$150K bail for serial stowaway arrested again at O’Hare

Serial stowaway Marilyn Hartman, arrested for trespassing at O’Hare International Airport again on Wednesday, is being held on $150,000 bail.

Hartman, 64, was arrested at the airport at 3:16 p.m. and charged with misdemeanor counts of violating probation and trespassing on state land, according to Chicago Police and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. She was ordered held on $150,000 bail in court Thursday.

Hartman has a history of arrests for trying to sneak onto planes. She was arrested twice in July 2015 – once at O’Hare and once at Midway — in a period of two days.

In the first of those incidents, she got on a plane — this time with a valid boarding pass — but was escorted off for “causing a disturbance,” according to Chicago Police. She was charged with reckless conduct, a misdemeanor, and released.

The next day, she tried to get past security at O’Hare without a ticket, but was recognized by security workers and charged with criminal trespass and a bail bond violation, the police said.

Those arrests came not long after she spent almost two months in jail on a previous guilty plea. At the time of her release — and just before the next two arrests — she had told reporters she was done with stowaway attempts and would stay out of airports unless she had a ticket.

“If I have a ticket, I can go,” she said then. “If I have a ticket to ride. Sounds like a song.”

In April and May of 2015, Hartman was arrested after trying several times to get past security at O’Hare and Midway. She has also tried numerous times in recent years to board flights without a ticket and succeeded at least once, flying from San Jose, California, to Los Angeles last August on a Southwest Airlines flight after slipping past an agent checking a family’s boarding passes and somehow getting past a gate agent.

She has offered little in the way of explanation for her behavior, once telling reporters: “Even smart people do stupid things.”

Hartman is next scheduled to appear at Branch 23 at 9 a.m. Feb. 23, according to the state’s attorney’s office.

Contributing: Rummana Hussain