A 69-year-old Royal Caribbean passenger spent close to a week in one of the Bahamas’ most notorious prisons after Nassau security found a loaded pistol in her purse. The gun had cleared embarkation screening at Port Everglades the day before.
Mary Robinson of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, was arrested by the Royal Bahamas Police Force on December 2, 2025, after a black Kel-Tec .380 with four rounds of ammunition was discovered in her bag as she tried to reboard Liberty of the Seas at Prince George Wharf. She had boarded the ship the previous day in Fort Lauderdale for what was meant to be a four-night Bahamas cruise celebrating her adopted son Johnny’s 12th birthday, with stops in Nassau and Perfect Day at CocoCay.
She wouldn’t make it to CocoCay. By the end of the week she had pleaded guilty to firearm possession, been sentenced under Bahamian law, and started serving that sentence at Fox Hill Correctional Centre.
What Happened On Liberty Of The Seas
Robinson boarded Liberty of the Seas, a Freedom-class Royal Caribbean ship, on December 1 at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. According to her attorney Bjorn Ferguson, who confirmed the details to People, the pistol cleared the line’s embarkation security screening without being detected. The ship sailed overnight to Nassau and tied up at Prince George Wharf the next morning.
Robinson spent the day in port. When she came back to the ship, the firearm was caught at the Nassau reboarding checkpoint. The Royal Bahamas Police Force boarded shortly after 3:00 p.m. on December 2 and arrested her.
According to a GoFundMe campaign set up by Robinson’s granddaughter, Graci Exendine, Robinson typically travels with a personal firearm and leaves it locked in her car when she boards a cruise. This time, the gun stayed in her purse.
Why The Bahamas Treats Firearm Possession So Seriously
Bahamian gun laws are some of the strictest in the region, and they don’t bend for tourists or honest mistakes. Ferguson told People that bringing a firearm into the Bahamas is “problematic,” with possession charges potentially carrying sentences from 12 months to 10 years.
Robinson pleaded guilty to the possession charges on December 4 before Magistrate Lennox Coleby. Reporting from local outlet The Tribune, picked up by People, said she apologized in court and explained she had forgotten the gun was in her purse, citing Oklahoma’s open-carry laws as the reason it had become routine to carry it.
The default sentence for unlicensed firearm possession in the Bahamas is 24 months. Magistrate Coleby offered Robinson the option to pay an $8,000 fine in lieu of jail time. She didn’t have the money on hand, and so was sent to Fox Hill Correctional Centre to begin serving the sentence.
Fox Hill is the country’s primary correctional facility and has a long history of poor conditions. A 2021 U.S. State Department report described conditions there as harsh, citing overcrowding, poor nutrition, inadequate sanitation and inadequate medical care. The facility has previously held high-profile inmates including FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Robinson spent five to six days at Fox Hill, according to Ferguson. Once Exendine’s GoFundMe cleared the $8,000 needed for the fine, with the campaign passing $12,000 in roughly a week, Robinson was released. Her granddaughter posted on Facebook on December 8 confirming Robinson was out and staying in a Nassau hotel while she sorted out her passport and a flight home.
The Question Royal Caribbean And Port Everglades Haven’t Answered
The part of this story that ought to worry every Royal Caribbean guest is the part nobody is explaining: a loaded pistol cleared embarkation screening at Port Everglades.
A representative for Port Everglades told People that security at the cruise terminal is handled by the respective cruise lines, not the port itself. Royal Caribbean did not respond to People’s multiple requests for comment, and as of this writing the line hasn’t issued a public statement on how the firearm went undetected.
Photo by Nothing Ahead on Pexels
Royal Caribbean’s prohibited items list explicitly bars weapons, firearms, ammunition, explosives and incendiaries, including replicas and gun parts. Bag screening at boarding is the line’s primary defense against any of that making it onboard. In Robinson’s case, a pistol with four live rounds passed through that screen on day one of a four-night cruise. The hidden costs of a cruise rarely include international jail time, but this case is a reminder that the things you don’t expect to deal with onboard can be the costliest of all. We covered some of the less obvious ones in our hidden-costs guide.
Cruise Hive flagged the likely outcome from Royal Caribbean’s side as a lifetime ban from the line, consistent with how Royal Caribbean has historically handled serious onboard security incidents.
What This Means If You’re Cruising To The Bahamas
I’d take the underlying story at face value. Most cruisers carry the same handbag every day, and people who own and carry firearms often enough stop registering them as separate objects. Forgetting a small pistol in a familiar purse is plausible. It is also no defense in Nassau.
The piece I’d want every cruiser to internalize is this: your home state’s gun laws don’t sail with you. The minute the ship clears US waters, you’re under whatever jurisdiction the next port enforces. The Bahamas, Jamaica and several other Caribbean governments treat unlicensed firearm possession as a near-automatic prison sentence, and the U.S. State Department’s March 2025 Bahamas advisory specifically calls out “zero-tolerance laws on firearms and ammunition, including accidental possession.”
The same goes for things that don’t read as risky to Americans. Camouflage clothing is illegal or restricted in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Saint Lucia and Dominica. Marijuana, even from states where it’s recreationally legal, is banned on every cruise ship under U.S. federal law and prohibited in most Caribbean ports. The list of “totally fine at home” items that can get you in trouble at a port stop is longer than most first-time cruisers realize, and the cost of getting it wrong runs from a denied boarding to what happened to Mary Robinson. If you’re sailing the Caribbean, our pre-cruise prep guide covers what to know before you go.
What To Watch Next
Two threads are worth watching from here.
- The first is whether Royal Caribbean issues a statement on how a loaded firearm cleared its embarkation screening at Port Everglades, and whether the line moves to tighten that screening across the fleet. Royal Caribbean uses similar X-ray and bag-check protocols at every U.S. homeport. If a Kel-Tec .380 with four rounds can clear a Port Everglades scan, the same gap likely exists in Miami, Galveston, Cape Liberty and Baltimore.
- The second is the broader Caribbean enforcement picture. Robinson’s case landed during a stretch of high-profile firearm and ammunition arrests of American tourists across the region, from Turks and Caicos in 2024 to a separate eight-person weapons arrest in Bimini in October 2025. The U.S. Embassy in the Bahamas has been pushing the same warning for over a year now: check your luggage, carefully, before you leave the United States.
For now, Mary Robinson is back in Oklahoma, the GoFundMe is closed, and the warning to every American cruiser sailing south is the same as it was before December 2: empty your bag before you board, twice, and assume the rules at every port stop are stricter than the ones you live under at home.
Are you cruising to the Bahamas or anywhere else in the Caribbean this year? When was the last time you actually went through your bag the night before sailing?