INDIANA COMPUTERS DAMAGED AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY :

$40,000 in electronics damaged by vandals at Indiana U.
By Paige Ingram, Indiana Daily Student; SOURCE: Indiana U.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind.

About $40,000 in electronics were damaged Monday morning as part of a vandalism spree in Ballantine and Jordan halls, according to Indiana University Police Department reports.A professor reported the incident at 6:27 a.m. Monday. She told police she had entered Ballantine at about 5 a.m. and noticed haze in the air. She did not think it was serious enough to report at first, but eventually changed her mind, said IUPD Capt. Jerry Minger, reading from a police report. Once police arrived, they found damage on the main, first and second floors of the building.On the ground floor, the damage centered around Room 003, a lecture room that seats 76 students, according to the IU's Office of the Registrar. Inside the room, wires connected to a ceiling-mounted projector and workstation had been pulled out, and a touch panel had been gouged, according to the report.Outside of the room, a wall cabinet containing a fire extinguisher was broken and the extinguisher had been removed.Broken glass from a building directory listing hanging on the wall was also discovered outside of the ground floor student lobby. Inside the lobby, newspapers littered the floors, Minger said, reading from the report.Upstairs, on the first floor, more electronic equipment had been damaged.From outside of the building, officers noticed a broken window in Room 149, on the south side of the building. Along with glass,computer keyboards laid on the floor of the room, appearing to have been thrown through the window from the outside, Minger said, reading from the report. Two Macintosh kiosk computers were also vandalized near Room 104. A University Information Technology Services representative told Minger that these computers, which were added in the fall of last year, were not connected to any of the building's alarm systems. More damage was discovered on the second floor. From the ground up to the second, officers traced the chemical trails that they assumed were coming from fire extinguishers that had been taken from around the building, Minger said, reading from the report."Classroom 235 and 247 were completely dusted with dry chemical from the fire extinguishers," Minger said. A window in the door to Room 237 was also broken with some kind of blunt instrument, according to the report, but no chemicals were sprayed inside the room.While two of the three missing fire extinguishers were located in Ballantine Room 005, the other was spotted outside, on the footpath between Ballantine and Jordan Hall.Vandals also entered Jordan Hall, knocking over a trash can on the first floor of the building, Minger said. More consequential was an unplugged freezer found on the first floor. The freezer is supposed to be maintained at negative 70 degrees, and was warming up after losing power, Minger said. No information was available as to the damage of the freezer's contents."We assume this is the same person, but it is hard to say," Minger said, in response to the two similar crimes. "It may be someone who had a grudge against someone in Ballantine or Jordan."IUPD has more than a dozen photographs of physical evidence that it hopes will lead them to the vandal or vandals, Minger said.(C) 2007 Indiana Daily Student via U-WIRE

February 27, 2007