Suspect Caught by CM Ryan Richards PDF Print E-mail
By Maeve Trudeau   
Saturday, 13 November 2004


A potential thief was caught inspecting windows of College III D Block last Monday. Luckily, the CIII College Masters spotted him before anything could be stolen. The intruder's excuse: he was looking for "George from Scotland." Last Monday night at around 6:00pm College Masters (CM) Prof. Ryan and Sarah Richards were walking outside College III when they noticed a suspicious looking person loitering around. They decided to follow him further and he eventually made his way to the back of the D Block of CIII and started looking into each window.

At that point Sarah went to call the porters and Ryan went inside the College III servery to get some help to apprehend the suspicious character. Fortunately, our Muslim community was having their dinner early and RA Hany Elgala and first year Karim Khashaba went to the Aramark entrance in the back. In this way the suspect was 'cornered" and the porters arrived right away.

The suspect was about 1.85 metres tall with dirty blond hair, was 35 years old and German. When asked what he was doing in IUB, it seemed that he couldn't speak English and simply replied he was here to visit his friend 'George from Scotland." Unfortunately for him, there are no 'George from Scotland"s - perhaps he should have tried 'Vlad from Romania."

The disturbing thing about this incident is that it happened during dinner time, when most students weren't in their rooms but had their lights on showing everything that was inside their rooms and, even more so, that seven of the eight accessible windows were open.

Another disappointing thing is that the porters stayed with the suspect for three hours waiting for the police to arrive. But the police never came, instead they took the suspects details over the phone and ran it through their database. They didn't find anything suspicious about him so they asked the porters to let him go.

CM Prof. Ryan Richards was very unsatisfied with the way they handled it and asked for a meeting to discuss what happened with the Polizei and what future steps could be taken. This meeting happened on Thursday and was organized by office manager Imke Sonnenberg at Mr. Richard's request. The police were very apologetic about the whole incident saying that IUB handled things perfectly and that they had made a mistake.

What the local police are going to do now is send details on to the Kriminal Polizei and the suspects' details will be checked further. Also, if anything else happens on campus then this would-be thief will be one of the first people to be checked for an alibi. Basically he's going to go on the 'usual suspects" lists as Mr.put it.

Prof. Richards asks that all students stay vigilant and approach anyone that they haven't seen around before, asking them nicely what their business here at IUB is. This is the main way that future thefts on campus can be avoided - but a word to the wise would be that if you live on the ground floor, lock your window.
 
< Prev   Next >
[ Back ]