UIC Student Robbed Blocks From Campus
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A University of Illinois at Chicago student was robbed at gunpoint several blocks west of the main campus this week.
Around 9:18 p.m. Thursday, the female student was walking north on Oakley Boulevard from Harrison Street, when she was approached by a man who took out a handgun and demanded her cell phone and messenger bag, UIC police said.
The robber fled north on Oakley Boulevard. and the student was not injured. The messenger bag was later recovered by police on Van Buren Street.
The suspect was described as an African-American man 20 to 25, 5-foot-9 with a dark complexion and short black hair. He was wearing a black T-shir and black shorts, and was armed with a blue handgun.
UIC Police are warning students to do as armed robbers say and give them what they want, as the victim did in this case.
The crime scene is about seven blocks west of the main UIC quadrangle, and about a block south of the Eisenhower Expressway. The block of Oakley Boulevard where the robbery happened is lined with new-construction housing on one side, and the campus of UIC's Chicago Technology Park on the other.
UIC saw a spate of student robberies earlier this year, some of them close to the main campus.
On a Tuesday evening in April, a male student was robbed and hit in the head in the 800 block of South Green Street in Greektown. About four days later, another male student was robbed in the 1400 block of South Loomis Street by a group of men, one of whom put a gun to his head.
The robber in the latest incident remains at large. Anyone with information should call UIC Police at (312) 996-2830.
The Sun-Times Media Wire contributed to this report.
