Residents of the Gamma Phi Beta house awoke early Thursday morning to a call for alarm after a former Aramark employee gained entrance to the house late Wednesday night.

A resident discovered the man wandering around the second floor, and after questioning him for a few minutes, he fled.

SMU Police later found the man, described by eyewitnesses as a 19 to 20-year-old Hispanic wearing a hooded gray sweatshirt and baggy khakis, walking down the 3100 block of Daniel Street.

Police released the man after questioning him about the incident as well as some jewelry one of the residents reported she was missing.

He told police that one of the residents had let him into the house to get a soda.

“We didn’t put out a crime alert, because we’re not sure that a crime has occurred,” Capt. Mike Snellgrove of the SMU Police Department said.

Aramark provides food service staff to much of the campus including the faculty club, located next to the sorority house.

It is not clear whether the SMU ID the man showed to residents was his own or another employee’s.

“Our normal procedure is to take all uniforms, IDs and bus passes from our employees on their last day,” said Ed Devoid, director of Dining Services.

Although house rules prohibit visitors from entering the house unescorted and bar men from the house’s upper floors, if the man was let in by a resident and police can find no evidence to suggest he is responsible for the missing jewelry, he will not face charges.

However, reports pieced together by the sorority sisters suggest that the man may have been in the house unaccompanied for over an hour.

Senior Emily Davis reported seeing a man flit past her doorway. At the time, she didn’t think anything of it; figuring that someone’s boyfriend was just breaking the rules.

Soon after, first-year Kristin Becker noticed suspicious activity while taking a shower.

“Our shower doors are made of fogged glass, and every time I turned around I thought I saw something moving,” she said.

At first, she thought nothing of it.

Living in a house with other girls, it’s not uncommon to see people moving around in the bathroom, she said.

“But I thought I noticed someone very close up to the glass, and then every time I turned around, he would dart behind where my robe was hanging,” Becker said. “Finally one of the other girls came in, and I didn’t see anything else.”

Just before midnight Thursday morning, sophomore Emily Babb turned off the light in her room and climbed into bed when she remembered she hadn’t brushed her teeth. As she stepped out of the room, she noticed the man standing in the middle of the hallway.

“I just stared at him and asked, ‘Can I help you,'” she said.

The man told Babb that his name was Carlos and that he was looking for quarters to use in the soda machine downstairs because it ate the ones he had put in already. He flashed her an SMU ID card.

When she asked him who he was with, he reported that a girl downstairs wearing jeans had let him in.

“At first I didn’t think it was totally unreasonable because our cooks sometimes let staff members from the faculty club in to get a drink,” she said. “But they have all been women.”

Babb escorted the man downstairs and gave him 50 cents to buy a soda.

“I started to get suspicious when the Coke came out without a problem,” Babb said. “I asked to see his ID card again.”

As the man pulled the card out this time, Babb noticed that the name on the card said Juan. When she confronted him, he told her that his name was really Juan Carlos. She does not remember the last name on the card.

When she tried to take the card from him to view it more closely, the man ran out the door.

Babb immediately roused the house to make sure that everyone was OK and nothing had been taken.

“My first concern was for my girls,” Babb said.

While they waited for the police to arrive, the sorority sisters begin to fill in the details.

Davis and Becker realized the man that they thought they had seen earlier was probably the same man Babb had encountered.

Junior Lauren Bradley, who said that she had been the only one downstairs during the period, reported that she hadn’t let anyone into the house and hadn’t seen anyone come through the front door.

Sophomore Margaret Sawyer, who arrived home later, reported that her television had been left on, her personal items had been shifted around and that some of her jewelry was missing.

The police have opened a burglary investigation, but as of Thursday no arrests were made.

“I still feel safe in the house,” Becker said, “but now you have to always be thinking that someone could get in – and not just in the Gamma Phi house, but in every house.”