TCU Police Chief Steve McGee said Wednesday that members of a fraternity left a bloody opossum carcass outside the door of another fraternity house Friday night but that the animal had not been harmed by the fraternity members.
Campus police have been investigating an incident in which members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity allegedly caught an opossum, tortured it, killed it and threw it at the door of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house.
McGee said the investigation uncovered a different version of the story.
“A fraternity member found a dead opossum behind a fraternity house and he threw it, another guy picked it up and then he threw it, and then at some point through all of the throwing around [the opossum] started leaking blood,” McGee said. “At some point somehow, opossum blood got smeared on a fraternity house’s outside door. The opossum wasn’t [killed], dismembered or anything like that.”
Earlier reports said that members of the SAE and Delt fraternities, which have neighboring houses, are the two fraternities involved, but McGee declined to name the fraternities.
A Delt fraternity member who wished to remain anonymous said SAE members caught an opossum last Wednesday, tortured it, killed it with a hammer and threw it at the Delt house last Friday night.
According to a statement from Delt President-Elect Logan Mims, a few Delt members saw other students have an “altercation with a small non-domesticated animal.” Mims did not identify those students as members of a fraternity.
“We are cooperating with TCU officials and have made ourselves available to them or any other authorities who desire our help in the matter,” Mims said in a statement.
SAE president Buddy Carruth denied the allegations.
Carruth wrote in an email, "My answer for you is no we do not have a statement to give regarding the incident. Why would we? Nothing happened."
He wrote that TCU 360 was "blowing the situation out of proportion" and that the brawl mentioned in some tweets never happened.
TCU Police were asked to open an investigation into the matter this morning by Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Kathy Cavins-Tull.
Cavins-Tull wrote in an email that she asked McGee to investigate if a crime was committed and to determine if the event was “an individual act or an act of an organization.”
Cavins-Tull also wrote that Fraternity and Sorority Life coordinator Molly Devine and FSL director Brooke Scogin have been meeting with both Delt and SAE chapter presidents to “ensure that the two organizations involved in this incident are learning how to deal with their differences in a civil way.”
Several people tweeted and posted on Facebook on Saturday that some SAE members smeared blood on their faces and threw a dead opossum at the door of the Delt fraternity house.
All of the social media posts found describe the two specific fraternities and a dead opossum.
Some of those posts have since been deleted. The authors of those posts declined to comment when contacted.