The fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s house at 35 High St. was burglarized Friday, and thanks to the fraternity’s house manager, police have apprehended a suspect.
Upon returning from the Jonathan Edwards gym Friday evening at around 10 p.m., Daniel Diamond ’11, who is in charge of overseeing SAE’s property, found a strange man who did not look young enough to be a student standing in the house’s kitchen, Diamond recalled. The man was wearing several articles of clothing that Diamond recognized as belonging to his housemates.
After the 6-foot-4 Diamond approached the man, he told him to drop the stolen items and get out of the house. The man then dropped a paper shopping bag full of sneakers and ran off carrying two white trash bags full of items that he may have stolen from the house, according a police report.
A chase ensued.
Diamond pursued the intruder into an alleyway between the Cambridge Oxford Apartments on High Street, and the man dropped a pair of shoes he was carrying but ultimately escaped. According to the police report, Diamond then returned to the house and discovered that the locked doors on five of the house’s bedrooms and its library had been banged up. Diamond’s bedroom door suffered the worst damage, he said — it was knocked off its frame.
At the time, Diamond was the only other person in the house, as its seven other residents were still away for the Thanksgiving break.
According to the police report, the intruder was a 5-foot-10 to 6-foot black man of medium to large build and had been wearing a number of SAE house residents’ clothes, including Jake Cecil’s ’11 Yale Basketball sweatshirt and Ben Dizards ’11 baseball cap and size 14 basketball shoes.
Upon arriving on the scene, police found that one of the house’s first floor windows was open and that the locks on both its back windows were broken. There was also a chair leaning against the house’s exterior back wall, which would have helped someone gain entry, and which Diamond said was not near the window when he had left the house earlier that evening, according to the police report.
Thwarted once, the thief was not deterred.
While Diamond spent the rest of the evening at the Omni Hotel on Temple Street because he said he didn’t feel safe sleeping in an unlocked house in a bedroom without a door, the SAE house was broken into yet again.
Diamond, who discovered the house had been burglarized again Saturday when he returned to the premises, said that time the thief or thieves had torn out the cabinets in the bedrooms and strewn the contents about the beds and floors. Some items, brother pins and cash, were missing, he said, and Dizard said his watch had been stolen.
Then, on Sunday evening, Diamond recognized a man standing outside the Walgreens on York Street. He thought it was the intruder, and he promptly alerted a Yale police officer who was nearby. Shortly thereafter, the New Haven Police Department arrested the man, Diamond said.
The NHPD has not released the suspect’s name or any details pertaining to the case, including the arrest report, and will not do so until the case has been closed.
At the fraternity Sigma Nu, which is located nextdoor to SAE on High Street, house manager Evan Stone ’07 said there have been no break-ins at the fraternity house this year. But although the fraternity has been lucky this year, he added that in 2006 and 2007 it was broken into a number of times and a number of computers, iPhones and iPods, were stolen.
Sigma Nu President Andy Shorten ’11 said the most trouble the fraternity’s house has had is with people climbing over the back fence to rummage through the trash, “probably looking for cans.”
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