A 36-year-old Californian man has been busted living in the Chicago O’Hare International Airport for three whole months because he was too afraid of the coronavirus to board his flight back to Los Angeles. Sure, it’s nowhere near as luxurious as Singapore’s Changi Airport, but it’s probably still a step up from the Jetstar domestic terminal in Sydney.
Aditya Singh – who first arrived at the airport on October 19 last year – was arrested over the weekend and charged with trespassing restricted area of an airport, the Chicago Tribune reports. It was only when two United Airlines employees asked to see his ID that he was caught out, because he showed them another airport worker’s badge that had already been reported missing.
Apparently, passers-by had been giving him food to live off. How Singh was able to live in what is basically a giant petri dish while subsisting off food that’s touched other people’s grubby hands is unclear. Elite mental gymnastics is likely the answer.
“You’re telling me that an unauthorised, non-employee individual was allegedly living within a secure part of the O’Hare airport terminal from 10 October, 2020, to 16 January, 2021, and was not detected? I want to understand you correctly,” Cook County judge Susana Ortiz told the court, apparently as flabbergasted as the rest of us.
“Being in a secured part of the airport under a fake ID badge allegedly, based upon the need for airports to be absolutely secure so that people feel safe to travel, I do find those alleged actions do make him a danger to the community.”
However, the judge also noted that as weird as the situation is, Singh was nonviolent. It’s just like The Terminal, only set in a global pandemic.
Once he posts $1,000 in bail, he’ll be banned from reentering Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport for life.
The airport is naturally looking into how this all even happened, but the good news is that Singh didn’t cause any trouble for travellers in Chicago.
“While this incident remains under investigation, we have been able to determine that this gentleman did not pose a security risk to the airport or to the traveling public,” a spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Aviation said in a statement.
Let’s hope Singh gets that vaccine ASAP so that he can be on his merry way – stress-free.
