Several break-ins and a threatening note led St. Thomas women’s transfer house residents to temporarily move out of their St. Paul house earlier this month.

On Tuesday, Feb. 4, the house’s Apartment Coordinator, Vanessa Gomez, told St. Paul Police officers an unknown person entered the house multiple times in one week, moved things around and left notes, according to a police report. Six St. Thomas students, including Gomez, currently live in the two-story house on campus.

“It makes me feel so unsafe at this school,” resident Amanda Nguyen said. “I can’t even make eye contact with you right now. I’m so scared… I can’t even make eye contact with people, I can’t even talk to people right. I’ve skipped my classes… and it’s just like, I want to be safe.”

St. Thomas Public Safety said its investigation is ongoing.

“We’ve put a lot of time and effort into trying to resolve it for them,” Director of Public Safety Dan Meuwissen said.

No alert was sent to campus after the break-ins.

“It doesn’t quite meet the threshold because we don’t have some pieces,” Aaron Macke, associate dean of students and director of residence life said. “We felt this was something specific to the house that we could try and figure out in terms of working with the residents, working with the space.”

While there was suspicious activity, the house is secure, according to Macke. The person responsible for the activity is still unknown.

“We are all under the impression that someone has been staying around watching for awhile because none of us had ever seen whoever’s doing this,” resident Lily Mohr said. “We could all kind of be in and out sporadic times throughout the day, and they still somehow know to not run into any of us.”

Strange happenings over January Term

When residents Lilly Turnquist and Sarah Hudson moved back into the house in early January, they noticed something was off.

“It looked like somebody had been downstairs because the lights were on, there was dirty dishes in the sink,” Turnquist said. “Vanessa had said she had cleaned everything up, turned all the lights off, left it perfectly clean.”

Turnquist assumed it had been left messy, chalking the messes up to maintenance members, maybe her roommate using the kitchen or her Apartment Coordinator visiting.

“Vanessa never came back during J-Term,” Turnquist said. “Sarah and I thought she did. She never did.”

Things got stranger.

“Sometimes, the back door was open … we always slam these doors,” Turnquist said. “These doors are super hard to get open, and if you close them correctly, they make a loud noise.”

The break-ins persisted even after Gomez returned.

“Her shower was wet, her bath mat was wet and her bathroom was filthy,” Turnquist said. “Someone had definitely been using the kitchen and the bathroom. She found a basket of clothes that were not hers in the closet.”

“We never really thought much of it in the moment, but once we’re starting to put it all together we thought, this is really creepy,” Turnquist said.

The women called Public Safety for the first time on Wednesday, Jan. 29.

“Nothing weird like that has ever happened around the house before,” Mohr said.

Throughout the process, although the residents were hopeful for follow-up, communication between residents and administrators fell silent.

“There’s no emails checking in on us; there’s no follow-ups. There was nothing from them,” Turnquist said. “It took four days. It also took four days for the locks to be changed… Four days where we were all sleeping in the same room together, not wanting to go back to the house alone. We didn’t know who was in there.”

Three out of five

On Tuesday, Feb. 3, Nguyen was sitting on the floor of the transfer house when she noticed something taped under a living room table.

“I see a note underneath one of the nightstands,” Nguyen said. “I read the note, and I was like ‘this has to be a joke.’”

The note, taped on with blue painter’s tape, read in red ink, “So by now I hope you realize you’re our pledges… we may or may not still have a key to the house ;) Sleep with one eye open. Best of luck. Xoxo ΣΦ letter 3 of 5.”

“It says letter three out of five,” Turnquist said. “There’s four other letters we haven’t found yet.”

Nguyen was terrified.

“I read it again, and again and again. And the more I read it, the more fear I had in myself… It’s really hard to get me frightened,” Nguyen said. “I was petrified to read that note.”

On Feb. 6, the women found another note written in the dining room table: “ΣΦ till I die.”

The letters on both notes are greek letters– Sigma Phi, typically associated with fraternities.

“There’s a lot of unknowns with the note. The fraternity is an unknown,” Macke said. “It’s not something that is a St. Thomas situation… we know pledges happen, but those aren’t linking up with any connection to St. Thomas.”

After the first note, the women called Public Safety for the second time and the St. Paul Police Department.

Hall directors Marina Helena Buitrago Cohoon and Amanda Cashman gathered residents for a meeting the night the note was found.

“They didn’t get in touch with us for a meeting until that night,” Mohr said.

In the meeting, the residents expressed their concerns and were given keys to safe housing if they needed it.

“I didn’t go to class at all this week,” Nguyen said. “Something traumatic like this, I just… I didn’t sign up for this.”

The students say they are unsatisfied with the university’s response, feeling their concerns were not addressed quickly enough.

Macke explained that was because Residence Life institutionally responds to break-ins through a specific protocol.

“Our first layer is always to get public safety involved and to start a report, and we did that and we did that immediately. Our second layer is to secure the immediate environment and space,” Macke said. “We secured locks, got them new keys, secured windows, responded every time a call was made. We have an active report going, active investigation. All done in a pretty tight timeframe.”

After several nights spent in emergency housing, the residents were back in the transfer house as of Saturday, Feb. 8.

Meuwissen said Public Safety has increased security measures by installing cameras near the building’s entrances and having officers do additional rounds.

“We’re just going to continue to monitor and continue to watch it,” he said.

While the investigation is still underway, Macke is confident the women are safe.

“The fact that we have them in there means that we are at least feeling good about the situation as we continue investigating and try to get some answers out of this,” he said.

Emily Haugen can be reached at haug7231@stthomas.edu.