A woman known for escaping airport security and sneaking on planes without a fine was arrested this week in Chicago, days after being heard on a TV news promising that such escapes were left behind.
Called “serial clandestine” by local media, the woman, Marilyn Hartman, was arrested on Tuesday at O’Hare International Airport on charges of criminal invasion and crime escape, Cook County sheriff’s office said. Her presence in O’Hare violated the terms of her probation set in 2019, when she was arrested at the same airport for trying to circumvent security without a passport or boarding pass.
Over the years, Hartman, 69, has been involved in at least 22 similar episodes – some successful – at airports across the country. In 2014, she was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport after sneaking on a flight from San Jose, California, reported the Chicago Tribune. Several times, including two at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, she was released with a warning.
In 2018, she successfully boarded a flight to London without a ticket or passport.
In an exclusive report shown this week on CBS2 Chicago, Hartman said he has boarded planes without a ticket on at least 30 occasions. “The first time I made it through, I flew to Copenhagen,” she told the station. “The second time, I flew to Paris.”
Ms. Hartman said she agreed to be interviewed only when “she was confident that I would not take an illegal flight again”. Two days after the report was shown, she was arrested in O’Hare.
At a court hearing on Thursday, Hartman’s lawyer Andrea Lubelfeld said her client was extremely upset after seeing the CBS2 report, prompting her to travel to O’Hare for the first time in more than a year. , according to The Tribune.
“She has a mental illness that was triggered by something beyond her control,” Lubelfeld told the newspaper.
On Tuesday, around noon, Mrs. Hartman, who was being monitored electronically, left the temporary housing facility where she was staying, according to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.
The authorities realized that she was heading towards O’Hare. About an hour later, they notified the Chicago police that it was close to Terminal 1.
“An alarm siren was activated on Hartman’s device, and she was taken into custody by the Chicago police,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. “Hartman has not entered any safe areas.”
R. Carter Langston, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, emphasized that Ms. Hartman was seen at the airport – before she could approach a security checkpoint – by a TSA official “who alerted the airport police of your presence “
“When a passenger goes through one of the many layers of security at an airport checkpoint, TSA takes it very seriously,” he said in a statement.
The Chicago Aviation Department, which manages O’Hare, did not immediately answer questions on Thursday.
The Sheriff’s Office sought approval to accuse Hartman of escaping crime, the statement said. Ms. Hartman is being held in Cook County Jail with no possibility of bail, said Parle Roe-Taylor, another lawyer for Ms. Hartman.
Prior to the last arrest, Ms. Hartman was “well positioned, actively involved in her treatment, making progress and waiting for a positive resolution,” said Roe-Taylor in a statement.
“The penal system is ill-equipped to treat or assist clients like Ms. Hartman,” said Roe-Taylor, adding: “We must do better than simply arrest people with mental health problems. Our criminal justice system is not an institution for mental health treatment. “
Mrs. Hartman has been on the police radar for years.
In 2015, she told investigators that she had boarded a plane in Minnesota without a ticket and flown to Jacksonville, Florida, according to an arrest report obtained by NBC News.
Ms. Hartman’s first O’Hare arrest took place in 2015, according to The Chicago Tribune, when she was charged with trespassing on state property. Since then, she has been involved in eight other incidents at airports in the Chicago area.
In 2018, Mrs. Hartman sneaked on a British Airways flight and traveled to Heathrow Airport, where she was detained by Chicago Police Department customs officials. said in a press release at the time.
In this episode, O’Hare’s surveillance cameras captured her moving through the airport without a boarding pass or passport. She hid her face with her hair as she walked by two TSA policemen while they checked other passengers’ boarding passes, a spokeswoman for the Cook County attorney said at the time.
Upon returning to the United States, she was charged with a charge of theft and trespassing.
She was still on parole from the flight to London when she was stopped in October 2019 at O’Hare for trying to get through a security checkpoint without proper documentation. She was arrested at Cook County Jail, where she remained until a year ago, when she was released as part of an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the Tribune reported. In April, Cook County Jail was the largest known source of coronavirus infections in the country, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
In the CBS2 report, Ms. Hartman says she was “in a state of depression” when she took the flights.
She explained that she would escape security “by following someone – they would carry, like, a blue bag”.
“And the next thing I know, I get on the TSA line and TSA lets me through,” she said. “They think I have the guy with the blue bag.”