Intruder Pesters Cabot House

Several students in Cabot House saw a face—and in one incident, other body parts—that was a bit out of place last Friday.

A Cabot resident reported that an unidentified male knocked on his or her door and asked whether the student wanted to engage in illegal drug use last weekend, according to Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) spokesman Steven G. Catalano.

HUPD officers were unable to locate the individual, who was sighted in E-entryway.

Peipei X. Zhang ’08, who lives in E-entry, encountered a person she believes was the intruder in the fourth floor unisex restroom.

“I was washing my hands at the sink, and I looked up and in the last stall in the shower is a guy staring back at me, showering with the curtain a third of the way open,” Zhang said, adding that the light in that stall was blown out.

Zhang was not sure what was going on or what to do, but a friend suggested she call HUPD.

The officer she spoke with acknowledged that HUPD had received other reports involving the same individual but that the intruder had not yet been found.

Zhang said she was not sure that the individual in the restroom was the same person described in the earlier reports, but once e-mails about the incidents appeared on the Cabot House open-list, things started to click.

“The timing is key, and the location is on target, but I’m not 100 percent sure,” she said.

Zhang said that the intruder invited one of her friends to engage in drug use with him.

David Mou ’08, who also lives in E-entryway, said he heard someone turning the knob to his locked fourth floor door on Friday. Thinking friends were at the door, he walked towards it.

“Whoever it was heard that I was coming and bolted down the stairs,” he said. “By the time I opened the door, he was already on the second floor.”

Mou said he did not check his e-mail until the next morning and did not even know that a suspicious individual had been reported in the building.

Mou added that while doors lock automatically in some Cabot entryways, E-entry is an exception and many of its residents do not lock their doors.

Cabot’s resident dean, Stephen H. Kargère, received an e-mail from a student about the suspicious activity on Friday afternoon, but he said he did not see the intruder himself.

Diana L. Link ’08, who also lives in E-entryway, said that although she did not see anything suspicious on Friday, she was concerned after reading the open-list e-mails.

“I was a little worried, but only because there was this random person walking around,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what was going on.”

Although almost every door in Cabot requires a swipe card, Zhang said that many students enter unchecked through the dining hall.

“There are a ton of students who get off the shuttle and go into Cabot. It would be really easy to come in that way,” she said. “You’re so preoccupied with what you have to do, you don’t really notice who you open the door to.”

—Staff writer Rebecca L. Ledford can be reached at rledford@fas.harvard.edu.