Two Duke undergraduates have confessed to stealing over $100,000 in equipment from various buildings on campus this month and will be charged accordingly later today. Police will also serve a warrant on a third student involved, from the University of Maryland at College Park.
Senior Charles Jeremy Kelley and junior Susan Webber Stone, both 21, have been placed on interim suspension from the University. Each will face two counts of felonious breaking and entering and two counts of felonious larceny, said Maj. Robert Dean, a spokesperson for the Duke University Police Department. Dean added that the Maryland student, 22-year-old John Jay Alexander, will be charged with one count of each violation for allegedly participating in one of the thefts.
Police said they identified the two Duke students as the same people caught on video surveillance April 7 in the White Lecture Hall stealing equipment worth $40,000. Officers said all three students were identified on a surveillance tape April 11 in the Bryan Center's Schaefer Theater stealing $61,000 in equipment.
Dean said DUPD received many phone calls Monday morning after The Chronicle printed pictures of the three suspects. The two Duke students, after interviews with DUPD officers, confessed to stealing the property and identified Alexander, Dean said.
Alexander and Stone each declined to comment Wednesday. Kelley could not be reached, and his listed number was disconnected.
Some of the stolen equipment was being stored in Kelley's room and has been recovered. DUPD officers traveled to College Park Tuesday to recover other stolen items, Dean said.
Warrants are also pending against Kelley and Stone for the April 5 theft of 28 electronic time switches, worth $10,750, from a Research Drive construction site, Dean said. Those switches were allegedly found in Alexander's possession. Kelley may also be charged for the larceny of a $10,000 video projector from the Levine Science Research Center and a $500 flat-screen computer monitor from Perkins Library.
Kacie Wallace, Duke's associate dean for judicial affairs, could not discuss individual cases due to federal privacy regulations. She said, however, that in cases of theft, the administration has several options, including expulsion. The Undergraduate Judicial Board will decide the outcome of the case.
"I don't know that we've ever had a theft to this degree, so I'm not sure it would be fair to predict a typical outcome," she said. "Obviously, we would follow up with a case of this nature, and when there's simultaneous judicial and criminal cases, we have an interest in resolving the internal cases as quickly as possible."
The thefts nearly caused the cancellation of at least one production in the Bryan Center. The stolen equipment is essential to Mao II, a play that opened Wednesday night, said the play's dramaturg and Professor of Literature Frank Lentricchia. He said the play's crew had been working for two years on the production's music and lights, which were lost in the thefts.
"This equipment was totally essential to putting this show up. It is a very technical show, and there was sound and light work that had been inputted," Lentricchia said. "A lot of people didn't sleep and suffered real emotional damage with this."
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