9 year old steals car, hops plane

[Kacey]

A determined 9-year-old runaway who managed to board flights from Seattle to Texas in efforts to rejoin his grandfather in Dallas was seeking a father figure, his mother said. Sakinah Booker said her son dislikes his new neighborhood, is afraid of a sex offender who lives nearby and has been impatient with her efforts to move back to Dallas.
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Semaj is charged in a car theft and police chase that preceded his effort to get to Dallas. It was the latest in a series of car thefts he is accused of committing. He remained in juvenile detention in San Antonio on Thursday.
Meanwhile, authorities scrambled to determine how Semaj, an 80-pound, 4-foot-9 fourth grader, managed to slip through airline and airport security.
According to Southwest Airlines, the boy approached the ticket counter at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Monday and was given a boarding pass after he said his mother was in the boarding area.

Full story here. Comments?

 

[exile]

There's a vast number of things that come into play in the events reported... I'll just comment about the on that made the loudest mental clang! when I read it: the fact that the airline would issue a child a boarding pass on the strength of his report that his mother was somewhere around the boarding area...half a decade and some change after 9/11 and billions of dollars spent on security, the TSA and Homeland Security and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, and this is all you have to do to be able to get a boarding pass????

What is there to say?