BETHLEHEM, Pa. – As Lehigh University students prepared for final exams this week, they found themselves grappling with the news that the sophomore class president had been arrested for allegedly robbing a bank.
“I didn’t believe it when I first heard it,” Kathryn Susman, an 18-year-old freshman engineering student from Hereford, Md., said Monday.
The robbery occurred Friday afternoon. Authorities said Greg Hogan, 19, handed a note to a teller at a Wachovia Bank branch, saying he had a gun and wanted money.
Hogan was picked up at his fraternity house later that evening and charged with robbery, theft by unlawful taking and receiving stolen property.
Police said he got away with $2,871.
One of his frat brothers, Patrick Thornton, described Hogan as “very energetic,” the sort of student who would cheer on the college football team wearing body paint.
“It’s by far the most interesting story we’ve ever encountered here,” Thornton added.
The university’s student Senate president, Kip Wallen, drove Hogan to the bank, but had no idea that Hogan allegedly intended to rob it, said Wallen’s lawyer, Karl Longenbach. Wallen has not been charged.
Police told The Morning Call of Allentown that Hogan admitted robbing the bank. He was released Saturday after posting $100,000 bond, a prison spokesman said. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for Jan. 31.
Hogan graduated in 2004 from the University School, a private school in the upscale Cleveland suburb of Hunting Valley. His father, the Rev. Gregory Hogan, is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Barberton in Barberton, Ohio, and has served as a city councilman in Seven Hills, Ohio.
Hogan also was a former fraternity rush chairman and a cellist in the university’s orchestra.
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