The Associated Press Michael Polanger,
20, is escorted by an Orinda police officer after he was arrested
Thursday.
By Chris Goodmacher and Robert
Salonga
Daily Bruin Contributors
Due to efforts by university police, authorities apprehended a
kidnapping suspect in Northern California on Thursday.
Santa Cruz police arrested Michael D. Polanger, 20, a native of
Orinda, Calif., after they found him with a 16-year-old girl, also
from Orinda, in a car near UC Santa Cruz.
The girl was found unharmed.
Polanger, a UC Davis student who could not be reached for
comment, had allegedly been harassing the girl for the past two
years. Around 1 a.m. Thursday, he entered her home through a patio
door leading directly to her room.
He then woke her parents up and forced them at gunpoint to lie
on the floor while he fled with the girl.
Orinda police called UCPD after receiving a tip that Polanger
had connections to students at UCLA.
“We tried to get these students to brainstorm as to where
he could possibly be,” said Nancy Greenstein, director of
police community services for UCPD.
A month prior to the kidnapping, Polanger had been staying with
various friends in residence halls.
“About a month ago he came down, stayed with me and in my
friends’ dorms,” said Max Meaker, a first-year
microbiology and molecular genetics student.
“He said he would stay a week or two, it ended up he
stayed a month,” he continued.
Meaker, who went to the same high school as Polanger and lived
in the same neighborhood, said he could not believe his
friend’s actions.
“He was a teddy bear ““ soft, friendly ““ he
doesn’t impose,” Meaker said.
He said Polanger wanted to get a job and apartment, go to
college and start fresh.
“He was suffering from depression at Davis and he wanted
to change his location; he thought it would allow him to leave his
issues behind,” Meaker said.
Orinda police said Polanger was under psychiatric care and may
have stopped taking his medication.
At UCLA, Polanger moved from dorm to dorm, staying with
friends.
“He seemed very nice. I heard he was highly intelligent,
willing to do stuff and he had a car,” said Wilson Tham, a
first-year computer science student with whom Polanger stayed for a
few days.
“But then he became creepy,” he added.
According to Tham, Polanger turned his focus from starting over
to an increased interest in women.
“His world was focused on women,” he said.
His behavior eventually led his friends to try and get him to
leave.
“I told him to leave; I was frustrated with the fact that
he lied about what he was going to do,” Meaker said.
“He wasn’t trying to go to college.
“I told my friends not to let him in their rooms,”
he added.
The day after he left UCLA, Polanger drove directly to
Orinda.
Meaker received a call from Polanger, who lied and said he was
at a hostel in Venice at the time.
Early the next morning, the kidnapping was reported, prompting
UCPD to interview Polanger’s acquaintances at UCLA.
“I told them about a friend at Santa Cruz; he stayed there
on the way down here. That was just a wild guess,” Meaker
said.
UCPD contacted UC Santa Cruz and confirmed this friend was a
student there with an off-campus residence. Representatives at UCSC
called the police and alerted them of the possibility of
Polanger’s presence there.
Police arrived at the residence around 7 a.m. Thursday and found
Polanger and the girl in a car nearby.
Polanger will be arraigned in court today.