A Sun Country flight from the Twin Cities to Newark, N.J., was forced to divert and land in Chicago on Friday morning after a passenger ranting about the LGBTQ community said the plane was going down.
Tracking data shows the flight left Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport at 7:13 a.m. and landed at Chicago O’Hare International Airport a little over an hour later. It had been scheduled to land in Newark at 9:43 a.m.
Seth Evans, a Minnesota native flying to his home in New York City, was sitting across the aisle from the unruly passenger.
As the plane idled in Chicago waiting for police to arrive, Evans wrote in a series of text messages that the man had been acting erratically for the entire flight, standing up and screaming between playing games of Candy Crush.
Evans said it wasn’t until the man said something to the effect of “the plane is going down” that the fight was diverted. He said the man was screaming about getting “gang chased,” “cooked” and “radiated” by the LGBTQ community and that this was causing him cancer. Evans said the man was wearing “no less than 15 masks” stacked one on top of the other.
At least once Evans recalled the man saying, “Trump is here.”
The passenger was handcuffed and taken off the plane without incident by Chicago police officers. The flight remained idled as U.S. Marshals and police interviewed passengers about the incident.
A Sun Country spokesperson confirmed that the flight was diverted to Chicago “as a precaution in response to a disruptive passenger.”
