A serial stowaway has been released from jail three days after she was sentenced to 177 days for violating probation by returning to Los Angeles International Airport.
“It’s all because of overcrowding, essentially,” Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Crystal Hernandez of the Sheriff’s Headquarters Bureau, explaining why Marilyn Jean Hartman was released.
Hartman, 62, was initially arrested Aug. 4 at Los Angeles International Airport after taking a flight from San Jose without a ticket or boarding pass.
She was charged with a misdemeanor count of entering the city as a stowaway, and she pleaded no contest on Aug. 6. Hartman was immediately sentenced to three days in jail — amounting to credit for time she had already served — and two years probation. She was also ordered to stay away from LAX unless she had a valid flight ticket.
The next morning, however, she was arrested by airport police near Terminal 7. She is believed to have traveled to the airport aboard a FlyAway bus from Union Station. She wandered through several of the airport’s terminals, in what Airport Police Chief Patrick Gannon termed a “scouting mission.”
Gannon said police suspected she would return to the airport, so police and Transportation Security Administration officers were looking out for her.
Frank Mateljan of the City Attorney’s Office said no additional charges were filed against Hartman, but she violated her probation by returning to the airport. Her probation was revoked.
Hartman was arrested as many as seven times in a six-month period earlier this year, primarily at San Francisco International Airport, for sneaking onto airplanes or attempting to do so. She managed to successfully sneak onto a Hawaii-bound flight from the Bay Area before being spotted.
Hartman was also arrested in 2010 in Kauai, Hawaii, for allegedly trespassing in the airport’s baggage claim area.
