DUPD charges burglary suspect

Campus Police are investigating a suspect in connection with last weekend's 14 burglaries following several additional reports of burglaries in Stonehenge Dormitory early Sunday morning, said Maj. Robert Dean of the Duke University Police Department.

At 6 a.m. Sunday, 35-year-old Curtis Louis Sangster of 5609D Forest Oakes Drive in Raleigh was arrested at the West Campus bus stop and charged with one count of first degree burglary. The arrest followed a student's report that a man of Sangster's description opened his unlocked door at 5:15 a.m. but left when he saw the student sitting at his desk.

Dean said the investigation of Sangster's connections to last weekend's burglaries would be extensive and could take some time. He also credited the suspect's arrest to the quick reporting of the incident.

A total of $235 was stolen from two rooms on Stonehenge's first floor and two other residents reported someone had been in their rooms. The burglaries were conducted in a similar manner as last weekend's thefts: Students' cash was taken from their wallets as they slept with their doors unlocked.

"I woke up Sunday and [someone] had taken... my pants out of my closet," said junior Chris Mailey. "He went into my closet and went in the door and left my light on." Mailey said nothing was stolen because there was no cash in his wallet, which was in his pants.

Last weekend, a total of $897 cash was taken from students in Jarvis Dormitory, the Theta Chi fraternity section and Brownstone Dormitory while they slept.

Dean declined to comment on whether descriptions of each weekend's burglar matched, but the two DUPD descriptions are fairly similar. Last week, a student reported the burglar to be a 6' 30-year-old black man of thin build with a shaved head and thick mustache. This week's description is of a 5'11" medium-build black man in his late 20s with a mustache.

Dean said students should keep their doors locked at all times, but Mailey admitted that because he had not had this problem last year, he had not been worried prior to Sunday morning.