The Stagnant |April 1, 1999

Major Bookstore theft foiled

by Casper Willy

of the Stagnant staff

Wednesday, around 8:30 p.m. several students reported to campus police having seen a man trying to run as fast as he could while pulling a cart full of stolen textbooks from the DUM-St. Louis Bookstore.

"He wasn't going very fast, but I don't think I would be either lugging all those books around like that," said one of the students.

When asked approximately how many books had been stolen Tori Schmultz, director of Hillary Services claimed there was no real way to tell. "We don't keep a very accurate inventory of [textbooks] but we estimate somewhere around 350 were stolen." Schmultz claims that would come out to be over $10,000 in sales for the Bookstore.

The perpetrator was caught and arrested that evening while he was trying frantically to wheel the books to his car located in Garage D. Officer Barry Brinkenhammer of the campus police said he didn't put up much of a fight.

"Some students called us and told us what they saw, so we finished our lunch and drove over as fast as we could. The poor guy wasn't getting anywhere very fast with all those books so we just walked over and arrested him," Brinkenhammer said.

The man was identified and taken to the police station, however, he was only charged with a misdemeanor since the actual dollar value of the books only came to a mere $673.22. Schmultz had no comment on this.