Orem » The case of the missing college newspapers is closed, mere hours before a formal investigation was set to begin.
The culprits? Two women who said they needed the papers for a youth-group project.
Brent Sumner, adviser to the weekly UVU Review at Utah Valley University, said the women came to his office Monday morning and confessed taking up to 700 copies of the March 23 edition off racks around campus late Wednesday night. He said the women, who were not UVU students, wanted the paper for a project and not to protest the paper's content.
"I've been here five years. I cannot tell you the feeling of walking through the [Liberal Arts] building and seeing the racks empty," Sumner said.
The campus police were just starting to fire up an investigation; a reward was scheduled to be offered Monday afternoon for information.
The paper's response: It won't press charges, but the women will have to write a letter apologizing for the theft and explain why they did it.
Jack Jared Waters, the paper's outgoing editor, said the paper may publish the letter.
"It would have been difficult to be forgiving if they had waited [to come in]," Waters said.
When he first heard about the theft, Waters thought it was an attempt to stifle the paper. He said the only controversial items in the March 23 edition were a letter criticizing the appointment of Matthew Holland as UVU's new president and an editorial calling for reforming the student-government election process.
Those articles were reprinted in Monday's edition, along with an opinion piece headlined "We won't be silenced."
"Aside from the obvious allegations and legal implications of theft, a much greater crime was committed against the student body of Utah Valley University," Waters and Editor-at-Large Jennie Nichols wrote. "The ideals of free expression and marketplace of ideas were taken away from them."
Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Virginia-based Student Press Law Center, remains skeptical about the reason the papers were taken. But he was glad to see that the case was resolved quickly.
"It's about as happy an ending as you can have," LoMonte said.
It's not the first time the UVU paper has been stolen. In the 1990s, hundreds of copies disappeared. A campus employee later confessed to taking the papers to use in a home painting project.
