Loyal readers of SFist will remember the lovely but troubled Marilyn Hartman, who showed up in the news so much between 2014 and 2016 that she even got her own tag. Well, we lost track of her for a bit, but she's back! And she just got arrested again for trying to stow away on another plane, this time at O'Hare Airport in Chicago.
In her 60s, former Bay Area resident Marilyn Hartman decided to derive all of her jollies from sneaking onto as many planes as she could, and she got remarkably good at it. We first learned of her in March 2014 when she was caught at least four times trying to board planes to Hawaii at SFO. She would be arrested a half dozen or so more times, and even managed to score a free stay at a Florida resort, but she also had a habit of getting caught and jailed and spoken to by a number of exasperated judges.
She admitted in August 2014 that she suffered from chronic depression. But a blog that surfaced with entries from 2012 suggested that her brazen stowaway game had been going for years, and that there might be some more extreme mental issues at play. SF Magazine caught the Marilyn fever and profiled her — as best they could — in June 2015, discovering that she had cut of ties with her family sometime in her 20s, and had perhaps been dealing with mental illness since that time, though that couldn't be confirmed. And the piece, by Joe Eskanazi who's now at Mission Local, confirmed that Hartman had probably been skating through all her plane trips because she just appeared to be "a harmless older white woman" who was treated with a kind of "benign neglect," even in the criminal justice system.
KRON 4 reports that Hartman was arrested this time on Friday night and charged with criminal trespass at O'Hare. She's got restraining orders, you see, that ban her from both O'Hare and Midway airports without a boarding pass due to previous incidents, and someone clearly recognized her and nabbed her again.
Sadly, it seems like Hartman is still wandering about on her own, without getting proper treatment or attention — or perhaps such treatment was only short-lived. She is now 67 years old, and it's unclear if she's been in Chicago for the last three years or what. (In 2016, she was sentenced to six months in a mental health facility in Chicago.) Back in 2014, she was living in a Tenderloin SRO and claimed to have only $4.25 cents to her name. But she's traveled more in the last five years than most of us, so there's that.
