When Bret Mahoney couldn’t find his GMC Yukon where he left it in the Freret Street Garage, he said he knew what happened.
“I thought I was having one of those senior moments,” he joked. But realizing he didn’t misplace his SUV, he became the third student to have his automobile stolen from the garage in a little more than a month.
While the recent rash of auto theft BOLOs has decelerated during the past two weeks, University Police said they are now working to put the brakes on any additional vehicle thefts from the garage and to reassure students about campus security.
UP Chief Patrick Bailey said while those efforts kick into gear, the department’s main objective is to maintain a safe campus environment and protect individuals, and depending on whom you ask, the efforts are working.
Mahoney said despite the theft of his car, he still feels safe on campus, but because of crimes that appear to be moving closer to campus with each new report, international business freshman LeeAnn Moss said she is becoming more concerned about safety.
“Sometimes walking around, especially late at night coming from the library, I don’t feel safe,” Moss said. “We have an open campus, and we have the security available. We just need to have it at the right place at the right time.”
Bailey, however, said students should not feel concern about personal safety at Loyola.
“We have a safe campus,” Bailey said. “One of my first priorities is to have the people here … feel safe. I don’t want to jinx myself, but that’s why you don’t see any kind of attacks or anything happen on the campus.”
Realizing the possibility of additional auto thefts, Bailey said that’s an area that could lend itself more room for concern from students who drive the same or similar models of the stolen vehicles.
“If I had one of those SUVs, I guess that’s a different story as far as property is concerned – we’re talking about professional car thieves,” he said.
Bailey said UP and the New Orleans Police Department have an ongoing working relationship and are investigating various angles of the thefts, including patterns, and concentrating security measures on the Freret Street Garage in particular during nighttime hours.
“We’re hoping that’s going to kind of deter (thieves),” Bailey said.
Detectives, Bailey said, are investigating the thefts, and NOPD is helping to patrol the campus sporadically in unmarked vehicles.
UP Captain Roger Pinac said there’s no clear-cut reason why SUVs at Loyola are being targeted, but there are stories of the engine blocks from the targeted SUVs being used for Corvettes and out-of-town contractors looking for quick replacements for their vehicles.
“There’s a whole bunch of different variables,” Pinac said. “You could have a certain demand in another part of a country, and the information goes out, and they start searching wherever there’s a concentration of any type of vehicle.”
Bailey said details about a perpetrator or perpetrators could not be released because of ongoing investigations, but in an e-mail he sent to the university he said UP knows when most of the vehicles were taken and at what time. Two of the thefts occurred in the early morning hours, one occurred in the late evening and one is undetermined, Bailey said.
Recently UP began offering steering wheel locks for the targeted vehicle types and has provided students with a list of retailers that can outfit vehicles with ignition kill switches. But the best remedy, Bailey and Pinac said, is armoring vehicles and being aware of and reporting any suspicious activity or audible car alarms.
“There’s no fool-proof system,” Pinac said. “The ultimate goal is if the thieves do come in here … they say ‘Now these people have clubs, this place is lit up like you can get a tan in there, we ought to go somewhere else.”
Daniel Monteverde can be reached at [email protected] reporting by Tyler Kaufman.
