The sad story of the serial stowaway just keeps getting sadder
Marilyn Hartman needs help.
She doesn’t need to be kept behind bars. She doesn’t need to be demonized as a threat to public safety. She doesn’t need to be featured for our amusement in heavily hyped TV news reports.
Hartman, the episodically homeless 69-year-old “serial stowaway,” was arrested Tuesday at O’Hare International Airport two days after CBS-Ch. 2 aired year-old telephone interviews with her from jail in which she described how she repeatedly evaded airport and airline security measures and illicitly boarded numerous flights over the years.
She consented to being recorded, and in the snippets viewers heard she sounded dotty yet cheerfully self-aware. But her public defender contended in court Thursday that Hartman didn’t think her words would be broadcast, and that the airing of the story Sunday night triggered a relapse. She skipped a therapy appointment Monday and on Tuesday left the West Side transitional facility where she’d been living on electronic monitoring for a year and, for the first time since the fall of 2019, headed for O’Hare.
Her return to the scene of many of her crimes is likely to further imperil her plea deal for the 2019 transgression. Her attorneys and prosecutors agreed earlier this month to probation and mental health treatment, but Judge Peggy Chiampas signaled an unwillingness to agree to probation.
In court Thursday, Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy said Hartman was a risk to public safety because “at some point (if ) she continues to be where she shouldn’t be, she’s going to touch something she shouldn’t touch and somebody’s going to be hurt.”
Please.
Hartman is a deeply troubled and somewhat mysterious soul. And the portrait that emerges from “The Woman Who Smuggled Herself,” a deep dive into her case and life story by West Coast magazine writer Joe Eskenazi, contains no hint of menace, but plenty of pathos, paranoia and confusion. It seems unlikely that she even has the mental capacity to consent to an interview.
She’s hurt no one and, in fact, done travelers a favor by revealing holes and vulnerabilities in airport security. She doesn’t belong in jail — where she is again awaiting the next developments in her case — but in a safe, therapeutic setting where she can be looked after by doctors, not guards. Whatever caused this most recent relapse, let’s hope it doesn’t derail her chances for getting the care she needs and living out her days in obscurity.
Vax populi
It’s apparently too much to ask that employers adopt a “no jab, no job” policy requiring all employees who deal closely with public to get vaccinated against COVID-19 when their turn comes or else find another line of work. I got a lot of pushback from vaccine skeptics when I floated that idea recently.
So how about we flip the script? Let’s give customers — including and especially patients — the right to know if the employees they’re dealing with have been vaccinated
and the opportunity to take their business elsewhere.
Prompting this suggestion is my wife’s experience at a downtown medical office Thursday when she went in for a routine test and, in conversations, learned that both of the technicians who were administering the test and were very close to her for extended periods had refused to be vaccinated.
They should have warned her at reception. They should have given her the option, when she scheduled the appointment, to be treated only by personnel with enough damn sense to follow public health guidelines. And there ought to be a sign on the door, right next to the demand to wear a mask, that some of the employees you may encounter have refused to be vaccinated.
If vaccine refusal is about the primacy of personal choice, then give the rest of us a choice too.
Sox appeal
The renewed focus on anti-Asian violence in recent days prompted several readers to remind me that Todd Ricketts, a part-owner of the Chicago Cubs and major fundraiser for former President Donald
Trump, was using the racist term “Kung Flu” to describe COVID-19 even before Trump himself began using it.
“There are five states that have terrible debt situations created by an overly generous pension system and irresponsible spending,” Ricketts wrote in a Facebook comment thread in mid-May 2020, first highlighted in a New Yorker profile by Alex Kotlowitz. “And everyone who lives in another state doesn’t want to use the Kung Flu as an excuse to bail them out of 45 years of mismanagement.”
Later in the thread he added, “there is too much, pork, too much unaccountable spending, too much that has nothing to do with the Kung Flu.”
We don’t yet know the motivation of the man charged with shooting to death eight people, six of them of Asian descent, Tuesday in Georgia. It’s best to fight the impulse to ascribe and categorize before we know more about the mental state and intentions of this or any other alleged gunman.
But there’s little doubt that the dramatic increase in this country of attacks against Asians is related to politically motivated, ugly, pointless and irresponsible efforts to blame Chinese people for the coronavirus pandemic. Those efforts have been promoted through such slurs as “Kung Flu.”
And so I have yet another reason to be glad to have switched my Major League Baseball rooting allegiance to the White Sox.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was, “Today a guy who carries a gun to church told me I’m living in fear because I wear a mask,” by @ chrismilburnnps.
The poll appears at chicagotribune.com/ zorn where you can read all the finalists. For an early alert when each new poll is posted, sign up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune.com/ newsletters.
Join me and the other regular panelists every week on The Mincing Rascals, a news-review podcast from WGN-plus that posts Thursday afternoons.