All three of the doors opened by the “Coronado Creeper” last Tuesday night had doorknobs that did not lock automatically.
The “Creeper” broke into Coronado Hall and entered three unlocked rooms. He burglarized one woman’s room and touched two other women in their sleep.
Katie Dedman, who was awakened by the suspect before 4 a.m., said she had forgotten to lock her bedroom door before she went to sleep.
“Some doors automatically lock from the inside and others don’t for some reason,” she said. “Our neighbor’s door just automatically locks.”
UNM’s residence halls have two kinds of doorknobs — some have a dead bolt above the knob requiring the door to be re-locked when entering and leaving, and others lock automatically when they’re closed.
Patrick Call, director of Residence Life and Student Housing, said he does not know why there are inconsistent locking devices in residents’ rooms.
“The locking mechanisms of what they used and what they didn’t use are all before my time, so I can’t tell you why there’s two different kinds,” he said.
Call said an eight-year renovation plan for all the dorms is underway. The renovation will standardize the furniture, flooring and doorknobs of all dorm rooms, but Call said he does not know how secure the standardized locks will be or how soon they will be installed.
Besides the individual locks on each resident’s door, there are also locks on the residence hall’s exit doors. Every resident is given a perimeter key to enter his or her residence hall.
Call said that, while this adds some security to the residence hall, there are ways to get around the perimeter door locks.
“That’s one of the difficulties in keeping students’ doors open,” he said. “If he looks like a student, people are nice people and they hold the door open.”
Call said members of RLSH examined each perimeter door after the incident last Tuesday and found no signs of forced entry.
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“Once we were notified that there was somebody in the building, we went to verify that all the doors of the building were locked and secured, so he had to get in the building following a resident,” he said.
RLSH also posted signs the day after the Coronado incident reminding students to lock their doors. Call encouraged students to question individuals if they try to enter residence halls without a key, and he said on-campus students should understand what is required to secure their dorm rooms.
“There has to be some self-responsibility in there,” he said. “Those folks have been living in those halls since August.”
Also, Call said emergency alert buttons are installed throughout the interior of each dorm, and RLSH posted signs last Wednesday to remind students to lock their doors.
