A Chicago-area woman with a long history of trying to sneak into airports and onto planes has been charged with escape from electronic monitoring after being arrested Tuesday near O’Hare International Airport, authorities said.
Marilyn Hartman, 69, is expected to appear for a court hearing this week on the new case.
Hartman, who has gained national media attention as the “serial stowaway,” had been fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet as part of her pretrial release in a pending airport trespassing case — a case that seemed on the brink of resolution when prosecutors and defense earlier this month announced they had reached a plea agreement. The new arrest may endanger that arrangement.
About two hours before the arrest Tuesday, the Cook County sheriff’s department learned Hartman had left the residential facility where she had been staying while on electronic monitoring, the department said in a statement.
The sheriff’s department said it tracked her movements Tuesday through the GPS on her ankle bracelet and that staffers tried calling her on a phone built into the device, but she didn’t answer.
Investigators learned she was heading toward O’Hare, according to the sheriff’s department, which notified Chicago police that she was in the vicinity of Terminal 1, home to United Airlines flights.
“An alarm siren was activated on Hartman’s device, and she was taken into custody by Chicago police,” the sheriff’s department said in a statement. “Hartman did not enter any secure areas.”
The arrest comes two weeks after a court hearing in which Hartman’s attorneys and prosecutors said they had reached the plea deal on her pending case: 18 months of probation, plus court-ordered mental health treatment.
Formal plea proceedings had not begun, but Judge Peggy Chiampas pre-emptively put attorneys on notice that she was not inclined to agree to that sentence. Hartman’s 2019 arrest at O’Hare violated the terms of her probation for a 2018 trespassing case. Chiampas balked at giving another probation to someone who had previously violated.
Nevertheless, Hartman’s attorney expressed hope that Chiampas would change her mind once she learned the complete facts of the case. A prison sentence, even a negligible one, would interrupt Hartman’s mental health treatment.
Hartman, who has a long history of trying to sneak onto flights in Chicago and around the country, was arrested at O’Hare in October 2019 just as she was trying to pass the second of two security checkpoints, prosecutors have said.
She spent time in Cook County Jail before being released about a year ago in an effort to release low-risk detainees in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. She is on a county electronic monitoring program and was placed at a West Side facility that provides supportive and transitional housing.
The 2019 arrest violated her probation sentence for sneaking past O’Hare security in January 2018, boarding a jet and flying to London’s Heathrow Airport without a ticket.
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