Three people have been arrested in connection with the Sunday morning robbery of a female student near Bobb Hall, Northwestern said.
Northwestern learned Monday morning that police made a traffic stop that led to the arrest of three people on Chicago’s North Side, said Al Cubbage, vice president of university relations.
“In the search of the car, they found BB guns, and the people in the car had similar descriptions to the offenders in the case here on our campus,” Cubbage said. The three were stopped in Chicago Police District 24, which covers Rogers Park, just south of Evanston.
Cubbage said the arrest probably took place Sunday night, but was unaware of an exact time.
The robbery occurred at 4:20 a.m. on Sunday, when two men approached two Northwestern students and demanded their purses, leaving with one student’s purse.
Northwestern posted a security alert on its Web site, and originally said that a gun had been drawn. Cubbage said Monday that one of the students said she wasn’t sure whether the gun was real, fake or a BB gun, but that the university had to treat the incident as an armed robbery. It was quite possible that the gun was a BB gun, Cubbage said.
The student whose purse was stolen told her bank that her credit card had been taken, and the bank found out that someone had used it at one location in Skokie and two others in Chicago. The university gave that information to Evanston and Chicago police before the arrests were made.
Cubbage said he is not sure if charges have been filed against the three people who were arrested, and that the next step will be for the students to try to identify them. He said the university is pursuing the matter aggressively.
University Police Assistant Chief Daniel McAleer declined comment on the matter Monday, saying that UP was still investigating the matter. As of Monday afternoon, Chicago police declined to comment on the case. Evanston Police is separate from University Police.
Cubbage said the robbery did not warrant the use of the university’s new emergency notification system. Implemented in January, the system uses e-mail, voice mail and text messaging to alert students. The university recently did its first text run of its outdoor notification system, which uses sirens and loudspeakers.
“We have not used that yet for a prime alert — when something has occurred, and the danger has, to a great extent, passed,” Cubbage said.
He said that the system will be used when there is imminent danger, such as an impending tornado. “When we believe that there is a significant threat of immediate danger, we would use e-mail.”
Bobb and North Campus residents were not contacted directly about the attack.
Cubbage said the university has been posting breaking crime news on its Web site and linking to it on NUlink (or its predecessor) for more than a decade.
The communications system “is obviously a very powerful communications medium that allows us to reach out instantly to the campus community,” he said, “but it is also one that is a lot more intrusive, and calling people up on their cell phones in the middle of the night to tell them about a hold up — I’m not sure that we’re quite ready to do that.”