Student is accused in theft of Nobel medal
UC Berkeley authorities believe they have solved the mystery of the missing Nobel Prize medal.
Campus police, acting on a tip provided by a student, arrested a senior biology major, Ian Michael Sanchez, on suspicion of grand theft Wednesday in last week’s disappearance of the 1939 Nobel medal won by nuclear physicist Ernest O. Lawrence.
For the record:
12:00 a.m. March 12, 2007 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Monday March 12, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 42 words Type of Material: Correction
Nobel medal theft: In some editions of Thursday’s California section, an article about the theft of a Nobel medal identified Linda Schneider of UC Berkeley as deputy director of the Lawrence Hall of Science. She is the marketing director for the hall.
University police allege that Sanchez used a key to take the 23-karat-gold award from a locked display case at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science. The hall is a museum in the Berkeley Hills, named after the late scientist, where the 22-year-old student from Modesto was an employee.
According to investigators, Sanchez said he took the award on a whim. Linda Schneider, deputy director of the hall, said Sanchez had been placed on “investigatory leave” from UC Berkeley.
The grand theft charge on which he was booked ordinarily carries a prison sentence of up to three years.
The medal was returned to campus Wednesday, much to the relief of university officials and the scientist’s survivors.
The theft “was definitely a shock, and I’m very glad they got it back,” said Margaret Lawrence Norman, 70, of Long Beach, the scientist’s second-eldest child. “I’m praying that they will be able to protect it and have something secure enough that this could never happen again.”
Schneider said UC Berkeley was planning to put the medal in a more secure setting when it is returned to Lawrence Hall in time for the 40th commemoration of the facility in May 2008.
Along with a sense of relief, she said, there is “genuine sadness” that the suspect was an employee.
“People have come up to me and said, ‘I’m just devastated to hear this,’ ” Schneider said.
Schneider said she believed that Lawrence’s medal was the only such award housed at UC Berkeley, whose faculty members have won 20 Nobel Prizes. Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron atom-smashing device, was the first of the winners.
Melted down, Schneider said, the medal is worth $4,200, but its actual value is “incalculable.”
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