Runaway 9-Year-Old Steals Car, Hops a Flight to Texas
Runaway 9-Year-Old Steals Car, Hops a Flight to Texas
A 9-year old boy who got tired of waiting for his mother to move to Dallas decided to steal a car from a neighbor, run from the police, then con his way onto a Southwest Airlines flight to San Antonio before being caught.
Sakinah Booker, who lives in Seattle, told police that her 9-year-old son Semaj hates his new neighborhood and that’s why he led the police on a merry chase and later ended up hundreds of miles away in San Antonio, Texas. Semaj, who is accused of committing several car thefts, was unhappy when his family left Texas and moved to Lakewood, Washington, which is located right outside Tacoma. He was afraid of a sex offender in the neighborhood and impatiently begged his mother to move back to Dallas to be near his grandfather.
Semaj’s mother has been trying to make the move back to Texas, but her son was tired of waiting. So last Sunday when he happened upon a car outside a neighbor’s house that had been left running, he slid behind the wheel and took off. Police spotted him quickly and began pursuing him, sometimes at speeds up to 90 mph. Finally Semaj took an abrupt exit off the highway, causing the engine on the car to blow. The vehicle went over a curb and coasted, smashing into a tree.
Police immediately surrounded the car, but Semaj refused to come out of the car. Officers broke through a window to unlock the door, and that’s when they recognized Semaj, who had run away from home on several occasions and, according to police Lt. David Guttu, was known as a local car thief. He was taken to the police station, where he was later released into Booker’s custody. But he soon ran away again, and his mother filed a missing person report.
On Monday, Semaj, who is only 4’9″ and 80 pounds, went up to the ticket counter at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and said his mother was waiting for him in the boarding area. The ticket agent gave him a boarding pass. “The young man’s information matched a paid, ticketless reservation for the flight,” said a Southwest Airlines spokesperson. Because he told the ticket agent he was 12 years old, he was not listed as a child.
Semaj was not asked for picture identification as he went through airport security, because his boarding pass said he was 12 years old. He then boarded the plane and flew to Phoenix, and then caught another plane to San Antonio. It was there that airline employees stopped him from boarding a plane to Dallas. According to David Hebert, a spokesman for the San Antonio International Airport, the boy couldn’t explain to the agents at the gate why he didn’t have a boarding pass.
At first Southwest employees thought he was lost, but once they realized he was lying, they contacted the police. When officers came to investigate, Semaj refused to give them correct information about his name, age, where he had come from, and how he had gotten to San Antonio. On Tuesday, authorities discovered that he fit the description of the missing person report Booker had filed back in Tacoma.
In a report aired on CNN Thursday morning, Booker told reporters that her son misses having his father in the house. “He needs a male role model and he’s really seeking it,” she said, without elaborating on exactly where his father is. Semaj was still in juvenile detention in San Antonio, but Booker said that she plans for him to go stay with her sister in Illinois while she continues working on getting her family back to Texas.
As authorities puzzle over how a 9-year-old fourth grader managed to slip through airline and airport security not once, but twice, the prosecutor in Pierce County, Washington, filed three charges against Booker in juvenile court related to her son’s vehicle theft. However, Deputy Prosecutor Fred Wist chose not to issue an arrest warrant, saying instead that he wants to know more about Booker’s plans to move back to Texas before he decides what to do. Wist told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “It may very well be that he is where he wants to be, and with a follow-through on the move, that might be the best thing to happen right now.”
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By Buzzle Staff and Agencies Published: 1/19/2007 |
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