Police officials are advising students to keep valuable items in vehicles out of eyesight after four vehicles were reported burglarized last Tuesday.The vehicles were burglarized while parked in the 20th Street lot, 20BK lot east of the tennis courts and White Hall lot No. 2 at the intersection of Avenue J and Avenue I.”All of the vehicles that were burglarized were similar in nature,” said Kevin Morris of the University Police Department.”In all the cases, entry was made by taking an object or tool, probably something like a screwdriver, to pry the door open through the locking device.”Many expensive things were stolen from the vehicles including iPods, laptops and radar detectors.”We want to make sure students are aware and lock their vehicles,” Morris said. “We also ask people to keep personal items like textbooks and laptops out of sight so they don’t make their vehicles attractive.”Although car break-ins on campus are rare, police say the burglaries usually come in waves.”Generally, we have preventative patrols drive around campus and in and around lots,” Morris said. “We also have the foot patrol who walk around the lots on campus and at the dorms.”Despite the preventative measures taken by UPD, some students still fall victim to petty theft.”When my car got broken into, I had some CDs missing and something random was taken out,” SHSU student Ashley Ortega said. “One of my shoes were missing. They took one shoe and left the other one there.”Ortega’s vehicle was broken into in the fall of 2006 while parked at a near campus apartment complex. According to Ortega, the burglary was merely a once-in-a-blue-moon incident.”I’m the only person I know who’s had their car broken into,” she said. “I think overall, this is a safe campus. I think that I was just one of those random, rare cases.”There are currently no leads on the burglaries, but authorities have entered the serial numbers of the stolen items into a stolen files database. The database, which is accessed across the nation, is used to help authorities track if stolen items have been pawned.”We advise students to report anything they see that might look suspicious.”
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