Poor Marilyn Hartman — the 62-year-old woman who was arrested several times earlier this year for at least four attempts to board planes at SFO without a ticket — managed to get herself onto a Southwest Airlines flight to LAX at San Jose Mineta Airport on Monday night and was once again arrested. She made it all the way to L.A., though!
Hartman was arrested and put on probation back in April after repeated attempts to board planes to Hawaii, telling authorities that she had cancer (this hasn't been confirmed) and just wanted to go somewhere warm. She was given a mental health screening after her third attempt and found to be mentally fit and "articulate." District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe told SF Weekly at the time, "She just strikes me as a very lonely person."
A Southwest flight attendant became aware at some point Monday night that Hartman was on the plane without a ticket, after she successfully sneaked through security and past the gate agent by sliding through past a family. As one "airport patron" tells KTVU, the fact that she was so easily successful "does raise the hackles on the back of the neck a little bit."
As KRON 4 reports, Southwest called the LAPD, who detained Hartman at LAX's Terminal 1 and are now holding her on $500 bail. Can someone please bail her out and send her to Hawaii? She is clearly bound and determined not to be stuck in San Francisco and this GoFundMe campaign from April still has not reached its $2500 goal. Let's do this, people.
San Jose Airport officials and Southwest Airlines are meanwhile holding their heads low and figuring out how they both failed to keep an unticketed passenger off a plane the second one in a year if you count the 16-year-old who got himself onto the tarmac into that wheel well on his way to Hawaii. Homeland Security issued a statement Tuesday blaming both the airport and the airline for not "protecting passengers from a potential threat to their safety."
