View the Video TSA: 'We don't live in a make-sense world'

A Capri Sun juice pouch mistakenly left in a 10-year-old San Diego girl’s carry-on handbag led a TSA agent to subject the girl to almost two minutes of frisking and extra screening that lasted about an hour, her father said.

Liquids exceeding 3 ounces are not allowed in carry-on bags, for fear they might contain explosives, but the girl’s father said the resulting search was an over-reaction and an inappropriate intrusion.

Kevin Payne of Pacific Beach and his daughter, Vendela, were passing through the Raleigh-Durham International Airport on Dec. 30, 2015, headed home to San Diego, when U.S. Transportation Security Administration agents discovered the liquid.

Authorities followed up with a swab of the bag and a false-positive test for explosives, then a nearly 2-minute-long full-body pat-down in which a female TSA agent touched the girl’s buttocks and groin repeatedly.

Did the TSA go too far in its frisking of Vendela? Yes 69% (483) No 31% (216) 699 total votes.

Payne said he has not made a formal complaint to TSA, but is considering doing so, possibly with the help of an attorney. He said he wanted to see how people responded to the video on social media first, to make sure he wasn’t overreacting.

Payne said TSA agents told him he wasn’t allowed to film, but he asserted his rights and was able to capture the incident on video, which he has since posted on YouTube and Nextdoor.

In the video, the girl stands with a blank expression on her face as the female agent runs her hands down the inside and outside of the girl’s legs, over her buttocks and chest, and around the waistband of her skirt.

The TSA investigation delayed the family’s travel for about hour, Payne said.

“I’m a very big proponent of security, and if they were patting me down no problem, but this was a 10-year-old girl,” Payne said. “The whole system seems to not work the way it should be working.”

Nico Melendez, a spokesman for TSA, provided a statement Monday in response to The San Diego Union-Tribune’s questions about whether the girl’s pat-down was warranted and conducted in accordance with TSA’s policies for searching children. The statement said pat-downs are used to resolve alarms and anomalies found in the screening process.

“Since pat-down screening is conducted to determine whether prohibited items are concealed under clothing, sufficient pressure must be applied in order to ensure detection,” the statement said.

The agency adjusted its policies in 2011 to reduce the likelihood that children under 13 would be patted down during airport screening.

According to the TSA website, “TSA officers will work with parents to resolve any alarms at the checkpoint. TSA has modified screening procedures for children 12 and under that reduce the likelihood of pat-down screening.”

The agency has not described the “modified screening procedures” in detail because of security concerns.

Vendela’s pat-down didn’t look “modified” to Payne.

“They gave her a very standard pat-down for an adult female,” Payne said. “I don’t think it was modified one bit.”

The only difference between a standard adult pat-down and the search of his child was that the search of Vendela took almost twice as long as it probably should have, Payne said.

“If you look at videos, most pat-downs on adults (take) about a minute,” Payne said. “Start to finish, in real time, (Vendala’s pat-down) was 1 minute and 47 seconds. It just didn’t seem like it was an efficient pat-down.”

Payne said TSA agents made it clear to him that he would be arrested if he tried to interfere with their search of his daughter. So he kept calm, waved to his daughter, and made funny faces at her to keep things light.

“I just kept it as calm cool compliant as possible, and she followed suit,” Payne said. “Deep down I was absolutely fuming, but I knew letting emotions out was only going to worsen the situation for everybody.”

Other incidents of pat-downs of children by TSA agents have prompted public concern in recent years.

In 2011, a video of a female TSA agent patting down a 6-year-old girl at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans prompted Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah to demand reformed search procedures that make patting down less intrusive for children under 13. The agency testified about its policies in a Congressional hearing the same year.

In 2010, Rep. Darrell Issa took issue with the screening of a disabled 4-year-old boy in 2009. TSA forced the child to pass through the metal detector without his leg braces or help from his father.

Payne said TSA agents did not exhaust other screening options before frisking his daughter. For example, they could have re-swabbed her bag using a different machine before they decided to pat her down, he said. They could have sent her back through the metal detectors.

As of Monday afternoon, reaction on social media was mixed.

“OK, I was skeptical at first just assuming an overprotective father, which is by no means wrong at all,” wrote a commenter identified as David Jackson of San Diego on social networking website Nextdoor. “But after watching the video, my mind is changed and, yes, that TSA agent went well past the line in this search.”

Jackson goes on to say that he did pat-downs on people much larger than Vendela while deployed with the Army in Afghanistan, and it took less than a minute. He said frisking children at airport security may be justified, given the likelihood that terrorists would use children to carry out attacks, but “if the agent was going for thorough, she went five steps too far past that.”

Commenter Janelle Sherako wrote that she’s familiar with secondary screening at airport checkpoints, having gone through it some 40 times last year while traveling for work in a knee brace.

“There is nothing out of line here,” Sherako wrote. “Being a parent myself and a frequent flyer I don't see anything other than the TSA agent doing her job.

“I’m sorry your child go searched,” Sherako wrote, “but I’d rather have my child searched every flight along with any other potential threat than to be on a plane and get hijacked, blown up, or (another) negative outcome.”