As if studying weren’t crappy enough.
A 32-year-old Rockville man was banned from McKeldin Library last week after he was accused of repeatedly defecating on the floor of the building’s fourth-floor bathroom over a period of several months, according to University Police spokesman Paul Dillon.
Library staff called police last Monday afternoon when they discovered the latest deposit, and one employee provided a description of a man who had just left the bathroom, Dillon said.
A man matching that description returned to McKeldin the following morning, and police caught up to him while he was using a computer on the fourth floor, Dillon said. He denied involvement in “the bathroom incident” but brought up the matter before officers could ask him about it, Dillon added.
Although the matter was investigated by police, the man was not charged witha crime because, as Dillon wrote in an e-mail, “no one actually saw him defecate on the floor.”
The man — whom police would not identify, except to say he was not affiliated with the university — is now in a “large file” of people banned from the campus or portions of the campus.
While it’s not unusual for students — such as those who chronically cause problems at sporting events — to be forbidden from specific locations such as Comcast Center, non-students are typically banned from the entire campus.
Dillon wouldn’t say why the serial defecator was banned only from McKeldin even though the man was suspected of multiple incidents dating back to March, saying only that the parameters of campus bans are at the discretion of the officers involved.
He added that additional security measures — gates and ID checks, for example — would counteract the goals of a university that prides itself on being open to the community.
“That’s not the nature of this campus,” Dillon said. “There’s been some challenges, but we are a public institution open to the public.”
The defecator isn’t the first unusual character to strike McKeldin. In October 2008, a student was sexually assualted in the first-floor reference stacks by a man who masturbated on her.
Nonetheless, Eric Bartheld, director of the library dean’s office, agreed with Dillon, adding that though the feces had been discovered multiple times in June alone, it comes with the territory.
“These things are unpleasant, but they occasionally happen in public buildings,” Bartheld said. “We get all kinds of people here. … We do our best to keep it clean and safe.”
But if the university really wanted safe, clean bathrooms, senior government and politics major Anna Heffron said, it could be taking more drastic steps to keep away people such as the McKeldin defecator.
“That’s gross,” Heffron said of the McKeldin incident. “If he’s not a student, it should probably be the whole campus.”
Summer student Katie Driver wasn’t concerned — just confused.
“It’s not exactly polite to just go do that,” Driver said. “What’s the point? Toilet. Right. There.”
rabdill at umdbk dot com
