Rapist Who Trespassed In Mather Sentenced

A 39-year-old convicted rapist arrested for trespassing in Mather House last month was sentenced to two years in a local house of corrections after he essentially pled guilty to all charges against him in Middlesex District Court on Thursday.

Ronald R. Vick, of Brighton, Mass., was arrested on the third floor of the Mather lowrise on Saturday, Oct. 15, after several Mather residents alerted the police of a suspicious individual wandering around the House. Police charged him with trespassing, breaking and entering in the daytime with the intent to commit theft, and failing to register as a sex offender.

A search of the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board (SORB) by The Crimson revealed that Vick had been convicted of rape in April 1991, and had an outstanding warrant against him because he had failed to register with SORB as a sex offender.

In court last Thursday, Vick admitted to sufficient facts—in effect, acknowledging that the Commonwealth has sufficient evidence to find him guilty and forgoing a trial—on all three counts with which he was charged, according to Middlesex District Attorney spokeswoman Emily LaGrassa.

Cambridge District Court Judge Severlin Singleton sentenced Vick to three concurrent sentences in a house of corrections: 30 days for his failure to register as a sex offender, two years for trespassing, and two years for breaking and entering in the daytime with the intent to commit a felony. The sentences will run concurrently, so he will only serve a total of two years, said LaGrassa. He will serve the time in the Billerica House of Correction, in Billerica, Mass.

Vick is classified by SORB as a Level 3 Sex Offender, which the SORB website defines as an individual for whom the “risk of reoffense is high and the degree of dangerousness posed to the public is such that a substantial public safety interest is served by active dissemination.”

The Crimson reported on Oct. 18 that on Saturday, Oct. 15, two Mather residents observed the 6’3”, 150-pound Vick acting suspiciously while on the third floor of Mather House, according to Harvard University Police Department Spokesman Steven G. Catalano.

David R. Bach ’07 said yesterday that Vick snuck into his suite through a common bathroom.

“He started looking around my roommate’s room, and all of a sudden he turned around when he realized there was somebody else present,” Bach said.

“I asked him what he was doing there, and he claimed to be fixing fire alarms. But I kept watching him, and he clearly wasn’t fixing the fire alarms,” Bach added.

Suspicious, Bach and his roommates decided to follow Vick as he left the room, and then confronted him.

“He then started picking stuff up, pretending to be a janitor,” Bach said. “His stories kept getting crossed.”

So the roommates distracted Vick with questions while someone called HUPD.

Alex J. Vannoni ’07 said that as they tried to keep Vick around until the police arrived, Vick was just “BS-ing them with weird answers.”

“He wasn’t physical at all,” Vannoni said. “He was just trying to quietly get out of there.”

Eventually, the police arrived, at which point they arrested him after checking him for outstanding warrants.

Bach said that Vick’s two-year sentence was reassuring, but that the incident illustrated the need for students to be careful and alert.

“I definitely feel safer now that this one known criminal is gone,” he said. “But we do still have to be aware of the fact that we live in a city.”

—Staff writer Reed B. Rayman can be reached at rrayman@fas.harvard.edu.