Campus Police

The University of Maryland College Park campus police are investigating an assault on a female student while she was sleeping in her residence at Leonardtown Apartments. The woman awoke at about 3:30 a.m. Sept. 9 to find an unknown man in her bed and fondling her breasts and torso, police said. She screamed and he fled the apartment. The victim glimpsed the assailant through her window and described him as curly headed and wearing a striped shirt, police said. Police have released a video that shows a person of interest running from the area of the incident.

Daniel Gross had cracked the story of mysterious resignations among student staff at a Towson University dormitory, and, truth be told, he felt pretty good about his work. The student journalist's pride quickly turned to frustration, however, when thousands of newspapers containing his article went missing from racks around campus. Three weeks later, Gross still wants to know who stole the estimated 3,000 editions of the Towerlight, and he says university police are dragging their feet in giving him answers.

A 20-year-old bicyclist and Johns Hopkins University student who was struck by a vehicle Saturday is in a coma, his father said Sunday. Nathan Krasnopoler, a second-year engineering student, was in a coma at Johns Hopkins Hospital on Sunday, according to his father, Mitchell Krasnopoler. "He had no pulse in the ambulance, they told us, but they were able to revive him," Mitchell Krasnopoler said. Nathan Krasnopoler was taken to the hospital Saturday after he was struck by a vehicle at 11:50 a.m. near the Hopkins Homewood campus in Baltimore.

University of Maryland officials produced video footage Wednesday from a school-operated camera that had been subpoenaed by attorneys for a student who was beaten by Prince George's County police, images that officials originally said they could not find. Lawyers for the student thought footage could be crucial in filling in the blanks of what happened March 3, when students took to the streets after the university's men's basketball team defeated Duke. More than two dozen people were arrested after confrontations with police.

University of Maryland campus police in College Park alerted students and workers of a possible cougar sighting reported near the wooded areas of the Comcast Center and Arena Drive yesterday. A university police spokesman said the department received a call about 6 a.m. yesterday from a maintenance worker who said he had seen a 4-foot-long, light tan and tawny brown animal with a 4-foot tail. The description of the animal, which would weigh about 50 pounds, fits that of a cougar, according to campus police.

The police chief at Morgan State University personally intervened this month to reverse and expunge the arrest of a scholarship student accused of theft and resisting arrest in a dispute that began over an unpaid $6.50 tab at a campus dining hall, according to documents obtained by The Sun and court papers filed yesterday. After personally persuading prosecutors at Central Booking to drop charges filed by his own officers, Chief Adrian J. Wiggins pushed for official police statements to be rewritten as if no arrest occurred, according to internal police records and statements obtained by The Sun. Two campus officers have been disciplined for failing to obey the chief's "unarrest" requests, and they filed a lawsuit yesterday in Circuit Court to have their punishments reviewed, Michael Marshall, their attorney, said.

Former Baltimore police chief Leonard D. Hamm will take over Coppin State University's public safety force next month, campus officials announced yesterday. The Baltimore native, who resigned under pressure in July as the city homicide rate mounted, will make $92,000 a year in his new job. As city police chief, he earned $162,000. Through a spokeswoman, Hamm, 58, declined to comment, but he said in a statement: "Many of the city police officers I have worked with are Coppin graduates.

DOVER, Del. -- The word first spread room to room in the dormitories, with resident advisers knocking on doors just after 1 a.m. to announce that two students had just been shot. About an hour later, officials were posting notices on the walls and on the Delaware State University Web site. By 5 a.m., classes for the day had been canceled. Last spring's shootings at Virginia Tech reverberated hundreds of miles away yesterday in this campus of about 3,700, as school officials cited lessons learned and moved rapidly to try to protect students.

Chicago -- Eastern Michigan University has fired school president John A. Fallon III and two other top officials, less than two weeks after a federal investigation found that administrators broke the law by covering up the rape and murder of an undergraduate student. Officials with the Ypsilanti, Mich., school announced yesterday afternoon that Cindy Hall, who headed up the school's campus police department, and school vice president Jim Vick, who oversaw the school's housing and campus police departments, were forced out. A day earlier, the school's Board of Regents held an emergency telephone conference and unanimously voted to end Fallon's five-year employment contract.

Amid the reports of the Virginia Tech shooting rampage yesterday, administrators at Maryland universities and colleges began fine-tuning their emergency plans and re-examining security provisions. Shocked students grappled with the tragedy by trying to locate friends who attend Virginia Tech. And across campuses, faculty, staff and students alike said their hearts went out to the victims and their families, with whom they expressed a kinship. "I just feel so bad [for] all the families and what they must be going through," said Angela Bockino, a Loyola College freshman from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Today, Loyola's 12:10 p.m. mass will offer a remembrance to the shooting victims.