Arrested again: How does this serial stowaway keep doing it?
In the time since Macaulay Culkin's character boarded the wrong plane to comedic-yet-heartwarming ends in Home Alone 2, a lot has changed.
The passing of the 2001 Aviation and Transportation Act, and with it the genesis of the Department of Homeland Security, marked the dawn of a new era in airport and airline security in which only ticketed passengers can pass through security. Then there's the fact that the TSA now assesses your terrorist inclinations on a 92-point checklist, and, well, the TSA's invasive methods just can't seem to escape the constant scrutiny they're under (TSA agents gaming scanners to grope attractive males, for example, isn't cool). We all know this, and we all assume – or at least hope – it's now nearly impossible to sneak onto a plane.
And yet, it is not.
Exhibit A: Marilyn Hartman, who has in fact earned some notoriety as a serial airplane stowaway and who this week added another line to her somewhat alarming resume. On Sunday, the 63-year-old Hartman was arrested for loitering around security at Chicago's Midway airport – just about a week after she was arrested across town at Chicago O'Hare for "lingering in a restricted area." In neither case did she actually stowaway, but her track record suggests it was never out of the question.
On August 4 of last year, Hartman flew without documentation from San Jose to LAX, where she was arrested upon her surprise arrival. Earlier in 2015, she somehow managed to again slip onto a flight from Minnesota to Jacksonville, Fl. without a ticket – and that's just a slice of her stowaway timeline, which notably exists on a news website because her history in this realm is so extensive.
The full story of Marilyn Hartman reveals a woman much more layered than the simple stowaway tag can bely, and it's important to give space to her battles with homelessness and, apparently, mental illness as possible motivating factors in her transgressions. Her troubles have in fact earned her support in the blogosphere (she blogs), and at one point you could donate money on this page to help her get to Hawaii, one of the many places she attempted to circumvent flying procedures to get to.
But as she faces "misdemeanor trespassing on state land" for the second time this spring, her story nonetheless offers another reminder that our current system is not perfect. Nor has it been for a while. In 2013, a nine-year-old flew unticketed to Las Vegas from Minnesota. Last summer, a teenager packed himself into a 767's wheelwell and made it to Hawaii. At least 268 times, airport perimeter security has been breached since 2004, per this AP report, and in at least one instance a convicted murderer has ambled through security untouched.