Police arrest train passenger for a 16-hour loud cellphone conversation

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

A 39-year old woman, Lakeysha Beard, talked for more than half a day while on an Amtrak train going from Oakland, California to Portland, Oregon. The loud cellphone conversation lasted sixteen hours last Monday, after which police stopped the train for twenty minutes at Salem, Oregon to arrest the woman.

According to the British newspaper Daily Mail, Amtrak has no policy forbidding passengers from talking on the phone on a moving train.

In the train's car, a few passengers asked the woman to put the phone away or to stop a few times during the conversation prior to notifying the train staff. Staff members were unable to convince the woman to end the conversation and stopped the train to arrest the woman and halt the disruption.

As British newspaper Metro mentioned, this cellphone conversation doesn't beat the record 51-hour phone call by Sunil Prabhakar of New Delhi in 2009.

Sydney, Australia etiquette expert Alex Travers, remarking on a train incident in March, said there is a lack of respect for public transportation from younger generations. The U.S. woman in the current incident, Lakeysha Beard, is 39 years old. Travers said, "I'm afraid we are all in a very bad place as far as we feel about our public transport. People think poorly of it, so therefore they are getting on it with a poor attitude." She called youths "me-oriented" and said that they "do what they want to do" without thinking about others on the vehicle.

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Sources

Lana Sweeten-Shults. "Sweeten-Shults: Cellphone transit nightmare shows decline in people's appropriateness" — Times Record News, May 23, 2011
Glenda Kwek. "Train passenger charged after 16-hour mobile phone chat" — Sydney Morning Herald, May 19, 2011
"Woman arrested on train for talking loudly on phone for 16 HOURS! (And she was in the quiet carriage)" — Daily Mail, May 18, 2011
"Train Passenger arrested for 16 hour phone conversation in the quiet carriage" — Metro.co.uk, May 18, 2011

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