Eleven Temple University students shared news that a robber held them at gunpoint and inside their apartment complex. NBC10’s Fraces Wang reports live from North Philadelphia where she got to speak to the young college students and the girl who sent a life-saving message from her computer.
Nearly a dozen people, among them Temple University students, were woken up, forced into the basement of an off-campus house and robbed of credit cards, cellphones and a car during a Friday morning home invasion.
The incident happened along the 1300 block of North 15th Street around 6 a.m., Philadelphia police said.
Two men wearing hoodies and masks and armed with handguns entered the home where 11 young people -- a mix of men and woman between 20 to 22 years old -- were sleeping, police said. The gunmen then gathered the occupants in the basement and proceeded to rob them.
"Overall is was just a violating experience," one of the victims said while speaking to reporters outside their home.
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"I don't know how I'm going to be able to sleep here again," another woman said.
Some of the women -- all seniors -- who were robbed said that the men went room-to-room waking up some of them. They then made the women wake up the others.
The men spent about an hour in the home, going through the rooms of the women. The men joked with each other and acted casually during the robbery, the victims said.
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The women told NBC10 that the men were looking for drugs, but they didn't have any.
The robbers took credit and debit cards, cellphones and the keys to a 2015 silver Lincoln MKZ, police said. The residents said the robbers also took cash and smashed a TV.
Investigators said the thieves drove off in the Lincoln with Pennsylvania tag KMF-1560.
The women who were robbed said that the armed thieves made each of them one-by-one open up their phones and sign out of their iCloud and remove their passwords.
The women said they used laptops to contact loved ones to call 911 after being locked in the basement.
The women said the gate outside their home has been broken and the fix order only came in after Friday's robbery.
The area is outside of Temple's normal patrol area, according to a statement from the university in North Philadelphia.
Temple and police said none of the people in the home were injured.
"The most important thing is that no students were hurt or injured during this incident, which will continue to be investigated by the Philadelphia Police Department," Temple's statement to NBC10 said.
The university added: "The safety of the Temple community remains the university’s top priority."
The women said they heard of a similar incident happening to other students recently. They said to each other that this seemed to be their time.
"You go to college, and it's supposed to be a fun time when you can have fun with your friends and finally be away from home and have independence," Nina, a senior, said. “Not only to have someone invade your home and your privacy, but to be woken up out of sleep.. that kind of taints things.”
There are additional resources for people or communities that have endured gun violence in Philadelphia. Further information can be found here.
