A woman’s body was found entangled in machinery in the baggage-handling area of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Thursday.
Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford said firefighters were called to the airport around 7:45 a.m. after reports of a person trapped in a baggage-handling machine, and that they found a woman tangled in a conveyor belt in the baggage compartment.
Police said she was 57 years old but have not released her name.
Langford said the baggage area is not open to the public and it’s unclear how the woman got there. Scott Allen, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor, said officers from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration visited the scene and learned the woman was not an airport employee.
Firefighters turned the scene over to police investigators, but Langford declined to provide further details. The woman was found unresponsive and pronounced dead at the scene, the Chicago Police Department’s public information office said in an email to The Associated Press. Detectives have opened an investigation, the office said.
The Police Communications Agency initially said the woman had been found at 2.27am, but there was confusion as to why fire and paramedics had not arrived at the scene for more than five hours.
Langford said he checked with the police department and was told security footage showed a woman entering the luggage compartment at 2:27 a.m. The department issued a second statement Thursday afternoon saying security footage showed a woman entering the luggage compartment at 2:27 a.m. The woman was actually spotted at 7:30 a.m. and a 911 call was made.
The footage only shows her walking, not what happened to her.
Police spokesman Nathaniel Blackman said in a phone interview with The Associated Press that no one was watching the surveillance cameras in real time and that investigators reviewed the footage after the woman’s body was discovered.
