Two armed men attempted a robbery late Monday night at Eisenhower College in Kelly Quad, keeping captive seven students throughout the ordeal.’ No property was stolen and there were no major injuries reported.
The main suspect remains unidentified and was described by witnesses as a dark skinned male, about 6 ft,’ wearing dark clothing and a ski mask.
He entered the unlocked suite while his partner, also wearing dark clothing and a ski mask, waited outside the room.
Less than two weeks into the new semester, this incident follows a string of other crimes committed on campus, since the first assault was reported last October.
Two students reported of being accosted on campus, one while jogging and the other in her dormitory. University police were able to gather DNA evidence of the first victim’s attacker.
Two other students have reported separate incidents of being robbed. One of those students was arrested later on a charge of falsely reporting a crime. He was also expelled, said Assistant Chief Douglas Little.
As of Tuesday afternoon, police officials said they were not yet ready to identify the suspects or even determine if they are Stony Brook students.
Eyewitnesses said that the main suspect switched off all the lights as he entered the suite. The male started yelling and demanding money.
The friends, in the middle of a casual poker game, at first believed they were victims of a prank by a resident of the suite. They did not immediately understand the gravity of the situation, laughing and treating it as joke.
However, they quickly realized that this was not the case. The gunman started cocking his gun as he slammed shut a bedroom door inside the suite while yelling, ‘Don’t f–king come out!’ said Loretta Lelvin, a resident at Eisenhower College and one of the victims.
Three students, two female and one male, who were smoking on the balcony at the time, noticed something was wrong when they saw the room darken. That was when they heard the boom of the slammed door. Partially veiled behind heavy curtains, the students saw the gunman.
Christian Beauchamp, one of the students who was on the balcony, said that the gunman ‘looked squarely into my face,’ and they made eye contact. Seconds later, shaken and scared, he leapt off the first floor balcony along with his two companions.
They immediately notified an on-duty member of the Residential Security Program (RSP), who was guarding the entrance of the building.
The RSP member quickly notified her superiors at Campus Residences who contacted Stony Brook Police, while five male and two female students were held captive inside the suite.
Little said the thieves appeared to know that the card game would be taking place.
Two of the male students in the suite told the gunman that they did not have any cash and that they were not betting any money in the game.
The gunman, hearing this, hit one of the students on the head with his weapon. The student did not sustain any major injuries, said university police.
The suspect told the students in the room that he would come back so they better have money.
Before he left, he flipped over the poker table, according to Lelvin and police accounts.
Both partners left Eisenhower through a back door, said eyewitnesses who watched from the second floor of the building. The saw them run through the woods into the Kelly Parking Lot where another accomplice in a black Mercedes-Benz picked them up.
Police arrived at the scene seconds after the suspects had already left, said several eyewitnesses.
Eisenhower College was locked down as RAs told students to remain in their rooms.
It is unclear how the thieves were able to enter the dorm, as the building requires an ID card with a member of the RSP manning the entrance desk.
Little would not comment about the investigation but he did say that police were able to get a partial plate of the vehicle and that ‘this matter is under active investigation.’
He also advised students to lock their doors to deter crimes of opportunity.
One student learned this the hard way. ‘I feel less safe and I will never leave the door open again,’ said one of the two students who spoke directly to the robbers.
Representatives from administration and of the Stony Brook University Police Department tried to reassure the university that this incident was isolated and ‘no threat to the campus community.’
But many students questioned the university’s response to the robbery. Several students from Eisenhower were outraged that they were not alerted of the situation until they received an email almost ten hours after the incident.
‘My RA didn’t tell me anything,’ said Kerrin Tuthill, a resident on the same floor where the incident occurred.
Stony Brook’s emergency management and the university police’s website do not reflect any information on the incident as of early Thursday morning.
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