A man arrested after what was reported as a security breach was ordered held on $35,000 bond Wednesday, and his family said they're not going to bail him out.
Elvis Jackson, 33, of Chicago, was charged with misdemeanor trespassing for trying to get onto Southwest Airlines flight 908 without a boarding pass, police said.
The former health care worker had recently fallen on hard times and is no stranger to run-ins with the law, his nephew said.
"To tell you the truth, that's nothing new because he's crazy like that," said Mario Jackson. "He was locked up like a week ago and now he's locked up again and it's a bigger bond now. I don't think nobody's going to want to get him out right away."
The arrest a week ago resulted from some problems with a police officer in Georgia, the nephew said.
Elvis Jackson was arrested after some passengers, seeing him sneak past the gate onto the plane, told security, police said. Jackson was escorted off the flight and into police custody.
The flight departed for Birmingham, Ala., about an hour late. The incident left some travelers a little weary.
"We go through so much security, I feel like, how did they do it," said passenger Joanne Speciale.
These days passengers can print out a boarding pass from home or even present a digital bar code on their cell phone. But investigators have yet to determine whether Jackson snuck past security check points. He may have showed up at the terminal from a previous flight, officials said.
"Right now we're reviewing all of the tapes, all of the footage we have from the thousands of security cameras that we have in our airport," Aviation Commissioner Rosemarie Andolino said when asked about the incident at a City Council budget hearing, according to the Chicago Tribune. "We're looking at that, working with TSA and garnering more information on how that penetration happened, and if it happened. What actually happened, we're looking at that."
Chicago police continue to investigate.
