Time and again, Marilyn Hartman, 67, has managed to board airplanes without a ticket.
Time and again she has managed with a warning.
Now a court is trying to put a stop to the notorious free rider.
Since 2009, Marilyn Hartman has been trying to sneak onto airplanes all over the United States. She has succeeded at least half a dozen times.
As recently as March last year, she boarded a British Airways plane in Chicago and was not discovered until landing in London, according to The Guardian.
A few days later, she was stopped at O'Hare Airport again – and this time a judge decided she should not be released on bail.
On Tuesday, she received her sentence: an 18-month suspended sentence. She was released on the condition that she not be allowed to stay at airports without a ticket and that she continue to submit to the treatment she has been receiving at a private mental health clinic since last summer.
"I apologize to the airport and for the problems I have caused," she told the judge, according to the AP.
Thinks she is the victim of a conspiracy
Marilyn Hartman's story may seem comical and harmless – and it raises legitimate questions about aviation safety.
But most of all, it's a story of personal tragedy, about a homeless woman who fell between chairs and for years was able to wander around airports without being stopped. She has built a worldview in which everyone from passport control officers to the President of the United States participates in a conspiracy against her.
In the US she is known as ”the serial stowaway”. Journalist Joe Eskenazi in San Francisco has become obsessed with her case and has interviewed her several times. In a report in The Guardian last year, he said that she believes she suffers from something she calls ”bladder trauma syndrome”.
”"For 25 years, Barack Obama knew about my case and everything that had gone wrong, but he chose to do nothing," she wrote in an email to the reporter.
How Marilyn Hartman tricked herself into boarding
Eskenazi describes her modus operandi to succeed in becoming a stowaway: She hides among other passengers, bows her head in the right position, takes advantage of when the staff looks away.
A few times she has even come across travelers' boarding passes or simply answered yes to leading questions like "Are you Maria Sandgren?"”
So why has it been able to continue? Why has she been able to get by with warnings, sent to shelters she just as quickly left, and been able to continue to evade the American flight?
The answer, writes Joe Eskenazi, is in all the mugshots she's posed for over the years. She's not Jackie Chan, nor a young man with an Arab appearance. She's an elderly white woman who looks like someone's grandmother, who blends into crowds and doesn't make security personnel nervous.
”There is no battalion of old white-haired women flooding our country’s friendly skies. But there are legions of mentally ill homeless people, many of them old and frail, roaming the streets of every major American city. We are not doing much to help them – and we don’t know how to. That is the real tragedy behind Marilyn Hartman,” Eskenazi writes in The Guardian.
Source: aftonbladet.se
