Woman dies after getting caught in baggage belt at Chicago airport

A 57-year-old woman was found dead at Chicago O’Hare Airport on Thursday morning, “entangled” in a baggage conveyor belt in a restricted area.

Airport employees found the woman, whose name has not been released to the public yet, around 7:30 am and called the fire department about 15 minutes later, with the emergency service arriving at Terminal 5 soon after. The woman was found unresponsive, “pinned in machinery” and “entangled in the conveyer belt system used to move baggage”, the Chicago Fire Department said. She was declared at the scene by paramedics.

An official with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) also went to the scene to verify whether the woman was an airport employee or not and has confirmed she was not in fact part of the staff, a spokesperson for the US Department of Labor said. So she should not have had access in the baggage sorting room she was found.

Reviewing security footage to understand the situation, police have found that she entered the “unoccupied restricted area at 2:27 am”. Whether the room was locked or not or how exactly she managed to enter the “restricted area” without being an airport employee is not yet clear. Moreover, the surveillance videos do not show anything beyond the woman entering the room and, since nobody was watching them live, it is not known how long she had been stuck in the machinery before the airport employees found her in the morning.

The fire department has turned the area over to the police. The room has been declared a crime scene and detectives have opened an investigation into the accident, the Chicago police department’s communications office said in an email to the Associated Press. An autopsy is also being conducted to determine the exact cause of death.

Despite the incident, traffic at the airport seems to have gone on unaffected. At the time of writing, O’Hare Airport has not issued a statement on the accident yet.