A man who paid a small fortune to visit Disney World wouldn’t let his decreased bank account get in the way of ruining his vacation over COVID safety measures. According to The Washington Post, in a story first reported by The Orlando Sentinel, Kelly Sills, a Baton Rouge resident, who had reportedly skipped through a mandatory temperature checkpoint raised such a stink when confronted that he was hauled off to jail.
It was supposed to be a lavish, five-day family vacation, including two hotel rooms, air travel, and admission to both Disney World and Universal Studio for seven to eight people. But for Sills at least, it all ended on the first night, when he gave security officers hell when they approached him, yelling and refusing to leave. They then threatened to arrest him for trespassing.
“I paid $15,000,” Sills reportedly told them once handcuffed. “You can’t trespass me if I paid $15,000.”
But they did arrest him, and after being contacted by the Post, he told a slightly different story than the one provided by police and Disney World security officials:
Sills said he would have “happily” consented to a temperature screening but he had inadvertently walked in through an exit and not realized his error. He partly blamed the security manager for escalating the conflict — and compared Disney security to Nazis and the mafia — but also admitted he was in “a bit of a mood” after a day of travel.
He also maintained that he isn’t one who takes the pandemic lightly. “Covid is a very serious thing,” Sills told the Post, “but so is my vacation with my family.”
This is far from the first such incident since Disney parks reopened with pandemic safety measures. The Orlando Sentinel has reported numerous cases of visitors pushing back against security, some of whom have spat on, yelled at, even pushed employees tasked with maintaining restrictions in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Florida Governor Rick DeSantis is notorious for loosening safety restrictions even as cases in the state ballooned, and local leaders have accused him of creating the kind of chaos that leads to a man ruining his vacation after being asked for a simple temperature check.
(Via The Washington Post)