You know the name: Semaj Booker
He was the then 9 year old who made it all the way from Seattle to San Antonio by smiling his way through supposedly secure check points in an attempt to get to his grandfather’s home in Dallas last year.
I guess a year’s time wasn’t enough to fix the problem because Booker did it again yesterday
He hated his Lakewood neighborhood and wanted to go back to Dallas, where he, his mother and three brothers once lived with their grandfather.
He was called resourceful, brilliant and cocky but, in an interview with The Seattle Times, Semaj promised he’d never do it again.
He broke that promise — or tried to — early Tuesday.
Semaj’s mother, who has since moved her family to Tacoma, reported Semaj missing to Tacoma police at 3 a.m. Tuesday.
Then, at 4:53 a.m., Semaj was captured on video as he went through security at Sea-Tac airport, said Dwayne Baird, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration’s Northwest region.
Semaj took off his shoes, emptied his pockets and walked through the metal detector — even though he should have been turned away because he didn’t have a boarding pass, Baird said.
“He told them he was 14,” Baird said. “We’re looking at our procedures to see how this kid was able to do this … . We want to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Well now, he said he wouldn’t try to get to Dallas ever again. Mr. Baird and his fellow employees must have taken him at his word.
The trouble is, Booker lied. And his has shown that Mr. Baird and his fellow employees are either fools or idiots for not using the ensuing 16 months since to fix the problem. It took a reasonably secure minded Southwest Airlines employee to catch the kid.
Feel safer yet?