"It's an indication you've embezzled these checks," she says the police officer told her. He also told her she appeared nervous. She hadn't before that moment, she says.
She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. "That's my money," she remembers saying. The officer's reply? "It's not your money."
At this point she told the officers that she had a good explanation for the checks, but questioned whether she had to tell them.
"The police officer said if you don't tell me, you can tell the D.A."
So she explained that she and her husband had been on vacation, that they'd accumulated some hefty checks, and that she was headed to her bank's headquarters, where she intended to deposit them.
She gave police her husband's cell-phone number - he was at her mother's with their children and missed their call.
Thirty minutes after the police became involved, they decided to let her collect her belongings and board her plane.
"I was shaking," she says. "I was almost in tears."
When she got home, her husband of 20 years, John Parker, a self-employed plastics broker, said the police had called and told him that they'd suspected "a divorce situation" and that Kathy Parker was trying to empty their bank account.
And what prompted this search and seizure of her checks and invasion into her personal life? Was she marked by the FBI? Was she under investigation for a possible financial crime? Did she have a record of fraud?
No. You see, all this was generated from her crime of going through an airport screening while seeming "nervous". The woman, Kathy Parker, was flying from Philadelphia to Charlotte. She works for a bank.
That was it. An airport screening led to her being held for embezzling money from her own joint bank account with her husband.
But all of this is okay because she might have been a terrorist, right? All of us are Kathy Parker. Expect to be treated as such at the airport.
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