Five people, including three University Book Center employees, have been charged with stealing thousands of dollars worth of textbooks from the Stamp Student Union’s bookstore, police said.

Plainclothes University Police officers were monitoring the College Avenue BookHolders store last week – hoping to catch another person believed to have stolen from the UBC – when they saw two men loading textbooks from the trunk of their car into bags across the street, University Police Spokesman Paul Dillon said.

The officers stopped the men as they started to take their bags into BookHolders. The men, Aaron Woodfork, 27, of Greenbelt, and Vernon Brewer, 28, of Hyattsville, told the officers that the books had been stolen by UBC employees and given to them to resell, Dillon said.

The suspects then identified three UBC employees who they said worked with them: Jeremy Conway, 21, of College Park; Robert Hawkins, 30, of College Park; and Lashawn Merryweather, 24, of Hyattsville.

Dillon said the five were suspected of stealing about $100,000 worth of textbooks from the UBC, though he added that was only a rough estimate. Police still need to determine how long the thefts had been going on to get a better estimate of the total losses, he said.

UBC Manager Mike Gore said the three employees implicated in the theft have been fired, but he declined to provide details on how long they had worked there or what jobs they held.

Dillon said it is a common practice for University Police to watch the BookHolders store when books are reported stolen from the campus. He said the other two major College Park textbook stores – the UBC and the Maryland Book Exchange – require photo ID to sell books, which may make them less appealing to criminals.

BookHolders CEO John Verde said his store also began checking IDs earlier this year in response to police requests, and he added that his employees are also required to photocopy the IDs of any customer with an especially large quantity of books.

“I don’t see that [criminals are] coming down to us any more than anyone else,” Verde said. “Obviously we don’t want anyone bringing in theft; it’s not productive.”

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