MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A man whose student visa had long been expired is in jail after West Virginia University police said they discovered him trespassing and using campus buildings for his personal storage.
“This is different,” said WVU Police Chief Bob Roberts. “We’ve had some strange things happen here. This one’s really different.”
Dong Xu, 38, was arrested Sunday and charged with entering without breaking, a felony.
Investigators had been trying to catch the culprit involved in a series of small, petty thefts since late last year.
“We actually had the person go into a professor’s office who’d had little things missing. He had put up a camera and we actually finally identified him in the fall,” Roberts explained.
Xu had not been listed as a foreign student at WVU since 2009.
“You don’t know how many people come and just stay with expired visas and those kinds of things. I think it’s something we have to look for and continue to keep our eyes opened for,” according to Roberts.
Investigators have not been able to identify a permanent residence for the Xu, but they don’t believe he was actually living in campus buildings.
However, there had been signs of something amiss in Stansbury, Hodges, and Armstrong Halls, 3 of the 105 main buildings on WVU’s campus.
“He was storing some of his property in the ceiling tiles. Things he had stolen were in the ceiling tiles. I think he was coming in and using the computer equipment and washing and bathing and doing those kinds of things in the buildings,” the chief noted.
According to Roberts, Xu had very little to say to investigators upon his arrest.
They found evidence Xu had illegally logged onto university computers and at least one device discovered with inappropriate images has been sent to the West Virginia State Police crime lab.