By Tobias Rangel and Jonah Morgan
When English teacher Christopher Meglin returned to his car in the teacher parking lot after a recent Riverside basketball game, he found his window smashed and laptop stolen.
“That’s when I saw that, ‘oh my God, there’s a gaping hole. Did I leave the window open?’” said Meglin. “Then I saw the glass and everything.“
The break-in was suspected to have happened at some time between 6 and 8:30pm while a varsity basketball game was happening.
Meglin noticed the break-in after leaving the basketball game at around 8:45.
The laptop, which Meglin used to DJ in his spare time, was the most valuable item stolen.
“I’m a DJ, and I do music. I was working on a program that I had for the next day, in my free time,” Meglin said. “I ended up keeping it in the car, so it stayed there the whole day.”
His teacher bag, which was also in the car, was not stolen.
Meglin immediately called the police and reported the crime. Police took fingerprints of the car and are now checking for matches.
Riverside assistant principals found video evidence of the incident on one of the security cameras on campus, but the angle and image were not clear enough to identify a suspect. Meglin reviewed the camera footage along with the adminstrators.
“There’s a car that literally backed up and pulled up into the spot where my car was for that brief period of time,” he said.
In the wake of the incident, Meglin sent out a message to the Riverside faculty, warning them to keep their valuables either hidden or with them.
The break-in occurred days after another break-in on campus, when someone broke into Riverside’s football locker room and someone stole around $5,000 dollars of equipment from the football locker rooms, mostly helmets.
Varsity Football Coach Cory Lea believes that the equipment was taken to be resold for profit.
“I think they just wanted to take those helmets and resell them,” said Lea.
The locker room was broken into twice, both times right before a game day. Lea was especially frustrated that his equipment was stolen right before two games.
“We have kids come into the office and they say, ‘my helmets are missing.’” he said. “We’ve got to play in three or four hours, so we’re trying to figure out what these kids can wear.”
Lea also praised Riverside’s administration for acting quickly and fixing the locker room doors.
Lea thinks the football break-in and Meglin’s car break-in are unrelated. He believes it was a fan from an opposing team and doesn’t expect it to happen again.
“I think it’s an isolated incident,” he said. “You know, normally nothing really happens on our campus. We’ve had cars that are left here overnight, even weekends at times, and this doesn’t always happen.”
