The Cook County Coroner’s Office has concluded that a 57-year-old man who was found caught in the machinery of a baggage carousel at Chicago O’Hare Airport on Thursday morning committed suicide.
On August 8, firefighters were called to a restricted area of the airport at around 7:45 a.m. because of a report that a person was “trapped” in machinery on the airport’s baggage conveyor system.
Chicago Fire Department found the unnamed woman in a backstage conveyor belt used to transport luggage. By the time firefighters reached the conveyor belt, the woman was already dead.
Police seized surveillance camera footage and determined that the woman entered the luggage compartment at around 2:27 a.m. on Thursday. What happened after that was not captured on film, but the coroner believes she died of suffocation.
Since the woman was not an airport employee, it remains unclear how she gained access to a part of the airport that was supposed to be inaccessible to the public.
In 2020, a man managed to live and sleep undetected in the secure passenger area of Chicago O’Hare for three months until two United Airlines employees became suspicious and questioned him about his activities at the airport.
The man, who had arrived on a flight from Los Angeles on October 19, 2020 and was scheduled to take a connecting flight the same day, showed suspicious United employees an airport employee ID card that had been reported missing in late October 2020.
Although the man had an employee badge, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) tried to reassure the public that he was never able to enter the secure, restricted part of the airport.
Aditya Singh, 36, was charged with trespassing in a restricted area of an airport, but the presiding judge acquitted him of any criminal wrongdoing.
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