Sigma Alpha Epsilon At USC Upstate Got Busted By Police For Performing A Ritual In A Cemetery With Guns

If you were ever in Greek Life then you know that each fraternity and sorority has their own individual rituals that each member must go through prior to initiation, and if you were never in Greek Life, congratulations! You’ve learned something new today.

However, if you were to Google “Phi Mu rituals” you wouldn’t get any usable search results. Fraternity and sorority rituals are always kept secret, because…reasons that I don’t know. So that we can all feel special that no one else knows what we do? Because some of our rituals are really stupid and we don’t want people knowing that we chug fruit punch for an hour in the basement prior to initiation? No clue, but either way the only people who know the rituals are the ones who are in the frats/srats.

Except…now we know part of Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s (SAE) at the University of South Carolina Upstate, because they got busted by police while doing it.

Police last night broke up a “fraternal ritual” in a South Carolina cemetery, chasing 20 Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers and arresting one fraternity member ona weapons charge.

Cops converged on the Oakwood Cemetery in Spartanburg after receiving a tip that the University of South Carolina Upstate students “would be in the cemetery performing a fraternal ritual,” and that one man was carrying a firearm on his hip, according to a police report.

When cops questioned the SAE chapter president, he claimed that “the fraternity had come out to the cemetery to perform a ritual where they bond and talk.” The details of this “ritual” are not further described in the report.

Via Smoking Gun

Normally I’d be cynical and say something like “What, you can’t talk in the chapter house or something?” but the point of fraternity rituals is that they make each chapter unique from the next, so if you gotta go have a pow-wow in a cemetery to do that then more power to you…except for the kid with the gun.

Caleb Cooke, 21, was carrying an unlicensed Glock 9mm pistol loaded with 14 bullets and claimed he needed it “to protect his ‘brothers’ in his fraternity while they were out in the cemetery.” Barring the appearance of zombies and ghosts, if you chose a cemetery where you were expecting violent grave robbers to show up and murder you at some point then maybe you should’ve just picked someplace else to hold hands and sing Kumbaya.

Then again it was 8:45 on a Sunday, and I hear grave robbers take Sundays off.

[H/T The Smoking Gun, header image via Shutterstock]