Housing and Residential Education officials are warning students to lock their doors in the Residence Halls after a string of thefts happened over the weekend.
Thieves were able to leave the dorms with more than $8,000 worth of items, which included six laptops, backpacks, iPods and a Nintendo Wii. The items were taken mostly from Sage Point Building 811, Sage Point Building 813 and Chapel Glen Building 804.
As of Monday, HRE officials had a vague description of the suspect, said Shelley Nicholson, assistant residential education coordinator at Sage Point. In an e-mail to residents, Nicholson said two people are under suspicion: both males wearing hoodies and one who was described as tall and Caucasian.
Officers at the U Police Department conducting an investigation on the case were unavailable to answer questions about the suspects, including whether or not the seven theft cases that occurred during the weekend involved the same suspects.
Resident assistants, however, have been telling residents that it might be more than two suspects, said Devin Despain, a Chapel Glen resident.
Despain, a sophomore in mechanical engineering, was one floor above his room during the span of time when his $900 laptop, his $45 jacket, $45 backpack and $200 calculator were taken from his room.
“They didn’t take any bigger stuff, just things that would easily fit in a backpack,” Despain said.
Despain suspects that the thief or thieves entered his room through his suitemate’s unlocked door, which is connected to his room through a bathroom. Despain said the thieves did not take his roommate’s property because he had just moved in a couple of days before, so his room was still empty at the time of the theft.
Most of the police reports indicate that there was no forced entry into the rooms of the victims who claim their property was stolen.
In the e-mail, Nicholson said the men walked into a “resident’s room unannounced and uninvited, noticed the resident in the room, were confronted by the resident and said they were looking for somebody and left the room.”
“The kids would just tap on door handles to see if they were unlocked and ask if Bob was home,” Despain said. “When they were told he wasn’t there, they would move on, but if they found an empty room, they took all your stuff.”
Despain urges potential theft victims to locks their doors and “kick the door on your way out” every time they leave their rooms.
Housing officials encourage students to report suspicious behavior of someone who may match the description of the suspect by contacting their RA or the U Police at 801-585-2677.