A hapless husband scurrying to meet his wife at Newark Airport arrival gate this weekend helped create a big security headache when he was allowed to waltz up behind four federal sky marshals and past a TSA security checkpoint exit without being challenged, police sources said.
The glaring afternoon foul-up — the latest to bedevil the Transportation Security Administration at beleaguered Newark Airport — arose because an inattentive TSA officer failed to put the brakes on the husband, who cluelessly followed the air marshals without showing his ID.
The lapse inconvenienced hundreds of travelers 90 minutes and delayed several departing flights, as Port Authority cops and the FBI frantically scrambled to learn whether the interloper posed a terrorist risk, sources said.
The embarrassing snafu unfolded at 4:27 p.m., at the B-1 exit in Terminal B when TSA screener Joshua Hernandez was at a podium checking the identification of four air marshals who were entering a sterile area, police sources said.
A fifth man, later identified as Jose M. Esteves, 32, of Levittown, Pa., innocently strolled up behind the quartet and passed through the exit without presenting his credentials in a bid to greet his wife, Roxena Esteves, and her boss, Jeffrey Green, who were getting off an arriving flight near Gate 42, sources said.
Initially, Hernandez mistakenly believed Esteves was with the air marshals and had presented his ID for examination — and nobody bothered to stop him.
Eight minutes later, when his oversight was finally discovered, a PAPD cop at the checkpoint and three TSA officials began running after Esteves to find out why he had slipped through the exit.
After they caught up with him and brought him back to the screening area to be searched and interviewed, they concluded he posed no immediate threat, but TSA officials admitted they had lost sight of him “for a significant amount of time,” police sources say.
That admission led to a decision to scrap all operations at Terminal B and to evacuate the area — including all commercial establishments and several planes that had already been boarded — so two PAPD K-9 teams to search for possible explosives.
The FBI-Joint Terrorism Task Force determined Esteves had no terrorist ties and authorities said he had “no ambition to cause the breach nor tamper with Port Authority property,” sources said.
Still, passengers were forced to be submit to a re-screening and it wasn’t until 18:09 p.m., that the checkpoint was finally allowed to re-open, sources said.
Hernandez could not be reached, but Lisa Farbstein, a TSA spokeswoman, insisted that the TSA had “quickly located and screened the passenger in question within five minutes, determining he was not a threat.”
She added that “proper exit lane procedures were reviewed with our workforce” after the incident.