TSA officers screening a carry-on bag at Dallas Love Field Airport found a pocketknife hidden inside a tube of toothpaste, according to an employee account posted on the Transportation Security Administration’s website.
TSA Officer Jazmine Kramer spotted what looked like a metal object near the toiletries while running the bag through an X-ray machine and flagged it for further inspection.
“Usually when people have prohibited items in their bags, it’s by accident,” Kramer said in the TSA write-up. “It’s not normally because they intentionally put something there thinking it will make it through.”
Security training instructor Wade Brown, Jr. searched the toiletry bag but could not immediately locate the object seen on the scan. He sent the bag through the X-ray machine a second time to pinpoint where it was, then picked up the toothpaste tube and noticed it felt off, with tape near one end.
Opening the tube revealed the pocketknife concealed inside.
The married couple traveling with the bag told officers their son had suggested hiding the knife inside the toothpaste to try to get it past security.
“I was super surprised when they both said that,” Brown said. “This was the first time at DAL I had ever seen someone intentionally hide an item inside something else in an attempt to get it through security.”
The couple voluntarily gave up the knife and were allowed to continue to their flight, TSA said.
Brown said the case underscored the need for officers to keep communicating when an X-ray flags something a physical search doesn’t immediately turn up. “If one officer sees something and another officer cannot locate it during the search, work together and communicate until you find it,” he said.
TSA Dallas Love Field Federal Security Director Amy Williams said officers are trained for exactly this kind of scenario. “A knife concealed inside a toothpaste tube is not something travelers typically encounter, but it is exactly the type of threat our officers are trained to identify and resolve,” Williams said.
The discovery follows a separate incident at Tampa International Airport, where TSA officers recently found a 4-inch, double-edged knife hidden inside a baseball bat-shaped flashlight tucked beneath the lining of a passenger’s carry-on. That passenger told authorities he had placed it there to save space, and he was arrested and barred from flying.
