Marilyn Jean Hartman, the California woman with a long record of sneaking past security onto airplanes, has apparently done it again and faces new charges in Florida, authorities said Monday.
According to the arrest report, Hartman, 63, said she managed to get past security Sunday in Minnesota and board a plane without a ticket — although that claim was not immediately verifiable by NBC News. Upon arrival at Jacksonville, Florida, International Airport, she used a fake name, Maria Sandgren, to get transportation to the swanky Omni Resort Amelia Island Plantation and checked into a $300-a-night villa, according to the report, which said she was found out when the person who’d legitimately booked the villa showed up.
She then fled and wasn’t arrested until Monday, the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office said.
Hartman, who’s charged with fraud by impersonation, defrauding an innkeeper and trespassing, has explained her many arrests for boarding planes without a ticket by saying she has an unrecognized illness called “whistleblower trauma syndrome,” claiming that as a whistleblower, she was forced by the FBI to flee her house, rendering her homeless.
After she was arrested in August at the Phoenix airport — her third arrest that month — she said she wasn’t to blame, asking reporters at a news conference, “Why has the government allowed me to get past security points?”
M. Johnson