Lori Edelman acted as many Penn State students do after hearing a knock on the door -- she invited the visitor in.
A man unfamiliar to her pushed the door open slightly, stuck his head inside and greeted her as she sat on the living room couch.
"Don't worry about anything. I just want to check for leaks," Edelman recalled the man saying.
The next day, Sept. 15, the State College Police Department charged this man, Matthew A. Maxwell, 27, with criminal trespass. A former maintenance employee in Edelman's building, The Graduate, 138 S. Atherton St., Maxwell was fired several months ago for breaking into apartments and stealing, according to court documents.
The showerhead in Edelman's apartment was faulty, and she said she assumed her realtors, GN Associates Realty, had sent a worker to fix it.
Maxwell, short, stocky and unshaven, appeared to walk toward the apartment's bathroom, Edelman said, but instead detoured into two bedrooms before entering.
"You girls should really lock your door," he warned before leaving. "This is our rowdiest building."
Court records indicate that Maxwell entered at least nine other apartments on the second floor of The Graduate that day.
Each time, police said he identified himself as a maintenance worker in search of water damage. Maxwell was charged after two other tenants identified him in a photo lineup.
Rattled by the intrusion, Edelman said she always locks her door now and checks that maintenance personnel are in uniform before allowing them in.
The owners of GN Associates Realty did not comment on the company's hiring practices before press time and other employees refused to comment.
However, a background check on Maxwell would have revealed that his recent string of apartment intrusions was not his first brush with the law: Court records show he was convicted of retail theft in 1998.
Other downtown apartment realtors did not respond to calls seeking comment about their background check practices. AW & Sons, The Apartment Store and McKinney Properties Inc. did not respond to more than a two-week period of repeated phone calls.
However, Mark Bigatel, owner of Associated Realty Property Management (ARPM), the office that leases rooms in buildings such as Penn Tower, The Legend and Beaver Plaza, said his company runs background checks on all prospective employees.
Applicants with a history of criminal activity are ruled out, he said.
In September 1991, a man who had worked as a janitor at an apartment building on 415 W. College Ave. raped a 21-year-old Penn State student living in the same complex.
Michael Powell, 36 at the time, entered the student's locked residence where police said he blindfolded her, forced her to perform oral sex on him, raped her twice and hit her over the head, according to court documents.
Police said there was no sign of forced entry.
Police searched for men with access to the apartment keys, and the investigation led to Powell, whose last day of employment at the building was nine days before the rape.
It is unclear who employed the man. A DNA analysis matched body fluid samples from Powell to those found on the victim. He eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of rape, one count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and one count of burglary
A background check may have also prevented the 1991 State College rape.
Powell was arrested in December 1982 on charges of rape and was released from the State Correctional Institution at Rockview five months prior to the incident.
Beyond the precautions taken during the hiring process, ARPM has its own security measures in place to ensure that maintenance workers' accessibility to keys is not abused, Bigatel said.
Keys are distributed to workers in the morning and collected and locked in the evenings, Bigatel said. Each key is marked "Do Not Duplicate" and State College businesses that make keys abide by this instruction.
"We know where our maintenance men are at all times," Bigatel said. "They're not going to be able to run to New Jersey and have a copy of the key made."
Penn State also runs background checks before hiring any faculty or staff members, which includes the Office of the Physical Plant employees who routinely perform maintenance on dorm rooms.
The procedure became mandatory in 2003 after it was discovered that a professor had been convicted of murdering three fishermen in Texas.
Three years ago, the Pennsylvania State Legislature grappled with the possibility of mandating background checks for all hotel employees with access to room keys.
At the forefront of the movement to get the proposed bill passed were Lin and Sol Toder -- a Mount Lebanon couple whose daughter, Nan, was bound to her hotel bed, strangled with her own pantyhose and bludgeoned to death with a machete in a Hampton Inn near Chicago in 1996.
The hotel where Nan Toder's murderer was employed didn't run background checks, The Associated Press reported. Doing so would have revealed past arrests for auto theft, criminal trespass, burglary and unlawful use of a weapon.
Testifying before legislators, Sol Toder told Nan's story and implored the representatives to consider the safety of their daughters or wives, Lin Toder said.
Hotel industry representatives led the opposition to the legislation, arguing that checks should be voluntary and that a requirement may prove too costly, Lin Toder said.
Criminal history reports on any adult resident in the state can be obtained through the Pennsylvania Access to the Criminal History system Web site, www.psp.state.pa.us/ patch, for $10.
The bill died within a few weeks.
The Toders, who continue to advocate for the legislation despite its failure, said the law should extend to any business that provides its workers with access to residency keys, including student housing.
"They're affordable and there's just no excuses," Toder said, "especially when it concerns someone's safety."
