Marilyn Jean Hartman got past security at Mineta San Jose International Airport on Monday night, Aug. 4, 2014, and was arrested after arriving at Los Angeles International Airport. She once made it onto a Hawaii-bound airplane before being noticed, and was ordered to stay away from San Francisco International Airport after several stowaway attempts. (San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office)
A “notorious 62-year-old stowaway” who had already been arrested three separate times trying to sneak onto flights at San Francisco International Airport managed to get on to a plane at San Jose, and fly to Los Angeles without a ticket.
She’s the second person to stowaway on a flight from San Jose in recent months. Back in April, a 15-year-old boy scaled a security fence onto the tarmac at San Jose, tucked himself inside a plane’s wheel well, and survived a 5 1/2 hour flight to Maui.
Yay airport security!
Despite the security concerns raised by the two stowaways, airport spokeswoman Rosemary Barnes declared emphatically Tuesday evening that the two are “very separate incidents.”
“I do not have details on how this all happened. I can say that this incident and the (April) stowaway incident are completely unrelated,” Barnes said. “(The Transportation Security Administration) and Southwest are reviewing how she was able to get on board the flight.”
A source familiar with the incident said Tuesday evening that Hartman tried three times to get around TSA agents screening boarding passes before she was able to slip past while a family was having their tickets checked. She did still go through the security screening devices that check for weapons and explosives, the source said.
Once inside Terminal B, she unsuccessfully attempted to board several planes before finally sneaking past a Southwest gate agent and boarding the plane to Los Angeles.