Four Brunswick males started their evening using the public computers in Smith Union; an hour and a half later they had been ejected from campus by Security and were lying in slush on South Street on the wrong side of a Brunswick Police officer's Taser.
Three of the four men have been issued criminal trespass warnings by the Brunswick Police Department (BPD) and will be arrested if they set foot on campus again; the fourth has yet to be issued a warning.
The Orient has conclusively identified two of the four individuals but is withholding their names since none has been charged with a crime.
At 10:15 p.m., Security received a call from a concerned student who reported two males who "didn't look like they belonged in the building" using the computer terminals across from the Mail Center. According to Nichols, two Security officers and Shift Supervisor Lester Wood arrived "within minutes...and checked the building out," but the two men could not be located.
A half hour later, Anita Xie '08 and Kacey Lane '08 were waiting for a Safe Ride in the lobby between Coles Tower and Thorne Dining Hall when they saw two men who did not appear to be students catch an open door and slip into the building.
"We were in the [lobby] and these guys looked very suspicious and waited around to get access to the building. When someone [with an ID card] went into the Tower, they followed," Lane said.
Lane called Security at 10:46 p.m. and reported the suspicious activity.
The Security dispatcher immediately brought up a live feed from the security camera in the lobby and identified where Lane and Xie were standing.
"Describe them to me," the dispatcher then asked, according to a copy of the call made available to the Orient. (Security records all incoming calls.)
"There are two black males; one wearing a blue coat, the other one wearing a brown coat and maybe a hoodie," Lane replied.
The dispatcher took down the description but then saw two black males on the video feed.
"Wait a minute. Are they right behind you just now?" he asked.
"There's more [of them] right now," Lane replied.
"Are those the guys?" the dispatcher asked.
"Those are new people," Lane replied.
Director of Security Randy Nichols showed the Orient the video of the lobby from Saturday night. It showed two men slip into the Tower behind a student who opened the door with her keycard. A few moments later, it showed two other men slip into the tower behind another student.
Over the next half-hour, the video feed from inside the Tower lobby showed the men standing around. They then disappeared from view. At one point, two of the men hoisted themselves up and sat on the vending machines adjacent to the elevators.
They were acting very suspiciously, according to Nichols.
"The body language speaks volumes to me. It says they are looking for an opportunity," Nichols said. "It tells me there are up to no good."
Security officers responded to the area of the Tower some minutes after Lane's call.
"Not including the dispatcher, we had six officers dealing with this," Nichols said. Some went into SuperSnack, two searched for the individuals floor-by-floor in the Tower and others reviewed video footage from the nearby cameras.
The four men exited the Tower at 11:17 p.m., video footage showed.
Acting on a tip from a student, security officers found the men between Stowe Hall and Howard Hall a few minutes later.
When confronted, "the four individuals were not cooperative," Nichols said. "The officers were asking for identification, asking routine questions as to why they were on campus and that kind of thing and they weren't getting those answers," he said. The men claimed they did not have any identification on them and that they were visiting a friend but they did not say who that friend was, according to Nichols.
"They were instructed to leave campus immediately," Nichols said. Security Patrol Supervisor Lester Wood said he saw them leave campus at 11:23 p.m.
A few minutes later, a Brunswick Police officer on patrol on South Street stopped the individuals.
According to Nichols, the police officer encountered problems with the men. "My understanding is that they were not cooperative, would not provide identification, kept their hands in their pockets and refused to remove them?which is an officer safety issue," Nichols said. "At one point the officer had to bring out a Taser. He did not deploy it, but he felt it was an officer safety issue," Nichols said.
When reached for comment, one of the four men said he was visiting his cousin's friend on campus?he could not recall the Bowdoin student's name?and was unjustly issued a criminal trespass warning.
"We was just leaving campus when the police drove up and made us get on the cold, wet ground," he said in a telephone interview. "They asked us for ID, but we didn't have no ID and they called us liars and made us get on the ground and pointed a Taser at us."
Multiple calls placed to the man's cousin were not returned late Thursday night.
The police report about the incident last Saturday was incomplete as of Thursday night.