Marilyn Hartman, 69, has been arrested again after trying to sneak onto a flight for which she hadn’t bought a ticket. She has successfully put herself away 22 commercial flights over the past two decades and was just 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 she was electronically monitored, CNN reportsStaff immediately began trying to contact Hartman on the phone built into the surveillance device. Holding her location, she headed toward O’Hare’s Terminal 1An alarm went off on her ankle bracelet and she was arrested shortly afterwards.
Since then, Hartman has been sent back to Cook County Jail and is not allowed to post bail.
But the real mystery is here why Hartman put all these planes away and exactly how she did it. However, the answer to the first question is sad.
Hartman suffers from an undiagnosed mental illness often accompanied by paranoia. In one case, she tried to sneak on a flight to Hawaii because she thought she had cancer and ‘wanted to go to a warm place and die, ” The Guardian reportedShe did not have cancer. Later she felt that she “really wanted to get off the island. “
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That Guardian article included extensive interviews with Hartman herself, who claimed she was the victim of a widespread conspiracy designed to harass her for the rest of her life.
“For 25 years, Barack Obama knew about my case and everything that went wrong when the verdict came against me, but chose not to do the right thing,” she claimed in an email. She said she experienced such severe fight-or-flight responses that she was essentially forced by those instincts to board a plane and try to get away from the vast network of people silencing her.
As regards how she was able to do this, things are more complicated. In many cases, she’s undergone the same gun screenings that we all do through TSA, but she was able to do so without any identification or boarding pass. She kept her head bowed, hid behind other passengers, projecting the image of a somewhat confused but completely harmless elderly woman. She came along “bend over under the velvet ropes, hitch a ride in small groups, present other people’s boarding passes or just answer ‘Yes’, when airport staff asks leading questions such as, “Are you Maria Sandgren?” When she was caught by airport workers, she was usually just thrown out, not arrested. The Guardian calls her “persistent”.
Hartman’s story is wild, but also incredibly sad. This is a homeless person woman who clearly did not receive the kind concern that could change her overall mindset.