The identity of the female student in this article is being withheld to protect anonymity and privacy.
A theft occurred Monday night that left one female student living in the residential halls without several pairs of underwear.
An unnamed female student living in Maddux-McCord Hall in Capitol Quad was studying and working on homework late at night. To take a break, she put a load of clothes into the laundry in the basement of her residential hall.
“At 1:00 a.m., I put my clothes in the dryer,” the victim said. “Nobody does laundry in the middle of the night on Mondays, so I do my laundry then a lot.”
She said that after she put her clothes in the dryer, she returned to studying and forgot to take her clothes out of the dryer until 4 a.m. The victim said that this is a normal routine for her and said that it has never been a problem in the past.
After two hours of leaving her clothes alone in the dryer, the victim returned to find her clothes out of the dryer.
“When I got down there, it was all strewn around on the table,” the victim said. “Like somebody had needed my dryer, which I thought was odd but I didn’t think too much about it until I noticed that all of my underwear was missing.”
No other clothes were missing from the victim’s laundry, besides the underwear.
“Whoever did it went through every thing and made sure not to miss any,” the victim said.
Andrew Moneymaker, area coordinator of Capitol Quad and Crawford Hall, said that laundry theft is actually quite common on college campuses. Moneymaker said living situations like the ones found in the residential halls force people to share facilities in commonplace laundry rooms, leaving clothes and personal belongings subject to theft if they are not being watched. Because of this, Moneymaker stresses that all residents stay with their laundry.
Moneymaker said he urges students to bring homework with them to the laundry room in addition to their laundry and wait in the attached study room until their clothes are done in the laundry machines.
The victim has checked the lost and found, but her underwear has not yet surfaced since their disappearance Monday night.
As of press time, no suspects have been found and no police report has been filed against the suspected thief.
A similar case to this once occurred during the fall semester of 2010 to a different female student living in MS Cooper Hall. The victim left her clothes in the dryer and returned to find only her underwear missing from the rest of her belongings.
According to an interview with the victim of the 2010 case, she lost several pairs of underwear in the theft and did not get them back.
In the 2014 case, the victim said, “I don’t particularly want them back, but I don’t want Mr. Creepy McCreeper to have them.”
