MINNESOTA COMPUTERS STOLEN Thieves strike U Radisson, local church | mndaily.com - Serving the University of Minnesota Since 1900:

Thieves strike U Radisson, local church
Subhead:
Three computers and a TV were stolen from the Radisson on Washington Avenue.

BY Robert Downs
PUBLISHED: 07/14/2009

Thieves made off with a 42-inch plasma television and three computers from the Radisson Hotel on Washington Avenue early Saturday night, each from areas available only to residents and employees, according to a police report.

The television was stolen from the hotel’s exercise room, and the computers from the public office area. It is not known if an employee is responsible, Radisson general manager Matt Monchamp said.

“We’ll leave it up to the police to decide,” he said.

Surveillance cameras captured footage of the suspects getting into a car with the electronics and driving away. However, the license plate could not be discerned and the suspects were not recognized, University of Minnesota police Lt. Troy Buhta said.

Once footage is sent to University police, images of suspects are passed around to officers, who may have dealt with them before, Buhta said.

Also, the images may be sent to a metro-wide database in attempts to match the image with a known criminal.

“It’s going to be pretty hard to track down a vehicle with no plate,” Buhta said, “as well as the people if we’ve never dealt with them before.”

Fingerprints were recovered from a knife found in the exercise room trash bin, which was used to break the television off the wall, the police report stated. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension could take as long as a year to process the prints, Buhta said.

“The BCA is very busy,” he said. “Also, prints from violent crimes take precedent over property crimes.”

The public office at the hotel remained closed as of Tuesday.