Aviation securityElderly woman forced to fly without adult diaper
A 95-year old woman dying of leukemia was planning on flying from Florida to her native Michigan so she could spend the last months of her life closer to her family cemetery plot; she was subjected to a 45-minute security examination at a Florida airport; two female agents discovered that the wheel-chair bound woman was wearing a Depend adult diaper, and insisted that unless the diaper was removed, the woman would not be allowed to fly
A 95-year old woman who is dying of leukemia was forced to undergo a 45-minute security pat-down at the Northwest Florida Regional Airport. Lena Reppert has been battling leukemia for eight years, but recently her doctors told her that she does not have long to leave.
She decided to fly to her native Michigan, according to her daughter, so she could be closer to her grave.
Fox News reports that when Reppert and her daughter arrived at the airport, TSA security personnel told them she would have to go extra security examination because wheel chairs do not go through metal detectors. Two security agents patted her down, and one of them noticed something hard around her waist. She was wheeled to a private screening room, where two female security agents discovered that the hard material was a Depend adult diaper.
Reppert was given a choice: either remove the Depend, or give up on going to Michigan. The elderly Reppert agreed to have the diaper removed and she made the flight with two minutes to spare.
The Panama City News Herald quotes Sari Koshetz, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration in Miami, to say that “TSA cannot exempt any group from screening because we know from intelligence that there are terrorists out there that would then exploit that vulnerability.”
