ORLANDO, Fla. – Jenni Clemmons boarded Delta Flight 1516 from Orlando to Atlanta Saturday morning and told News 6 a woman was sitting in her seat.
"So I just say to her 'ma'am I think you're in my seat' and she just very bluntly said to me 'I'm not moving,'" Clemmons said. "I was taken aback by that so I called a flight attendant over and she looked on the manifest and said you're definitely supposed to be in that seat. And she asked the lady for her name and she gave her, her last name. Within the first two or three minutes she discovered she wasn't on the manifest at all. They all said she's not on any manifest on any Delta flight. They said she's not a Delta customer at all. It's not that she got on the wrong flight, she's not supposed to be on any flight."
Clemmons said for 45 minutes, the woman argued with flight attendants, pilots, gate agents, Delta supervisors, and even Orlando police.
"She was just belligerent from the beginning, threatening me, using bad language, yelling," Clemmons said. "Basically when they asked for ID she showed a selfie of herself on the cellphone. She was just saying here's my ID and they were saying ma'am that's a picture of you. She was saying 'I don't have an ID, I left my ID at home because I don't drive, various reasons why she didn't have an ID. But she kept showing literally a selfie of herself."
Clemmons said the woman wouldn't show a boarding pass either.
"She would say 'I threw it out. I threw it out.' That's the only thing she would say. They would ask her where, and she would say she couldn't remember. And they said well you just got on the airplane and walked to seat so you haven't gone that far, where is the boarding pass? She said 'I threw it out, I threw it out.' And they say they checked all the garbage cans and they don't see the boarding pass."
Clemmons said eventually Delta officials escorted the woman off the plane.
The plane sat on the tarmac for almost an hour after that until the pilot announced he was taking the plane back to the gate and the TSA would have to re-screen all of the passengers, according to Clemmons.
"The pilot's telling us she's a security risk, they have K-9 dogs searching the airplane, we're all padded down," Clemmons said. "They're saying we were re-screened, that's not normal screening to go through someone's complete luggage, every person on the plane, padded down, go through luggage. They're giving it really nice terms for what really happened, and it was chaos."
According to Orlando police, the woman was walked to an elevator and allowed to board a shuttle bus to leave the airport.
"I think it's crazy because anytime that you have a plane full of people scared and worried, because everyone on that plane was especially because of how belligerent she was when she left, and what pilot told us," Clemmons said. "The fact that they won't give answers is unbelievable to me. And if they really let that lady go, I have bigger concerns than I originally had."
TSA spokesperson Sari Koshetz only said the woman was "screened" but would not answer questions about if TSA agents checked the woman's identification and/or boarding pass.
Orlando International Airport spokesperson Carolyn Fennell said there was no security breach.
Clemmons believes the woman was able to sneak around the TSA counter where IDs and boarding passes are checked and also slip past Delta gate agents.