Last week, I recounted the bizarre travel drama of Deshon Marman, the New Mexico safety who was hauled off a plane the day after his best friend's funeral for refusing to pull up pants resting somewhere "below his buttocks but above the knees" and subsequently arrested for resisting authorities. At the time, I noted that it was quite possibly "the dumbest incident ever recorded on this site." As it turned out, Marman's arrest was also the most-read incident ever recorded on this site, by quite a wide margin. Obviously, the evolving eccentricities of urban fashion remains a permanent cultural flash point, even those that aren't nearly as fashionable as they used to be.
So, as a kind of response to the 60-plus e-mails on the subject I haven't quite had the stomach to open, here's Marman defending himself ? and offering an apology to fellow passengers ? over the weekend on Albuquerque television:
And just to check his work, here's a bit of passenger video of Marman refusing to leave his seat when asked by the crew, an encounter which began contentiously enough to compel a random flier to pop out his camera phone, but hardly escalated into anything resembling an in-cabin riot:
Admittedly, as a piece of "evidence," not much happens there, and certainly nothing that will convince anyone to see anything they weren't already inclined to see when they hit "play." Marman's attorney told the San Francisco Chronicle that "nothing was visible" when his client was seated and "the issue should have been over" after he was allowed to board the plane. (The passenger who shot the video more or less agreed: "When I first saw him coming down the aisle, I was like, 'Come on man, really?' But after he sat down, you couldn't see anything.") Marman also went on local television in Albuquerque to give his defense:
What you don't see on the passenger-shot video, according to a US Airlines spokesman who spoke to the Associated Press is Marman's "repeated refusal to earlier to follow a boarding agent's advise to pull up his pants," or the alleged resistance when he was forcibly removed from the plane that led to additional charges for battery and resisting arrest. "He's refusing to get off," the spokesman said. "The captain's thinking, 'What if he refuses something else in the air?'"
Marman didn't get the chance, because he was tossed in the San Mateo County Jail instead. He was released on $11,000 bond a day later. Prosecutors have until July 18 to decide whether to press charges in this gripping criminal drama.
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Hat tip: Larry Brown Sports.
Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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