A student reported that his N Street house was burgled on Saturday morning after finding hundreds of dollars of electronic goods missing.

A burglar allegedly entered a student’s N Street house through an unlocked back door to steal the items, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

John Turner (MSB ’09) said that he woke up in his home on the 3600 block of N Street to find his laptop, two calculators and iPod missing. He reported that his backpack, which contained papers and notebooks, was also gone, leading him to suspect that the thief used it to carry the other missing items.

The MPD report lists the value of the stolen items at $840.
Turner said he went to bed around 4 a.m. and noticed his backpack and items missing around 11 a.m. He said the last of his housemates came in at 5:45 a.m. and that the housemate thinks he remembers everything still there at that time.

Turner said he believes the burglary happened at or around 6:07 a.m. because friends with AOL Instant Messenger windows still open the next morning said that someone was logged out of Turner’s account at that time, though it had been open all night.

The front door automatically locks and so was likely not the point of entry, Turner said. But Turner said the back door that night was unlocked. He and his housemates always lock that door, he said.

The back door, which had a chair in front of it when Turner went to sleep, was open about a centimeter the next morning, but the chair was still blocking the door, leading him to believe the burglar walked out the front door. Nothing else in the house was out of place, Turner said.

Turner said that last semester, his neighbors installed a lock on the gate that leads to the four adjacent backyards of his block. He said the university forced them to take the lock off the gate due to what it called a fire code violation.

“I think we should be able to lock our backyard if we want to,” he said.

Turner’s gate had bungee cords fastening his gate to the fence, which he said he discovered had been taken down after finding his items missing. The four gates to the backyards were open, and the bungee cords that had fastened them to their respective fences were on the ground.

Turner partly blamed the university for the theft.

“It makes me angry at the security we have around here,” he said.

“Living in university housing … it would be nice if we didn’t have to deal with stuff like this.”

A DPS representative could not be reached for comment last night.