A former Transportation Security Administration agent who was accused of tricking an airline passenger into showing him her breasts as she passed through security has been sentenced to 60 days behind bars, prosecutors said.
Johnathon Lomeli pleaded no contest to a felony count of false imprisonment Friday in connection to the incident at Los Angeles International Airport, California’s attorney general’s office said.
Lomeli will report to county jail to serve out his sentence, then undergo 52 classes addressing sexual compulsion and spend two years on probation, prosecutors said.
He was also barred from working as a security guard.
The airline passenger told authorities that Lomeli had stopped her in June 2019, claiming that he needed to look into her bra at a security checkpoint.
Lomeli also instructed her to hold out her waistband out so he could look down into her pants and then told her that he needed to take her to a private room for more screening, prosecutors said.
The woman said that he took her to an elevator, where he told her that he could perform the screening.
It was there that he asked her to lift her shirt and expose her breasts, prosecutors said.
He then looked down her pants once more before telling her that she was free to go and complimented her breasts, prosecutors said.
“We all have the right to be treated with dignity and respect in all places. And no one is entitled to use a position of power to violate those rights,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “Why can’t some men absorb that simple truth? This is 2021, not 1921.”
With Post wires