Woman Arrested on Southwest Plane for What She Told Fellow Passengers

By Epoch Newsroom
December 11, 2017 Last Updated: December 11, 2017
A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-700 passenger jet taxis on the tarmac after arriving at Los Angeles International Airport on April 5, 2011, in Los Angeles. (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

A woman was arrested after she threatened to kill fellow passengers aboard a Southwest Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon, to Sacramento, California.

A video of the arrest was captured by a passenger on the flight before it was sent to CBS Sacramento. The video can be viewed at the bottom of this article.

The woman apparently first tried to smoke in the plane’s bathroom and tampered with the smoke detector, Southwest officials told the CBS affiliate.

And when she was told to go back to her seat she began yelling—threatening to kill everyone on the plane while demanding that the plane make a landing.

The woman then shoved a flight attendant before she was physically restrained by other passengers and crew members for the remaining 30 minutes of the flight.

“I swear, if you don’t [expletive] land, I will [expletive] kill everybody on this [expletive] plane!” she yelled, according to the Sacramento Bee.

When the plane landed, law enforcement officers were waiting to arrest her.

The woman was identified later as 24-year-old Valerie Curbelo.

A CBS Sacramento reporter went to the jail to ask Cuebelo questions about why she smoked on the plane. “The anxiety, yeah the anxiety,” Curbelo responded.

“I don’t know,” Curbelo said of the incident where she threatened to kill passengers on the plane. “It was not me. It was not me.”

“Our reports from flight attendants indicate a customer violated federal laws by both smoking onboard an aircraft and by tampering with a smoke detector in an aircraft restroom. Our crew enforced the regulation and that was followed by the passenger outburst,” Southwest said in a statement to the Bee. “The safety of our crew and passengers is our top priority and we take all threats seriously.”

The flight had 136 passengers and five crew members.

Curbelo was arrested on three felony counts of threats to commit a crime resulting in death or bodily injury. She’s currently in the Sacramento County Jail on $75,000 bond.

The video of her outburst on the plane can be viewed below.

Warning: contains profanity


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