During the all-campus blackout early Wednesday morning, several students decided it would be amusing to abscond with an ad-hoc stop sign set up by Oberlin Police.
With designs on the sign for a room accessory, several inebriated students toted the 50-pound safety fixture back to their rooms.
Unfortunately for these would-be thieves, the sign was dragged through the snow and left a distinct trail. Hot on their tails, police followed the tracks to Tank Hall.
“If a person’s drunk and walking home and they see a stop sign can be moved, with their thought processes not working well, it seems a funny thing to do, and you get a cool accessory for you room,” one student involved with the theft said. “But obviously it’s not.”
Police did room-to-room searches until the sign was recovered. Several students in Tank said they were considering filing a formal complaint against Security questioning the legality of the late-night intrusion.
According to reports, police also discovered several students smoking marijuana. They then threatened to take the students to the station unless they disclosed who had purloined the sign.
“They found a group of three boys smoking a bong in the hallway, and they were threatening to take the boys into the police station, and they coerced them into saying this girl had something to do with it,” the rueful student remarked.
The sign-snatching student expressed indignation at the way the matter was handled.
“They started yelling at me, asking me ‘Where’s the sign? Where’s the sign? Where’s the sign?’” she said. “I at first denied I knew anything about it. I was terrified.”
“I didn’t even know what my rights were,” she added. “The only answer I received was something to the effect of, ‘You don’t know your rights? You didn’t go to school?’”
Oberlin Police Chief Michael Moorman and Captain Miller were not available for comment Thursday.
Other students, who had no knowledge of the theft until officers began hammering on their doors, were similarly upset.
“About three-thirty in the morning I heard a couple of loud bangs on my door, and Oberlin police officers entered the room and shined flashlights on us and basically asked us if we knew anything about the stop signs,” sophomore Erin Brazell said. “We were really, really scared last night.”
The 2 a.m. theft drew the wrath of several officers. According to students, officers said they were in ‘hot pursuit’ of the thief. The involved student, however, contends otherwise.
“If they were in hot pursuit of the sign, a three year old child could have crawled faster,” she said. “They showed up 30 to 45 minutes after we arrived back at Tank.”
The search comes on the heels of two incidents over Winter Term in which students claim Security conducted spurious searches.
In one, maintenance crews discovered that a student had been growing marijuana when changing a sprinkler head, then searched the entire hall.
In another, Security entered several students rooms in pursuit of illicit alcohol after asserting that an massive unauthorized hall party had transpired. House Loose Ends Coordinator Monica Lee stated that Security claimed the doors were propped. However, at least two of the students whose rooms were searched were away for Winter Term.
“If you were away for Winter Term, it means your door was locked,” Lee said. “They were all locked. They were checked by our residence director.”
Security is also threatening Tank with disciplinary action for excessive alcohol consumption.
“They said that Safety and Security was going to file a formal complain against Tank Hall because we had too many empty beer bottles,” Lee said. She claimed that an officer said, “There are too many empty beer bottles around, so you must be doing too much partying.”
Lee declared she was going to meet Captain Miller today to discuss the stop sign fracas.
Traffic safety sign theft is somewhat of a tradition among angst-ridden young adults. But it can have grave and deadly consequences.
In 1996, three Florida teenagers were sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing 19 stop signs in Tampa, after three teenagers were killed by a 8-ton truck that careened through an intersection and struck their car. While their case was later overturned because of trial errors, the worst case scenario remains.
Police said the matter was still under investigation. A formal report has not been issued.
Chief of Security Bob Jones declined to comment about the specifics of the event, saying only, “We’re still gathering information on it.”
Lee and Brazell are scheduled to meet with ResLife today to discuss courses of action and will seek legal counsel on whether a formal complaint is warranted.