By Melissa Proulx, Staff writer

Kewei Chen, a former University of New Hampshire student, was found guilty of burglary, attempted burglary and invasion of privacy last Wednesday in Dover District Court.

Chen, who pleaded guilty to all three charges, will now serve three to six years in a New Hampshire state prison as a result.

According to a report from WMUR News 9, Chen admitted he was guilty of those charges in a negotiated plea. Additionally, Foster’s Daily Democrat reported that he must also complete a sex offender program.

According to a March 19 article from Foster’s, the burglary incidents occurred during the night of March 20, 2013. Chen, who had stolen a key to a Randall Hall dormitory room two nights prior, attempted to break into the room with the stolen key. After realizing the locks had been changed, he then tried to go through the window.

The resident, who was female, was able to escape the room when she heard Chen trying to come in through the window.

The invasion of privacy occurred in February of 2014. According to The New Hampshire articles from Friday, Feb. 28, knowledge of the invasion of privacy incidents arose when female students in Randall Hall reported that someone had tried to take videos of them showering.

One of several females who reported the incident to the UNH police department on Thursday, Feb. 27, had told UNH police that she had seen someone using a white iPhone with a “Despicable Me” sticker trying to take the videos and, at the time, had believed the suspect to be male.

According to an article about the sentencing hearing by WMUR on March 18, police had later found the phone fitting the description with two videos of women showering in Chen’s dorm room nearby.

These are not the only crimes that Chen was found guilty of, however. In October, he was also convicted of aggravated felonious sexual assault. 

The assault occurred in the fall of 2013, shortly after Chen had begun attending UNH. According to Foster’s, an unnamed female student had spent the night in Chen’s dorm room after locking herself out of her own. She woke up to find Chen sexually assaulting her, but did not report this crime until six months later.

According to WMUR, the female student said that she had decided to come forward after Chen became a suspect in the series of crimes that following winter.

“Within a very short period of time of arriving here in this country, he was committing crimes, felony-level offenses, and several of them,” Senior Assistant Strafford County Attorney Alysia Cassotis told WMUR in a March 18 interview.

Once he is released, Chen will then be deported back to China, where he is a native resident.

In the WMUR article, Chen’s lawyer, Caroline Brown, was said to have called him a young kid who made some tremendous mistakes, but feels remorseful for what he had done and the impact that it had. She had also said that he’s willing to serve his time and return back home.