SANTA CRUZ — Police arrested a 26-year-old man on the UC Santa Cruz campus this week after he allegedly broke into a dorm building bathroom and stood around in the nude.
UCSC students and a parent reached out to the Sentinel this week with concerns that details of the incident — not the university’s first run-in with the man — were not immediately shared with the campus, or at least the dorm, as a warning. On Thursday afternoon, four days after the incident, students received a generalized community safety reminder email and information on community therapy resources.
On Sunday night, Porter College freshmen Chloe Bohlmann and Skylar Sidensol-Denero were alerted to an apparent intruder — initially described as a middle-aged man who had been in the co-ed bathroom for hours, staring out from behind the shower curtain — through a student messaging system. The two decided to approach the man and ask him to leave, they said. Inside the bathroom, Bohlmann encountered a “completely nude man,” standing with all of the sink faucets turned on, himself dripping wet.
“I basically told him … ‘You can’t be in here, this is completely illegal for you to be in here in this building with students, just completely naked, and that’s not OK,” Bohlmann said.
The girls first unsuccessfully sought out a resident assistant, then called campus security officers for whom they said they waited about 20 minutes for a response before someone else put in a 911 call to the UC Police Department around 9:30 p.m. In the interim, the man got dressed, packed up and ran out of the building, with Bohlmann giving chase down the stairs in her slippers for fear he would attempt to enter another of the dorm’s floors instead of leaving, she said. Police took Benny Estuardo Cruz-Cordon, listed in jail logs as a Covina resident, into custody on suspicion of trespassing at the dorm after locating him about 15 minutes later near a bus stop. He was released from Santa Cruz County Jail the same night.
According to UCSC spokesperson Scott Jason-Hernandez, Cruz-Cordon is not an enrolled student and campus police have responded to prior complaints of Cruz-Cordon trespassing on campus. As of Thursday, Cruz-Cordon had no listed criminal charges filed against him by the Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office.
“The residence hall has locks at both the entrance and on all the bathrooms and showers,” Hernandez-Jason wrote in an email responding to a Sentinel inquiry. “We are encouraging our residents to not let people follow them into locked buildings, to not prop open doors or interfere with the locks, and to call 911 if they have any safety concerns.”
Bohlmann and Sidensol-Denero agreed that their peers needed to be more cautious, no letting others into the dorm and bathrooms, but said they felt others would have taken the concern more seriously if they were aware of this incident. So, the two and several friends posted flyers describing their encounter and noting that the same man had been seen sleeping in the dorm’s hallways and even pushing open a propped-open dorm room door. The flyer urged anyone with information on the man to contact campus police at 831-459-2231 and “Do not let any strangers into your building! Speak up!”
Sidensol-Denero said that students sometimes keep the bathroom doors from locking with tape, which may be convenient for residents but also is troubling when students are letting outsiders into the building.
“I would want to know if somebody got into my building and if that’s something that we need to be more worried about,” Sidensol-Denero said. “I just want to make sure that everybody knows.”