Search Cheap Flights and hotels
Mum claims American lost her 12-year-old daughter.
A mother whose daughter was flying unaccompanied from Tennessee to Miami was told by American Airlines that she had gone missing after being allowed to leave the plane.
Monica Gilliam, 39, a photography professor, received a distressing call last Saturday from the airline informing her that they could not locate her daughter upon arrival at Miami International Airport.
“It was the American Airlines manager at Miami and he says, ‘your child is missing, we’ve shut down the terminal, we don’t know where she is,’ she said in a video posted on her TikTok account, which has now garnered more than 1.8m views.
“Not one AA employee stopped her to see if she had an adult [with her],” Gilliam said in the video.
“Not one Miami airport employee stopped her and even the TSA agent when she left the secured area and went into baggage claim didn’t stop her either,” she added.
The young girl managed to contact her father and he was able to guide her through the airport terminal and later found her at baggage claim.
Check prices and Book Cheap flights and hotels Now
“The complete abandonment of a minor in their care, and the negligence displayed today is criminal,” Gilliam wrote in the video’s caption.
@relativelymonica The utter failure by @American Airlines ,#tsa and #mia ♬ original sound – relativelymonica
Gilliam paid an extra $150 for a chaperone to escort her 12-year-old daughter on her trip.
The American Airlines website lays out how the service gives unaccompanied minors early access to board the plane, an airport escort to assist with making connections, and, most importantly for Gilliam, “escorting the child to the authorized adult picking them up when they land”.
During an interview with WTVC NewsChannel 9 in Chatanooga, Gilliam told the news agency that she’d since been in contact with American Airlines about the ordeal, and they’d apologised and offered her three free flights for the distress she had experienced.
“I have no plans of flying with American Airlines again because what they did is inexcusable. And I have no faith in them at all now, because they didn’t do their job. And they lost my child,” she told NewsChannel 9.
According to the Women’s Fund Miami, Miami-Dade is the number one hub for trafficking in Florida, while the state itself ranks third in the country.
“So she’s going through the airport with that billboard on her, that she was an unaccompanied minor in one of the largest human trafficking hubs in the country,” Gilliam said on TikTok.
