe this child really was running amok. That being said, the whole post-9/11 "safety" claim is getting so tired and old at this point that I can barely stand it anymore. People who feel threatened by a down syndrome child probably shouldn't be working with the public. They should be working much closer to home where they can hide in naive safety from everything they don't understand.