He’s no Frank Abagnale, Jr.
A United Airlines gate agent in Denver has been charged with felony theft for stealing $130K of jewelry from a passenger’s bag, including a pearl encrusted bracelet and diamond earrings.
The passenger was traveling from Aspen to Denver and somehow dropped her cosmetics case that contained the pricey jewelry in the Aspen Airport. The staff found it just in time and loaded it on the flight to Denver — as a gate-checked carry-on bag!
Upon reaching Denver, gate-checked bags are unloaded and placed on rack that is wheeled to a special position near the end of the jetbridge. It was there that the crime transpired.
Video from the Denver Airport’s surveillance system appears to show [Rafael] Magana “taking possession of the … cosmetic case … and intentionally wrapping the case with a white piece of [printer] paper,” at the gate, according to the statement of probable cause provided by the District Attorney’s office.
Magana walked over to a nearby coffee shop where he obtained a brown paper bag and then “artfully conceale[d] the wrapped cosmetic bag into the paper bag,” according to the statement.
Back at the gate, Magana picked up his phones, water bottle and the brown paper bag and left his post at the customer service desk, according to the search warrant.
photo at top courtesy of Denver District Attorney
Matthew,
I am disappointed in your analysis of the crime.
Your blog is not the place to suggest that s/he should have been more careful with his/her jewelry. S/he could have dumped it out right in front of the employee and this does not give the employee any license whatsoever to take it. It is possible that you may understand this, but you do not suggest this by what you wrote. It is 100% unacceptable that the agent stole the jewelry, regardless of how careful the passenger should have been or was.
I’m going to give you another light to think about this in. You have a child coming. If this passenger were to be that child, while you might (rightfully) be disappointed in his/her behavior, you would not ever blame your child for what happened to him/her by the employee, or at least not publicly. Or, imagine that your wife was sexually assaulted by the same employee. Would you say to her that “Heidi, you shouldn’t have been so drunk.” or “Heidi, what were you wearing?” You wouldn’t do that if you were a good husband. So it is not your place to speak like this on a travel blog.
To the person who may have had to go through this, if you are reading this, I apologize for his analysis on the incident that happened to you. What happens dot you was wrong, no matter how you acted or how responsible you were.
Hi Alan, Thanks for your comment.
You write–
And I agree with that.
She was not more culpable (not culpable at all) because she was negligent or careless with her bag. Still my point is and remains that if you are traveling with something very valuable, you are always wise to keep it close. The world is a messed up place and sometimes we cannot avoid harm, but we can often mitigate it by being cautious — like avoiding walking down a dark street alone in a dangerous neighborhood with fancy jewelry and a flashy cell phone.
Think of it as a cost/benefit analysis. This case is not remotely analogous to a fundamental issue of freedom or right to expression, like we see in some rape cases in which blame is deflected back upon the woman…
This woman doesn’t share blame for what happened but she could have avoided the hassle by being more careful. That is friendly advice, not subtle condemnation. We are talking about harm to property, not harm to a person.
Thuggish?
I’m going to give you another light to think about this in. You have a child coming. If this passenger were to be that child, while you might (rightfully) be disappointed in his/her behavior, you would not ever blame your child for what happened to him/her by the employee, or at least not publicly.
As aglobal risk management professional, I absolutely could and would blame the passenger. No, theft should not happen. But being careless with something with this kind of value is absurd. In the law there is a concept in insurance called ‘contributory negligence’ and the idea that this value of jewelry should not have been an onboard item is a bar you will never get over in trying to collect a recovery from the airline.
This modern idea of not holding people accountable for things that are, at best, “ill advised” is pretty difficult to stomach.
Here’s the punch line: don’t do stupid things with 100k in jewelry. And as a father of two kids, you are darn right, if they get in trouble or beat up or something, Im going to look at what happened that led to that position. They get in trouble for that all the time. Sure your sister should not have hit you, and she will have consequences, but next time, don’t antagonize her for 20 minutes.