Beiruting News

A woman who had been arrested six times for trying to sneak onto flights at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) managed to take a Southwest flight from San Jose to Los Angeles - without a ticket.

Marilyn Jean Hartman, 62, was arrested on suspicion of trespassing late Monday at LAX, after arriving from San Jose International Airport (SJC) aboard Southwest Airlines flight, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Hartman was only discovered in LA when flight attendants did a head count for passengers continuing on to Phoenix, and counted one more person than there should have been.

She's the second person to stow away on a flight from San Jose in recent months. In April, a teenager flew from SJC to Hawaii by successfully hiding in the wheel well of a Hawaiian Airlines jet.

San Jose airport spokeswoman Rosemary Barnes told the Mercury News the incidents were completely unrelated. The Transportation Security Administration and Southwest are both looking into how Hartman was able to board the flight, Barnes added.

But California 15th district Congressman Eric Swalwell said it was an "apparent failure by both airport security and the airline of protecting passengers from a potential threat to their safety." Swalwell had also raised concerns about security at SJC after April's incident. "[Hartman] is a known plane hopper," he said. "She is someone that airport officials should be looking for."

Hartman was placed on probation in February after being arrested for attempting to board three Hawaii-bound flights departing the San Francisco airport on three separate days, prosecutors said.

On her first arrest, she made it through security and onto a plane only to be caught when the actual ticket holder showed up, officials said. On her second and third attempts, she was caught trying to get through the security line. Authorities arrested her three more times over the next two months at the airport, said San Mateo County sheriff's spokeswoman Rebecca Rosenblatt. Each time, she had no ticket to fly and told investigators she had nowhere else to go, the Mercury News reported.

In May, Hartman was determined to be suffering from a mental illness and deemed a suitable candidate for a residential mental health program, prosecutors said. She was sentenced to two years supervised probation. It was not known what treatment, if any, she completed.

San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said in May that Hartman claimed she wanted to fly somewhere warm because she had cancer, though her claims about having the disease were unsubstantiated.

Officials at SJC posted a notice on the airport's website, noting that Hartman had gone through the TSA screening. "The Airport's security systems and processes were not a factor in this incident and public safety was never compromised," the airport website states.