Five car-related crime incidents occurred on the Tufts campus in five days last week. Based on the close proximity of the acts' times and locations, police suspect a connection between them.
The first incident occurred on Feb. 17 between 9 and 11:30 a.m. in the Cousens Gymnasium parking lot. One student's car, a 1999 Saturn, had its front passenger window smashed and its radio stolen.
Three days later, at nearby 4 Colby Street, several items were taken from a 2002 Dodge Dakota belonging to a Tufts employee. One flashlight, four CDs, $5 in change and a pair of sunglasses were all stolen between 4:30 and 8:30 p.m.
"There was no sign of forced entry, so [the employee] must have left the door unlocked," Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) Sergeant Robert McCarthy said.
The following day, Feb. 21, a third car was burglarized between 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. A graduate student who had parked her '96 Honda in the Elliot-Pearson lot returned to find the window smashed and the radio stolen. Twenty CDs were also missing.
Cousens Lot, 4 Colby Street and the Elliot-Pearson lot are all on the Medford side of campus.
Another incident of damage to a car occurred on Feb. 18, but nothing was stolen. Between 1:30 and 11:30 a.m., two cars - a Subaru and a '99 Audi, both parked near Hill Hall - were vandalized.
The passenger's window of one of the cars and the driver's window of the other were smashed. The owners of the cars, two undergraduates, did not find anything missing.
"There was stuff in there they could have taken," McCarthy said.
He added that he did not suspect a link between the vandalizations and the robberies, but said that a sudden outbreak in robberies suggests that the first three events may be related, especially given the lack of car robberies in the weeks preceding the incident.
According to McCarthy, it is not uncommon for car-related incidents to come in waves.
"Usually we get those in stretches," McCarthy said. "We haven't had them in a while."
Most recently, a series of break-ins occurred during the 2004-2005 school year.
"Last year we made an arrest for breaking into cars." McCarthy said.
McCarthy also said that the perpetrators of a rash of break-ins like this one are usually not Tufts students, but rather young people from the area.
To combat the problem, TUPD has kept a closer eye on the areas in question with increased patrolling in the lots and areas where the break-ins occurred. At press time, the police had no suspects or leads.
