Marilyn Hartman, the 69-year-old woman who seems to want to go everywhere, is going nowhere -- at least for now. A Cook County judge ordered the so-called "serial stowaway" held without bail pending a hearing on Monday.
Hartman was arrested at O'Hare Airport Tuesday after leaving the West Side shelter where she has been living since last March. An electronic ankle bracelet alerted authorities that Hartman had left that facility, and she was discovered in the CTA station at O'Hare a few hours later.
"This continues to be a huge major security breach that she participates in," prosecutor James Murphy declared during a hearing Thursday. "She has repeatedly said she will follow the rules, and breaks those promises."
Suggesting Hartman was a bad candidate for electronic monitoring, Murphy noted she had "squandered chance after chance."
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"If you look at 'flight risk' in the dictionary, her picture is going to be next to it," he said.
But defense attorney Andrea Lubelfeld painted a picture of a woman who was seriously mentally ill, suffering by her own admission from bipolar disorder. And she said a news story about Hartman that aired Sunday night pushed her over the edge.
"She's trying to take care of her issues in her life as she heads into her sunset years," Lubelfeld said. "She has a mental illness that was triggered by something that was out of her control."
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Judge David Navarro said he was not unsympathetic to Hartman's mental health issues, but he noted that in the eyes of the law, she was accused of escape.
"Miss Hartman, to add salt to the wounds, you didn't just go and leave for a walk, you went to the one place you specifically can't go, O'Hare Airport," he said. "To do so is to thumb your nose at the courts and the entire process."
Navarro set Hartman's bond at $100,000 on the escape charge, but he ordered her held without bond on charges that she had violated her previous bail agreement. A hearing on that matter is set before Judge Peggy Chiampas on Monday.
"It is simply a bright line," the judge told Hartman. "You're either in custody, or you are out of custody. And when you're at O'Hare airport on electronic monitoring, that seems to be a clear indication you're in violation of the electronic monitoring agreement."
