Most airport arrests start with something small. This one started with a dog.
A woman was walking through Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport with her service dog, a medium-sized shepherd, when the animal defecated on the terminal floor. She bagged it up, but there was a residue left on the floor, so she went looking for something to finish the job.
Her search for napkins is where it went wrong. She walked to a nearby security podium and started rummaging through it for napkins. A St. Charles Parish sheriff's deputy who had stepped away from the station came back, found her going through it and asked what she was doing.
According to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, she became verbally aggressive at that point. She swore at the deputy and called her a name. The woman then walked off, wiped up the floor with the napkins and headed for the exit.
Before she got there, she turned back toward the deputy and threw the bag of dog waste at her. It hit the deputy in the shoulder.
What Happened Next
The first deputy drew her Taser and ordered the woman to stop. The woman kept walking.
A Jefferson Parish deputy responded to the call for assistance and tried to take her into custody. According to the arrest report, she refused to hand over the dog's leash so she could be handcuffed, holding it above her head instead. In his report, the second deputy wrote that he forcefully moved her into a wall to gain compliance.
Both people were hurt. He reported a cut finger, and the woman was treated for a cut to her hand.
Her dog was handed over to a friend before she was taken to the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center in Gretna. Booking records show she was charged on September 18 with aggravated assault upon a police officer and battery of an officer with injury, along with criminal mischief and resisting an officer. She was released three days later on a $15,000 bond.
Neither she nor her attorney had responded to a request for comment as of Friday evening.
Why Airport Arrests Escalate So Fast
Reading the sequence, the striking thing is how little separates the beginning from the end. A cleanup, an argument over napkins, and four charges including assault on a police officer.
Airports compress a lot of the conditions that make confrontations worse. Everyone is stressed and often late. Law enforcement is armed and visible in a way it isn't at a train station. Passengers are managing bags, animals and children while being told what to do by several different people. And the jurisdictions overlap, which is how you get deputies from two different parishes involved in one incident inside the same terminal.
It's also why the charges pile up. Throwing something at an officer, however petty the object, is assault. Declining to stop when told is resisting. Each step adds a count, which is how a mess on the floor turns into a felony-level booking.
Louis Armstrong has a longer history with this sort of thing than most airports its size. Deputies there have handled a passenger who bit six of them on Thanksgiving after being removed from a Spirit flight, and a woman who arrived at the Spirit counter with no clothes on and refused to leave.
