The Johns Hopkins University student who killed an apparent intruder with a samurai sword got people talking.
But what about the liquor store cashier who chased down a shoplifter, only to be threatened in an alley behind the Charles Village Pub on St. Paul Street?
Or the burglar who broke into a graduate student's Calvert Street apartment and stole her backpack while she slept?
Or the man who pushed open an unlocked second-story sliding-glass patio door and startled the female occupant of Hopkins House on West University Parkway when he shined a flashlight into her eyes? He had climbed to the balcony by standing on trash cans.
Or the student who opened a bedroom door on East 33rd Street and confronted a man holding his guitar, laptop computer and a cup of coins. Guests had left the front door to the house unlocked.
These are just a few items culled from the university's weekly crime report starting Sept. 7 and ending Sept. 21, which details eight residential burglaries and one attempted burglary in the off-campus neighborhoods. Six of the victims were undergraduates, graduate students or professors.
Whether the area around Hopkins is being hit harder now than in previous years is difficult to discern. While campus police note crimes that occur in the off-campus area in their daily and weekly bulletins, those crimes aren't tallied in their official statistics, which only count burglaries in off-campus buildings owned by the university or controlled by student organizations.
But the numbers did concern authorities, who issued a crime alert Sept. 14, the day before the student killed the man hours after someone had broken into his house on East University Parkway and stolen two laptops. Hopkins security officials, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
Transient students can be easy targets in an urban environment, especially those living off campus, where they're less protected and more exposed to the edgy rhythms of the street. They often feel immune from harm, are out late at night and sometimes drinking, and they don't often practice the same basic precautions that homeowners routinely take.
In most recent burglaries, police reports note that the person breaking in simply opened an unlocked door or climbed through an open window, sometimes on the second floor. Baltimore police have made one arrest - a man found inside a house in the 200 block of E. University Parkway after the homeowner, not a student, discovered his front door had been forced open. There is no word yet on whether this suspect, or the man killed by the student, could be responsible for other break-ins.
