85-year-old woman contemplates suing TSA following alleged strip search

posted at 11:21 am on December 5, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Terrorist Attacks ]   

Very clever of those jihadis, disguising themselves as frail female octogenarians.

That ostensibly was the reasoning applied by security personnel at JFK Airport last Tuesday when they subjected an 85-year-old grandmother to what she claims was a humiliating strip search. (A video of interview with reporters can be seen here.)

The woman, Lenore Zimmerman, of Long Beach, New York, told the New York Daily News:

I walk with a walker—I really look like a terrorist? I’m tiny. I weigh 110 pounds, 107 without clothes.

Zimmerman was headed to Fort Lauderdale, where she spends winters. When she arrived at the security checkpoint, she asked to forgo the full-body scan in favor of a pat-down, fearing the advanced imaging technology might interfere with her defibrillator.

The agents were only too happy to oblige. Indeed, they gave Zimmerman a pat-down she’d never forget. They escorted the 4-foot-11 woman to a private room and proceeded to remove her clothes.

In the course of the pat-down, Zimmerman’s metal walker fell against her leg, opening a gash from which blood trickled. She says, “My sock was soaked with blood. I was bleeding like a pig.”

She maintains that the TSA agents were unmoved, focusing instead on the business at hand: removing her pants. Eventually a medic was summoned to treat the woman’s injuries, but by this point she had missed her 1 p.m. flight.

TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein insists that “proper procedures were followed.” She knows this because she reviewed the closed circuit TV footage(!) of the strip search. (Copies may be purchased in the lobby.)

Zimmerman now says she is contemplating suing the TSA, but the agency is sticking to its story that Zimmerman exaggerated:

TSA contacted the passenger to apologize that she feels she had an unpleasant screening experience; however, TSA does not include strip searches in its protocols and a strip search did not occur in this case.

In the meantime, a second elderly woman has come forward and claimed the same thing happened to her. The passenger, 88-year-old Ruth Sherman told WCBS in New York, that TSA agents became suspicious of the bulge under her clothing. As it turns out, Sherman wasn’t armed with an explosive. Instead, the bulge was from her colostomy bag. She told correspondent Dave Carlin:

It’s bad enough that I have it. I had to pull from my sweatpants and I had to pull my underwear, my underwear down.

You don’t do that anybody. I felt like I was invaded.

Sherman’s story, though jaw-dropping, is not a first for the TSA. A 62-year-old bladder cancer survivor actually had his urostomy bag burst by overly aggressive TSA personnel, drenching him in his own urine. And it happened not once, but twice. Nor is Sherman the oldest victim of TSA misconduct. That distinction belongs to a 95-year-old woman in the late stages of leukemia whose adult diaper was removedduring a 45-minute search.

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