MIT student's lit-up jacket could have gotten her killed. [View All]

[pnwmom]

And she faces 5 years in prison -- for wearing the wrong jacket to the airport. Check out the photo at the link.

http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/09/21/star_simpson/

Star Simpson, a 19-year-old MIT student, was arrested at gunpoint this morning at Boston's Logan Airport when officers suspected that a circuit board and battery she had pinned to her sweatshirt was a bomb. Indeed, every news outlet is now referring to the thing as a "fake bomb," and Simpson has been charged with possessing a "hoax device."

But pictures of the sweatshirt that officials are putting out show something quite less scary -- I have no idea what a real bomb looks like but I don't think it's a plastic board with a 9 volt battery on it. Simpson's explanation is that the jacket was a wearable art project she made so she could stand out at her school's career day (the plastic board lights up). All information now streaming in supports that view, and suggests that the affair could have been a misunderstanding, one that very nearly turned tagic.

This is my speculation only, but it seems quite possible that rather than intending to deliberately walk into Logan with a fake bomb, Simpson might instead have rolled out of bed with an art jacket she often wore around campus and slipped it on in a rush on her way to pick up a friend -- forgetting that she was heading into the all-fear-all-the-time black hole that is United States aviation.

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A woman from Instructables.com who knows Simpson tells Boing Boing that Simpson's friends at MIT "say she wears the hoodie on a regular basis -- it's just unfortunate that she had it on while trying to pick a friend up at the airport. MIT students don't really do mornings, or worry about what they're wearing, so I can't imagine she'd even think about her clothes before heading out to pick up a friend at the airport before 8 a.m."

Cops are pointing darkly to strange text scrawled on the jacket -- "Socket To Me / COURSE VI." Guess what, "Course VI" is a reference to MIT's electrical engineering course, not an Al Qaeda codename.

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