An enraged mom wound up in jail over the weekend after she allegedly yelled at TSA authorities and refused to let her daughter be examined before boarding a plane.
Andrea Fornella Abbott, 41, was attempting to fly out of Nashville International Airport on Saturday when she put up a fight over her supposed right to refuse a search of her daughter. The Transportation Security Administration says that Abbott shouted and swore at them, demanding that her young daughter didn’t need to have her “crotch grabbed.”The TSA says that the woman would not let her daughter go through a full-body scanner or partake in a pat-down.This incident comes only weeks after the TSA announced that they would be changing its protocol for screenings of children. Josh Pistole, representing the TSA, said that agents will have to repeatedly try to screen children in an attempt to decrease pat-downs, which have come under increased scrutiny in recent months.Video footage of a 6-year-old child undergoing a pat-down at a New Orleans airport earlier this year went viral after the YouTube clip began circulating wildly. Similar incidents have since been widely reported.Police are saying that Abbott was not imprisoned for refusing to allow a scan, but rather for not calming down. TSA agent Sabrina Birge tells police that Abbot was “very stern” and spoke with “quite a bit of attitude,” insisting that neither she nor her daughter would go through a scanner.Birge says she told Abbott that the machine is “10,000 times safer than your cell phone and uses the same type of radio waves as a sonogram,” but the woman insisted, "I still don't want someone to see our bodies naked.”An official police report says that Abbott tried to record the incident on her cell phone but was prevented from doing so.The daughter’s age has not been made available.