A Virginia father was befuddled when a Southwest Airlines crew accused him of human trafficking as he was flying home with his teen daughter and her friend following a trip to Las Vegas.
John Kerrigan was boarding his connecting flight to Virginia Beach at Denver International Airport on Oct. 21 alongside his 15-year-old daughter and her 16-year-old friend when the flight staff grew concerned.
A flight attendant approached the two teens and questioned them about their relationship with Kerrigan, who had left his seat to use the plane’s restroom.
“She keeps asking if we’re all right and if we know you,” Kerrigan recalled his daughter telling him, according to WAVY. “And I said it seemed strange.”
Unknown to the father or the teen girls, the flight crew had contacted Norfolk International Airport and reported Kerrigan as a suspected human trafficker.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Blue Light Initiative issues guidelines and training for airport and aviation crews to become familiar with the signs of human trafficking.
One of the common indicators of the heinous crime is “a non-genuine relationship: particularly with a parent or guardian and a child.”
Southwest employees are trained on detecting the warning signs of human trafficking and are taught the protocols for alerting law enforcement officials, according to the airline’s website.
Three police officers boarded the plane and confronted the trio at the gate in Virginia.
“[They said,] ‘Sir, would you follow us? We’d like to ask you some questions,’” Kerrigan said.
Kerrigan found his public escort rather humiliating and contested his removal from the flight.
“I said, ‘This is offensive.’ I did find it very offensive. I mean, I hadn’t done anything wrong,” he added.
Airport officials questioned Kerrigan for 20 minutes, but let him go without charging him.
The Post has reached out to Southwest Airlines.
In September 2023, singer David Ryan Harris was flying with his biracial children when American Airlines staffers accused him of trafficking them.
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The “Don’t Look Down” hitmaker, 55, traveled from Atlanta to Los Angeles on Sept. 15 with his sons Truman and Hendrix.
“Apparently, a flight attendant had called ahead with some sort of concern that perhaps my mixed children weren’t my children,” Harris said in the video posted on Sept. 23.
“Because they were unresponsive during an interaction with her. We are met, embarrassingly so, by this AA employee and police officers. They questioned my kids.”
Harris received an apology, with the airline claiming its policies around suspected human trafficking were not followed.
Over 1,900 people were referred to US attorneys for human trafficking offenses in 2022, according to the Department of Justice’s Human Trafficking report published in October 2024.
Of the referrals, 1,656 were prosecuted, doubling the amount from 2012, with 1,118 convictions made in 2022.
US district courts charged 1,070 defendants with one of the three traffickings (human, sex and labor), with 91% being male, 58% white, 20% black, 18% Hispanic, 95% US citizens, and 71% with no prior convictions.
