They Ruled Out Everything

I am a resident assistant at my college. The school is VERY particular about alcohol violations, and there is a specific way you have to handle them. For example, if we suspect that a resident is drinking in the hall, we aren’t allowed to do anything unless we physically see them drinking it. There are lots of other rules as well that are pretty common sense, such as no pets other than fish or no open flames. This group somehow managed to break almost all of them.

I was the RA on call, meaning that if there was a problem, then I was the first point of contact. I was sitting at the front desk, chatting with another RA, when she got a text from a friend who lives in the building. The friend saw some girls drinking in their room, and being loud and obnoxious. My coworker told me to go up and check on them.

When I got to the room, I noticed several things wrong. First of all, their door was wide open, so I could see right into the room. The dorms consisted of two bedrooms connected by a common area, and the door opened directly into the common area. It was a total mess, which isn’t a crime in and of itself, but there were alcohol bottles everywhere, and no residents to be seen, though I could hear them talking in another room. I knocked on the door, and one of the girls came into the common area. I informed her that she wasn’t allowed to have any alcohol bottles in her room. She insisted that it was allowed because they were just for decoration, and I told her that it was still against the rules. (You couldn’t have any alcohol or drug apparatus, even if it was completely empty and strictly decor).

At that point I called my supervisor, who showed up some time later with two Public Safety officers. Even though what we could see was restricted to the common area, the officers had to search the whole suite, just in case. While they started looking, my supervisor gathered all the girls in the common area and started to document their IDs. The whole time, they were extremely belligerent and disrespectful, and kept insisting that she had no “right” to do this.

It turns out, the situation was much more than a few empty wine bottles. The officers found several half-empty beer bottles, a pipe, and a bong WITH some weed still inside. Upon further inspection, my supervisor found a cage, out in regular view, containing several mice- definitely not an approved pet. While I was standing there waiting for them to finish, I looked over and noticed several open candles on a table as well. The cherry on the cake? They’d taken one of the floor signs, which had fallen from its place next to the stairwell, and hung it on the wall as decoration. Aside from being a rather tacky addition, it was also blatant theft of school property.

In the end, the girls were written up and given a court date. They were livid, but I had zero sympathy for them.