More Turbulence At CLT-Douglas
This is definitely not the kind of news that Mayor Anthony Foxx and the uptown crowd clawing desperately to land the DNC in Charlotte want floating around the country.
It was strange and disturbing enough when reports first surfaced that Delvonte Tisdale had fallen to his death from an airplane over Boston, after breaching security at CLT-Douglas and boarding the craft. Stranger and even more disturbing still when News 14 subsequently reported unnamed sources claiming that Tisdale had gained access to the plane from inside the airport and not by breaching perimeter security, as was widely assumed.
Now comes news that the TSA was conducting a sting operation at CLT-Douglas during the same timeframe in November, within days of the Tisdale incident, that saw TSA agents successfully bribing a JetBlue employee to sneak a package onto a plane. This from WBZ News Boston:
During the test, an undercover TSA inspector approached a JetBlue ticket agent and insisted he needed to get a package to Boston that day. The inspector handed the JetBlue employee a $100 bill, which he accepted and put in his pants pockets.
The ticket agent put the package in the name of an unwitting passenger on the flight to Boston — an unaccompanied minor — and it went through normal baggage screening. I was grabbed by the undercover TSA team just before it was loaded onto the jet.
….
This is the second time recently that a breach in airport security has linked Logan Airport with the airport in Charlotte. The other incident was also in November, just four days before the TSA undercover operation, when the mangled body of a Charlotte teenager was discovered in a Milton neighborhood.
On November 15, Delvonte Tisdale, 16, was somehow able to get on the tarmac at the Charlotte airport and climb into the wheel well of a US Airways jet bound for Boston.
Tisdale’s body was later found in Milton by investigators who believe it fell from the jet as it made its approach into Logan.
“He had no money, no training, yet he was able to secrete himself in a commercial jetliner,” said Milton Police Chief Richard Wells.
Asked what the two incidents in Charlotte say about airport security, Chief Wells said: “It’s a battle of attention versus inattention. You can’t sit back and rest on your laurels.”
There’s no official evidence at this point directly linking the Tisdale incident with the TSA sting (Tisdale stowed-away on a US Airways plane), other than they both took place at CLT-Douglas. But that fact is impossible to ignore, leaving even stranger and more disturbing questions in its wake, none of them boding well for overall security at CLT-Douglas.
Which brings us to the CMPD’s investigation into the Tisdale incident, ongoing since late last November and apparently nowhere close to any results. This from TCO:
In the Tisdale case, investigators are awaiting test results to determine whether grease found on the teenager’s clothing matches grease used on aircraft examined at the Charlotte airport, Richard Wells, chief of the Milton, Mass. police told the (Quincy) Patriot Ledger newspaper this week.
Wells said he met three weeks ago with Charlotte police about Tisdale’s death.
“They had put together an overlay of the airport and where the airplane was parked,” Wells said. “They did have a lot of questions to answer. I know it’s still an active case in Charlotte about how he (Tisdale) got on the plane.”
Airport chief Jerry Orr, meanwhile, tells the uptown paper that all is fine, and this is the first “he’s ever heard about an employee at the airport taking a bribe. “If I thought it was an everyday practice, I’d be squealing,” he said.’”
Maybe it’s time he started.
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