NOT THE SHARPEST KNIVES IN THE DRAWER: TSA Screener Makes Disabled Boy Take Leg Braces Off
Daniel Rubin, the Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who broke the story about a TSA screener who planted a plastic bag containing a white powder inside a passenger’s bag as a “joke,” learned of another case of the agency’s cavalier cruelty towards travelers. Last March, Camden, NJ, police officer Bob Thomas and his wife, Leona, were taking their disabled son, Ryan, to Disney Land for his fourth birthday. Born 16 weeks premature, Ryan had just started to walk with the help of leg braces:
The boy's father broke down the stroller and put it on the conveyor belt as Leona Thomas walked Ryan through the metal detector.
The alarm went off.
The screener told them to take off the boy's braces.
The Thomases were dumbfounded. "I told them he can't walk without them on his own," Bob Thomas said.
"He said, 'He'll need to take them off.' "
Ryan's mother offered to walk him through the detector after they removed the braces, which are custom-made of metal and hardened plastic.
No, the screener replied. The boy had to walk on his own. …
They complied, and Leona went first, followed by Ryan, followed by Bob, so the boy wouldn't be hurt if he fell. Ryan made it through.
A TSA supervisor backed the screener up, as did the airport manager. After Rubin’s planted baggie story, Thomas got in touch with him. Checking into TSA procedures in such cases, Rubin found out from a TSA spokesperson who confirmed that the boy should have been taken to a private screening area where his braces could have been swabbed for traces of explosives while he was wearing them and expressed regrets that Thomas did not report the incident to TSA directly so the screener could be retrained.
Unlike Nicholas George - who got the ACLU to sue over being questioned by the FBI after TSA agents found Arabic-English flash cards in his pocket that included the words "bomb" and "explosive" and a passport showing he had taken a tour of states sponsoring Islamic terrorism - or Raed Jarrar, another ACLU client, who received a $240K settlement in his discrimination suit against JetBlue and TSA officers who told him to remove or cover a T-shirt with Arabic writing because other passengers were uncomfortable (second item) – Thomas has no plans to sue. Not that the ACLU has contacted him to offer its services.
Editorial Note: The Stiletto has studied three foreign languages and does not recall her workbooks or other study aids including words like “bomb” and “explosive,” nor can she fathom why a casual tourist would want to know how to use these words in friendly conversation with the locals.
Comments