FIRSTs

smarten up. winnpegFIRST.ca

cityFIRSTs

A 'few hundred thousand' stolen from Red River College safe

Security gate at college's student services office entrance.
photo: Sean Ledwich

A security guard says a “few hundred thousand” dollars were swiped from a safe at Red River College’s Princess Street campus in the early morning of September 2, 2009.

A safe in a student services office was emptied of tuition payments and retail deposits by a thief who hid inside the campus and emerged after it closed at midnight, he says.

The crime may have been prevented if lessons had been learned from a theft at the same office a year before, the guard says.

In September 2008, someone slid open an unlocked security gate and entered the student services offices. Once inside the person took staffer Ellie Snowball’s purse from her desk drawer.

It’s an unsolved crime, partly, Snowball thinks, because none of the college’s many security cameras was covering the entry point.

“The camera was not focused here, it was focused to the elevator, you know, [it] was stupid,” Snowball said.

Fast forward one year.

The same entry point still had no camera pointed at it when a thief entered the locked student services office and cleaned out a safe, the guard says.

Marjorie Blanchard, a customer service representative in the office for eight years, remembers the safe heist. She doesn’t know how much was stolen, though.

"They won’t tell us. I don’t think they want us to know. People were not in good moods for quite a long time after.”

Many students, who returned for the fall semester on August 31, were paying their tuition at the time. Blanchard said the heist netted two days worth of tuition payments. A Securicor armoured car pickup was slated for the next day.

Jim Drever, manager of RRC security services, would only confirm the theft took place.

“Because that’s an ongoing police investigation I’m leery about making any comment.”

According to the guard, who worked on campus at the time, “a few hundred thousand” dollars in cash and cheques were emptied from the safe.

The guard, who wants to remain anonymous, tells a story of a thief who seemed to have intimate knowledge of the campus.

The guard says he viewed the security tape. He says it shows someone entering the office at 12:30 a.m. At 2:30 a.m., two hours after the caper began, the thief leaves the office with two black bags.

The camera view is from outside the office looking through a partly transparent wall opposite the office entrance.

He also says that a set of master keys and a plain envelope containing keys to compartments inside the safe were taken from a nearby security office that night. The compartments were used by retail outlets on campus, including a bookstore, print shop, and convenience store.

He thinks the thief knew the safe combination.

None of the video gives a clear shot of the culprit, he says,

The guard thinks employees of Securitas, the security company hired by the college for the Princess Street campus, were unfairly singled out during a subsequent investigation.

He says everyone in the student services office knew the security gate had no camera pointed at it after the theft of Snowball’s purse in 2008. Most importantly, he says, security guards did not know the safe combination.

The guard believes the thief must have known the motion detectors in the student services office had been turned off because of too many false alarms.

He says if the college’s security administration had learned from the 2008 purse theft this latest crime could have been avoided.

“How can they be without a camera? Without a motion detector? There would have been no entry at all. All these things should have been in place.”

A spokesperson for the Winnipeg Police Service confirmed a theft was reported at a school between September 1 and 2, 2009. They are investigating and have no suspects.

Comments

No comments have been submitted yet. Why don’t you be the FIRST?

Leave a Comment

Log In or Register.

Advertisement

small_potatoes