UFPD officers arrested a student during a history lecture Wednesday, pulling him from a class at Keene-Flint Hall in connection with a string of TV thefts from campus buildings and student apartment complexes.
The student, 29-year-old Tyler Anthony Brown, is facing two felony charges for burglary and grand theft, two misdemeanor charges for resisting officers and one misdemeanor charge for theft. According to UF spokesperson Cynthia Roldan, Brown is also being charged with evading a previous arrest attempt on Tuesday.
Brown couldn’t be reached for comment. Alachua County Jail allows inmates to talk with reporters only with written permission from their lawyer and approval from a senior jail official. Brown hasn’t been assigned a public defender or retained a private lawyer, according to court records.
UF history professor Mitchell Hart, who teaches Brown, said three UFPD officers were waiting outside his classroom at Keene-Flint Hall before his class began Wednesday afternoon.
Shortly after Hart started lecturing, one officer entered the classroom and asked for Brown to excuse himself from class. After Brown left the room, Hart said his students heard an “enormous crash and yelling,” adding that officers “slammed” Brown to the floor.
“You just kept hearing, ‘don't resist, don't resist, stop resisting,’” Hart said.
From the classroom window, Brown’s classmates could see officers escorting him to a police vehicle. Hart, who has taught at UF for over 20 years, said he’d never seen anything like the incident.
A video posted to the app Yik Yak on Wednesday showed multiple UFPD officers and a detective handcuffing Brown on the hallway floor of Keene-Flint Hall.
According to an arrest affidavit filed by Gainesville Police Department in August, Brown allegedly stole two TVs from the UF Computer Science and Engineering Building.
Two months earlier, Alachua County Sheriff’s Office arrested Brown on a felony grand theft charge. According to a sworn complaint, Brown stole a 85-inch TV from Midtown Apartments, was illegally occupying one of the complex’s units and nonviolently resisted an officer. He failed to appear in court following a summons last July.
Also in May, Brown was arrested for trespassing a Wawa at 1614 W University Ave, according to an arrest form filed by Gainesville Police Department. The business trespassed Brown from the property days before.
Court records show that Brown had no other local criminal history except for two dropped charges of driving without a valid license.
UFPD trespassed Brown from campus Wednesday, barring him from all UF properties for three years.
Contact Vera Lucia Pappaterra at vpappaterra@alligator.org. Follow her on X @veralupap.
Vera Lucia Pappaterra is the enterprise race and equity reporter and a second-year journalism major. She has previously worked on the university desk as the university general assignment reporter. In her free time, she enjoys deadlifting 155 lbs. and telling everyone about it.
