Two Syracuse University students on the first floor of Dellplain Residence Hall woke up early Monday morning to an unknown man standing in their dorm room.

The students, who asked to remain anonymous, said they went to bed Sunday night without locking the door. At about 6:30 a.m. the following day, both students woke up when they heard the door to their dorm room open and said they figured it was the other person.

After falling back asleep for 10 minutes, the first roommate said the second roommate saw someone leaving the room.

‘We started screaming, obviously shut the door and locked it as soon as he got out,’ the first roommate said.

Both students searched the room after locking the door and said they could not find anything missing. The second roommate said she thinks the man just came into their room and stared at them for 10 minutes.

‘I’m a light sleeper and I usually hear stuff going on, and I heard nothing,’ the second roommate said.

The students called the Public Safety and an officer arrived soon afterward.

‘We told him what happened,’ the second roommate said. ‘He just told us to lock our door and that there was nothing he could do.’

Katharine Voorheis, the resident adviser on Dellplain’s first floor, sent out an e-mail to her entire floor Monday at 8:15 p.m. In the e-mail, she told the students to always remember to lock their doors at night.

‘Although you may know and trust the people that live on this floor, you do not know who may be on it at any point in time,’ Voorheis wrote in the e-mail. ‘The nature of this incident seems to be out of the ordinary and isolated, but please remember for your safety to lock your door when you are gone and to lock it at night.’

Jenny Koslovsky, the residence director of Dellplain, said she was unaware of the incident.

The students said they could not give a good description of the man because their room was too dark at the time, and he was already leaving by the time they woke up.

‘When I first saw him, he had already turned around,’ the second roommate said. ‘He was probably 6 feet tall; that’s all I can tell.’

Both students said leaving their door unlocked Sunday night was nothing out of the ordinary, since it was something they had always done.

‘We usually sleep without the lock because we never thought someone would come in,’ the second roommate said.

Published on April 5, 2006 at 12:00 pm