A mother has called out American Airlines for losing her 12-year-old daughter. Apparently, the child was flying as an unaccompanied minor and went missing.
Monica Gilliam of Chattanooga, Tenn., alleges that the airline lost track of her daughter, who was flying to Miami last Saturday to visit her fathers. Gilliam shared her story on TikTok and has so far received 1.8 million views.
“Almost an hour after her flight landed, I got a call from American Airlines,” she recounted in the clip. “It was the [AA] manager at Miami … He says, ‘Your child is missing. We’ve shut down the terminal. We don’t know where she is.’
“It turns out that the flight attendants waved her off the plane and said ‘bye.’ And she said she didn’t know what to do, so she kept going because they were telling her bye. So, she kept walking,” Gilliam added.
Gilliam said her daughter, fortunately, found her dad but without help from the AA crew or Miami International Airport employees.
The airline released a statement to PEOPLE in which it stressed that it “cares deeply about our young passengers” and they are “committed to providing a safe and pleasant travel experience for them.”
“We take these matters very seriously and are looking into what occurred. A member of our team has reached out to the customer to learn more about their experience,” AA added.
AA requires children between ages 5 and 14 traveling without parents to use its unaccompanied minor service. The service provides “an airport escort to help your child to the gate for flight connections” and “escorting the child to the authorized adult picking them up when they land.”
The mother explained that AA’s service also requires minors to wear an unaccompanied minor tag on a necklace that has their boarding pass and the information of the adult picking them up to verify their identity.
“So, she [was] going through the airport with that billboard on her that she was an unaccompanied minor in one of the largest human trafficking hubs in the country,” her mother continued.
Gilliam’s daughter was able to get ahold of her father to tell him her flight had landed early. He then talked her through the signs so she could get “to him as safely and as quickly as possible.”
“I don’t want this to happen to anybody else, and if your child is flying an unaccompanied flight with American Airlines, then consider that,” Gilliam concluded in the video. “It’s not OK, and it shouldn’t happen.”
