A Rutgers-Newark student was arrested on Tuesday night after campus police received a tip that he might have potentially dangerous substances in his dorm room.
Elan “Eli” Haba, a 19-year-old sophomore at the school who is from North Caldwell, was arrested and charged with theft of movable property, possession of a weapon and possession of fireworks, according to an article on NJ.com. He was later released to his parents.
The threats led campus police to evacuate students at three dorms on two separate occasions Tuesday and Wednesday. The students were let back into their dorms after a couple of hours.
According to a message officials sent to the university community, campus police received information from authorities at the University of South Dakota that led them to search the student’s room. The Essex County Bomb Squad and the Newark Police Special Operations Division assisted in the search. The message said:
The teams found potentially dangerous materials in the student’s room and removed the materials. Subsequently students from University Square, Woodward Hall and Talbott Hall were evacuated.
A second evacuation was ordered later that day, but students were allowed to return to their dorms.
The University’s Director of Communications Helen Paxton said she does not know whether Haba is still a student at the school, but she confirmed that he has been banned from the dormitories. “The campus is quite calm,” she said in a phone interview this morning. “The sun is shining.” Paxton noted that the investigation was being handled by the FBI and that it “could be months” before the case goes to trial.
And what, pray tell, were these “potentially dangerous substances?”
Becsuse if they turn out to just basically be fireworks, then every other garage someplace like South Carolina should also be raided.
One suspects, then, that despite the quotes above attributed to one Helen Paxton, it would then take YEARS before this kid is ever tried, if then. Not least because a) he hasn’t even been indicted yet and B) one gets a sense of the size of this potential “conspiracy” from the apparent fact (one of very few offered above) that the kid was released to his parents.
I also await the near-inevitable attempted linking here of this kid to recent events on the Montclair State campus. (I’m just sayin’, State Street Pete, and just as dumbly as you did on another thread. But purposely dumbly in my case.)
Et tu, Spiro T?