While it is definitely not the norm, occasional stories of airline workers rifling through and taking off with valuables from passengers’ suitcases break through the news cycle.
In September 2023, a woman traveling with Spirit Airlines (SAVE) from Jamaica's Montego Bay to Detroit International Airport filed a lawsuit claiming that a lost bag that the airline later delivered to her home was missing property worth more than $14,000 of luxury clothing and jewelry — Louis Vuitton (LVMHF) and Gucci handbags, a golden bracelet and a Rolex watch. In November 2023, a United Airlines (UAL) passenger claimed an airport worker dug through his bag and opened a sealed bottle of tequila to take a “shot.”
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The latest incident came unraveled when Spirit passenger Paola Garcia did not let up on her quest to determine what happened to the missing items in her luggage. As first reported by Fort Lauderdale news outlet Local10, Garcia spent two hours waiting for her pink suitcase containing two Apple (AAPL) watches, a MacBook, an iPad and some designer clothing and jewelry to turn up on a carousel at Terminal Four of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
Apple Watch connects missing iPad and laptop to airport worker’s house
When it did not, Spirit staff told Garcia to go home and wait for the suitcase to be found and sent to her house. But the next day, she received an Apple Watch notification showing that her computer was 15 minutes away from the airport. She drove to the address shown on her watch and, after arriving at a home with open suitcases strewn all over the front yard, ended up calling the police.
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“The first thing the police told me was ‘What are you doing here?’” Garcia described to Local10. “‘It is so dangerous for you to be here.’”
Officers were then able to connect the address on Garcia’s watch to a home registered to an airport retail worker. While a police investigation into how he obtained the suitcases is still ongoing, 29-year-old Junior Bazile has now been arrested and charged with grand theft. Under Florida law, that term refers to theft of anything valued at over $750.
Later security camera footage obtained from the airport also appears to show Bazile rifling through a suitcase in the back of the shop he worked at even if it is not immediately clear how he obtained it to begin with.
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‘I don’t think it’s one person working in the airport, it’s a group’
In a statement, Spirit Airlines said that it has issued Garcia a reimbursement for the price she paid to check her luggage as a courtesy for the inconvenience even though it now appears increasingly likely that no Spirit employee was involved in the incident and that the bag was intercepted at some point near the end of its transit through the airport.
Garcia, in turn, told reporters that she suspects Bazile was part of an orchestrated group effort to steal bags at the airport.
“Personally, I don’t think it’s one person working in the airport, I think it’s a group,” she said. “One person can’t just do that, take bags.”
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