Teen girl leaves secret message in airline lavatory — when flight attendant reads it, she urges pilot to call cops
The importance of being vigilant can never be stressed enough. Taking note of unusual behavior or minor details can prove life-saving for people around us in unexpected ways. In 2017, then 49-year-old Sheila Frederick, a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, was serving on a Seattle to San Francisco flight when she noticed something off about one of her passengers accompanying a teen girl, reported The Independent. She kept a thorough observation and realized something was wrong, and played an instrumental part in offering help to save the teenage girl’s life. The girl seemed "dishevelled" during the flight, and Frederick felt something was problematic. Accompanied by a well-dressed man, she seemed a bit uncomfortable.
Frederick immediately started connecting the dots. “Something in the back of my mind said something was not right. He was well-dressed. That’s what got me because I thought, ‘Why is he well-dressed and she is looking all dishevelled and out of sorts?’” Frederick recounted. As a flight attendant, she took the initiative to try and speak to the passengers and see if she could figure things out. However, the man got defensive and the girl disengaged from the conversation. Frederick’s doubts began to turn into a conviction that something was wrong. Eventually, the Alaska Airlines employee left a note in the plane’s lavatory for the girl.
The teenager responded on the note, "I need help," and that was all Frederick required to act fast. She immediately informed the pilot that this was a possible trafficking scenario, and the matter was escalated to the authorities of San Francisco. As the plane landed, the passenger was arrested and the girl was set free. Around 27.6 million people are victims of human trafficking on a global scale, according to the United Nations International Labour Organization, reported Homeland Security. Out of these, 43% are women and girls. Victims are either forced into sex trafficking or labor.
Flight attendants are trained to identify acts that indicate potential trafficking, per the Association of Flight Attendants- CWA. “Flight Attendants and airline employees will be the ‘boots in the air’ fighting human trafficking,” former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Acting Commissioner David V. Aguilar noted. They are specifically trained to look out for troubled passengers or suspicious people. The visible signs that are often looked out for are co-passengers controlling travel documents of another adult, controlling or restricting the movement and interaction of an adult passenger, an adult passenger having a lack of information about the destination or even a child traveler accompanied by a supposed parent or guardian who is not related to the minor.
It was this training and the sharp and brave action of the flight attendant that helped bring the girl to safety. Frederick credited her years of experience and the training she received that helped her identify the unusual occurrence and act shrewdly and in time. “I’ve been a flight attendant for 10 years and it’s like I am going all the way back to when I was in training and I was like, I could have seen these young girls and young boys and didn’t even know,” she remarked.