Sports Editor and Staff Writer
@primetimeMitch and @feliciawarfield
From Sept. 21 to Oct. 12 there have been 34 reported home burglary crimes in Salisbury, Maryland, bringing the total number of burglaries in the city to 243 through the month of September for 2014, coinciding with the several car break-ins during the overnight hours of Oct. 25 in which items of value within the cars were stolen.
The number of home burglaries is significantly down from 2009’s 505 reported burglaries through the month of September.
Just 26 of the burglaries have been reported on-campus or in residence halls of Salisbury University between 2011 and 2013, but burglaries are still a common theme within Salisbury’s crime scene and college students living off-campus still remain a big target for a prospecting burglar.
Salisbury University senior Brianna Phillips has lived off-campus for over a year and has been a victim of two burglaries since June of this year.
The first burglary happened during a Sunday afternoon on June 1 at her apartment on Coulbourn Mill Rd. in Fruitland, Maryland. One of Phillips’ four roommates returned home that day and noticed the garage door had been left opened.
Upon further investigation, Phillips, police officers and her roommates discovered a skateboard that did not belong to any of the residents, outside screens of the window slashed with knives, fingerprints on those windows and footprints on their barstools. Missing from their home was a MacBook computer, a set of Beats by Dre headphones, $300 in cash and alcohol.
The second burglary took place on July 4; Phillips returned home from a trip to New York and brought home with her two large containers full of alcohol. When she returned home from work later, one container was missing and just a few houses down from her, high school-aged students were throwing a party.
She called the police to inform them that she had been robbed and that there may be underage drinking a few houses down and Phillips expected the police to come investigate, but instead they just stopped by the house throwing the party.
“We watched a cop drive by and everybody at that party ran inside,” Phillips said. “One kid came out and talked to him, but the cop didn’t even get out of the car; he just kept driving.”