2-year-old takes wild ride

Conveyor belt for luggage takes boy deep into Atlanta airport

ATLANTA — Dramatic video shows a toddler who climbed onto a conveyor belt scrambling over suitcases during his wild ride on a luggage chute that took him underground inside the world’s busiest airport.

Edith Vega’s 2-year-old son, Lorenzo, climbed aboard the belt when she briefly set him down to print a boarding pass at Hartsfield-jackson Atlanta International Airport on Monday, she told police.

Security video later released by the airport shows some of what happened next.

One camera recorded Lorenzo disappearing feet-first through a rubber curtain, beyond the reach of his mother and an airport worker.

Video shows him crawling over bags, trying to avoid being pulled through a large screening machine that resembles a darkened cave above the conveyor belt. But the conveyor is too fast, and it pulls him inside. He pops out on the other side, only to tumble down into another room where startled security workers pluck him from the belt and give him hugs.

The screening machine had detected a problem and diverted the child on a path for bags in need of more checks, Transportation Security Administration spokesman Mark Howell said Thursday. That’s when workers rushed to help, the video shows.

“The officers who work down there, almost all of them are parents,” Howell said. “Their initial instinct was to get that kid back to the mom. They kicked into overdrive to try and get him upstairs.”

The child suffered a fracture of his right hand, but he’s otherwise OK, authorities said.

“It was quite a moment that really brought perspective to life and how important life is,” one of the TSA workers, Christopher Strickland, told ABC’S “Good Morning America.”

Vega, who lives in Lawrenceville, Georgia, told WSB-TV in Atlanta that that authorities said her son’s journey lasted five minutes. She said she wanted to jump on the belt to follow her son but wasn’t allowed.

Spirit Airlines said the boy was in a section of the ticket counter that wasn’t open or attended by staff.

Jenny Burke, a TSA spokeswoman, said pets have occasionally ended up on a similar trip through the baggage-belt system — always inadvertently.

For a person to actually go through this is very rare,” she said.