By Ben Suazo, Assistant News Editor
Ian Stoneking said he was coming back to his room in Vander Poel on Sunday, Oct. 9, when he heard a student say to an R.A. that she and her friend found cockroaches on the fourteenth floor.
“That night I’m laying in bed, my lights are off, and I saw a black spot on the wall,” he said. “Then it started moving. It was, in fact, a large cockroach.”
Stoneking, a junior, said he chased the bug but lost it under another person’s door—”I felt really bad [for that resident],” he said—and spent the remainder of the night in his girlfriend’s room, at Liberty Hall.
“If I had not heard earlier that day [about the possibility of cockroaches]…I would’ve honestly felt like a dirty, disgusting person,” he said. After the incident, Stoneking cleaned the food from his room and threw out an exposed toothbrush as a precaution.
Stoneking told an R.A., but never called the Office of Residential Programs about his sighting. ResProg, meanwhile, is aware of only a few reports of cockroaches from just three towers. None of the reported cockroaches have been confirmed.
“We treat everything seriously,” said Jean Smith, Associate Director of Residential Programs for Operations. Smith explained that the University is required to respond to a resident’s pest concern within two hours of receiving a complaint. “We immediately call the Plant Department, no matter what [the concern] is.”
Dom Lavin is director of Campus Operations in the Plant Department. He explained that in Vander Poel Hall, the University has had and has responded to one alleged cockroach sighting, which was on the fourteenth floor. The University has a contract with Assured Environments, a New York-based pest control company, and Lavin says the company’s pest control responses have been reliable.
“They work closely with our managers,” said Lavin. “They’re excellent.”
In the case of Calie Donnelly, the Vander Poel junior who lodged an official complaint this week, Assured Environments worked in her room while she was in class and left a note which said the room had been “secured” by an exterminator. Donnelly said she saw a roach this Sunday night but didn’t call maintenance until 9 a.m. the next morning.
“Around 2 a.m. I started eating food in my room,” Donnelly said in an email. “Let me say I keep my room extremely clean and tidy, I never leave food opened, I have a secured plastic bin where most of my food is kept and is already enclosed by their packaging. I got up to walk around and that’s when I saw the giant cockroach. I flipped out. It was crawling all over my covers and was plain nasty.”
When a student calls in a roach complaint, Lavin said that his department leaves a scented glue trap and monitors it to confirm a roach infestation. In addition, a gel product of low toxicity is used in any cracks along the floor and walls that does not kill the bug immediately. The roach spreads the gel to other roaches it rubs against and an infestation can be quickly exterminated. Lavin emphasizes, however, that the University “hasn’t had a confirmed case in years,” and that this year’s glue traps have been empty.
Smith and Lavin suggested that if there is an isolated cockroach, the bug could have been brought in by a student from home or from a store.
“You never know what’s in the bottom of a box. It could just be a stowaway,” Smith said.
Lavin agreed: “In shopping stores, you can go home and a roach could get a ride in your shopping bag.”
As for Stoneking and Donnelly, the Vander Poel residents continue to insist that what they saw were cockroaches. Donnelly said that she searched for “American cockroach” on Google and immediately recognized the images.
“I never heard of these bug issues until this semester,” she said. “Why all of a sudden are cockroaches coming into our dorms?”
If you believe there is a pest in your room, you should call ResProg x3-6930 or the Physical Plant Department x3-6619 during the day, and Public Safety x3-6606 after hours.

Ian Stoneking snapped a photo of this bug in his room in Vander Poel Hall. Stoneking alleges it is a cockroach, but ResProg and Campus Operations say they haven’t confirmed roaches. (Ian Stoneking/The Chronicle)