Madison couple searching for belongings, answers after luggage rifled through on flight from New Jersey
By Arman Rahman
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Madison, WI (WISC) — MADISON, Wis.- A pair of travelers said they’re left feeling violated and frustrated after they say things were rifled through and stolen out of their luggage on a trip home from Newark to Madison.
“It’s frustrating, it’s painful,” Blake Hovanec said. “I feel like I just keep saying it’s frustrating. It’s one of those things that just eats at you, you know?”
That’s not how Hovanec and his partner Hollis Masson thought they’d feel after a vacation in New Jersey visiting family.
When they hopped off the United Flight at Dane County Regional Airport late Sunday night, they went to get their checked bag and saw the back outer pouch where they put Hovanec’s Nintendo Switch was wide open.
“And then we pulled the luggage off of the conveyor belt,” Masson said, “and that’s when I said, ‘Hey, where is the Switch?’.”
They immediately opened the bag and found out it was completely rifled through.
“A bunch of clothes had been strewn about, a nutcracker that I had gotten from his mom’s house had been broken,” Masson said, “a couple of books that were in the bottom of the bag had been taken out of the bag, stuff that was under the clothes. And that’s when we started going through the outer pockets and we noticed the bag of jewelry was missing.”
It was jewelry that was given to Hovanec that belonged to his late uncle.
“It may cost you next to nothing to have received it but what it means to you is very personal and yeah and just, I don’t get that anymore,” he said. “It’s just gone.”
They weren’t just missing memories — Masson felt their privacy was robbed.
“A pair of my underwear is gone,” they said. “It was a pair of used underwear that is gone…And that’s that’s something that I’m not, I’m trying really hard not to dwell on because that doesn’t need to be keeping me awake any more nights than it already has.”
Immediately, the pair called the Dane County Regional Airport but said they couldn’t get a hold of anyone.
Then they called the New Jersey Port Authority, who told them to call United Airlines.
Things got even stranger, Masson said, when the woman from United asked them to read the barcode on the checked luggage tag.
“And it was somebody else’s last name,” they said. “They had put, they had switched somebody else’s bag barcode for ours. So I gave that number to the lady on the line for United and she said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting because that person’s bag has been registered as also being lost,’.”
According to the couple, other passengers on that same flight were in line in Madison with the same problem.
“So, at least three people’s bags had been either directly stolen or stolen from, and that’s a lot,” Hovanec said.
A United spokesperson told News 3 Now, “We know our customers count on us to deliver their belongings on time. We’ve received this report and we are investigating.”
Masson and Hovanec said they were told the same, and that the airline might reimburse them. The United employee told them the company’s policy, “United assumes no liability for high value, fragile, or perishable items carried in connection with domestic travel.”
That left them feeling more frustrated and neglected.
“Why would I check a bag and pay you money to look after my stuff and then you tell me, ‘Oh, but actually, we don’t have to watch it, we don’t have to take care of it for you’,” Masson said.
Masson also felt the Port Authority in Newark didn’t take the incident seriously enough, and is pursuing filing a police report.
“There’s thousands of people, millions of people per year going through the Newark Airport, going through United,” they said. “And it’s not just people my age, it’s teenage girls, it’s young children. And you wonder, like, what kind of stuff is getting taken out of their bags, too? And what kind of value people assign to that stuff in a gross sort of way?”
Bottom line, the pair now think checking bags isn’t worth the risk anymore, and they cautioned others against it going forward.
“You can’t trust anyone,” Hovanec said. “You have to you have to keep it secure yourself. It’s the only way to fly safe these days, apparently.”
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Jaymes Langrehrjlangrehr@wisctv.com608-277-5241
