Marilyn Hartman, 69, was arrested again after trying to sneak on a flight for which she had not purchased a ticket. She successfully tidied up 22 commercial flights for the past two decades and has just been arrested again for attempting to board a flight at Chicago O’Hare International Airport on Tuesday, March 16.
Hartman managed to escape from a residential facility where he was being monitored electronically, CNN reports. The team immediately started trying to contact Hartman via the phone built into the monitoring device. When they found her location, she was heading towards O’Hare’s Terminal 1. An alarm went off on her anklet, and she was arrested shortly after.
Hartman has since been returned to Cook County Jail and is not allowed to post bail.
But the real mystery here is why Hartman packed all these planes and how, exactly, she did it. The answer to the first question, however, is sad.
Hartman suffers from an undiagnosed mental illness that often includes paranoia. On one occasion, she tried to sneak on a flight to Hawaii because she believed she had cancer and had “I wanted to go to a warm place and die, ” The Guardian reported. She did not have cancer. Later, she felt that “I really wanted to leave the island. “
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This article by The Guardian involved extensive interviews with Hartman herself, who claimed to have been the victim of a widespread conspiracy to harass her for the rest of her life.
“For 25 years, Barack Obama learned about my case and everything that went wrong when the decision came against me, but he chose not to do the right thing,” she said in an email. She said she experienced fight or flight reactions so severe that she was essentially forced by those instincts to board a plane and try to escape the vast network of people dedicated to silencing her.
In terms of how she has been able to do that, things are more complicated. In many cases, she passed the same weapons exams that we all do via TSA, but was able to do so without any identification or boarding pass. She kept her head down, hid behind the other passengers and projected the image of an older woman a little confused, but totally harmless. She succeeded by “crouching under the velvet ropes, hitchhiking in small groups, presenting other people’s boarding passes or simply answering ‘yea’, when airport officials ask important questions like: ‘Are you Maria Sandgren?’ ”If she was picked up by airport officials, she was usually just expelled, not arrested. The Guardian calls it “persistent”.
Hartman’s story is wild, but also incredibly sad. This is a homeless woman who obviously didn’t receive the kind of care that could transform your general mindset.