In the last month, six students were arrested and charged with felonies, but despite the arrests police said they don’t see a trend.

“There is nothing in my numbers to see a spike in crime,” University Police Chief Jimmy Williamson said Monday in an interview. “A slight increase maybe, but until the end of the year it is hard to say.”

In the most recent case, University student Zachary Taylor Jones was arrested and charged Friday with open container, urinating in public, possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of less than one ounce of marijuana and felony possession of a Schedule IV drug (Xanax).

An officer saw Jones urinating near a car behind Georgia Theatre, holding a beer, police reported. Police saw that Jones had a marijuana pipe and a pill bottle.

The weekend before, junior Hayter Lamar Whitman was arrested and charged with felony possession of a Schedule IV drug (Xanax), misdemeanor possession of marijuana and underage possession of alcohol on King Avenue.

Police responded to a call that a residence door was open and found what looked like a gravity bong inside, according to the report. Police questioned Whitman outside and found a beer bottle and marijuana stems in his car. Xanax tablets were found in the ashtray.

“Felony crime is up throughout the whole nation and state. Economic conditions are causing

people to resort to crime to make ends meet,” Williamson said, but he did not explain the number of drug arrests.

On Oct. 16, student Charles Ronald Gill was arrested and charged with felony aggravated assault after stabbing roommate Ryan Zarnowski in the shoulder when Zarnowski tried to take a knife away from Gill.

Zarnowski told police he and Gill had been drinking at their apartment but Zarnowski did not give police any additional information. He declined to speak to The Red & Black Monday. Gill has since moved out of the apartment, the report states.

In another case, senior Robert Adam Kapfhamer was arrested and charged with felony criminal attempt at burglary on Sept. 25 when he tried to break into a police officer’s apartment.

“Students may think it is no big deal [to be arrested], but they can be charged with a crime that will affect them later in life,” Williamson said. “Some students have their records expunged. We have an average of 15 per year and the courts decide. We don’t see it frequently though.”

Students who were arrested 10 years ago call Williamson and “ask what to do about a past criminal record,” he said. “I tell them I don’t know how to fix it and I can’t rewrite the past. The best advice I can give them is to get an attorney.”

But for students who proclaim their innocence, the charges are devastating.

On Sept. 20, sophomore Jamie Leigh Momeyer was arrested for felony theft by taking after her roommate, Matthew Waldrop, told police she took $500 from him on Aug. 24.

“I just want to let everyone know I wasn’t even living at my apartment then,” Momeyer said Monday in a phone interview. “I had moved back home when this whole thing occurred.”

Momeyer said she is filing a lawsuit against Waldrop. “I can’t even describe how I felt because I have never really been in trouble, I’ve never been arrested and I’ve done well in school,” she said. “I felt horrible because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

Though the felony charges are serious, Williamson said the department only arrests a small percentage of total students.

“So it can’t be as prevalent as we might like to think,” he said. “We’re not arresting students in the thousands. We arrest roughly 3 to 6 percent of students.”