A distraught mother, en route to Baltimore, caused quite a ruckus at the Nashville airport on Saturday as she tried to protect her daughter from the TSA’s much-criticized screening procedures.
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Andrea Fornella Abbott, 41 of Clarksville, Tennessee, was arrested at the airport after she lost it at a TSA agent for trying to pat down her daughter, according to the Daily News.
Local police claim that Abbott shouted at agents, yelling that she didn’t want her daughter to “be touched inappropriately or have her crotch grabbed,” The Tennessean reports.
Security officer Sabrina Birge told police that “(Abbott) told me in a very stern voice with quite a bit of attitude that they were not going through that X-ray.” Despite being told that the machine was “not an x-ray,” Abbott insisted, “I still don’t want someone to see our bodies naked.”
Abbott then tried to shoot video of the incident on her cell phone, but cops arrested her before she could record anything. The cops cuffed her and hauled her off to jail, charging her with disorderly conduct, the Daily Mail reports. She was released that night.
After the uproar over the patdown of a 6-year old girl in New Orleans in April and the patdown of a baby in May, the TSA has modified its policy about patdowns of children.
The TSA has been called out multiple times publicly in the past year. In December, Khloe Kardashian likened patdowns to rape; in February, Alaska Representative Sharon Cissna returned home by boat to avoid a TSA patdown; in May, former beauty queen Susie Castillo issued a teary video plea over the TSA after a patdown at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport; and in June, an elderly cancer-stricken woman had her adult diaper removed by the TSA because they felt something “warm and firm.”
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