Fraternity breaking and entering vandals remain unknown

Two UNC fraternity houses on Cameron Avenue have been vandalized in the past month — and police don’t know who is behind the incidents.

On Jan. 14, five windows of the Chi Psi fraternity house at 321 W. Cameron Ave. were broken around 5 a.m., according to a Chapel Hill police report.

Sgt. Josh Mecimore, spokesman for the Chapel Hill Police Department, said it appeared that rocks were thrown into the fraternity house’s windows.

On Sunday morning, the front driver’s side window of a vehicle in the parking lot of the Sigma Phi Epsilon house at 207 W. Cameron Ave. was shattered between 1:10 a.m. and 10:31 a.m., according to a Chapel Hill police report.

Later that afternoon, a rock was thrown into a window at the house after Sigma Phi Epsilon member David Stewart got into a dispute with a group of people in the house’s front yard.

Mecimore said Stewart reported that a group of about 20 people were yelling at him, and he asked them to leave the premises.

Mecimore said someone in the group threw a book at Stewart, and someone threw a rock into one of the house’s windows.

He said witnesses told police the group left the area via Pittsboro Street and headed toward the FedEx Global Education Center.

The presidents of Sigma Phi Epsilon and Chi Psi declined to comment on the incidents.

Interfraternity Council President Peter Blumberg also declined to comment on details of the vandalism.

“Obviously I think that random acts of violence against anyone are bad,” he said.

“I hate to see this happen to anyone, whether they’re Greek or not.”

The police have no reason to believe the three incidences were related, Mecimore said.

He said police have exhausted all leads and are no longer investigating the incidents.

On Jan. 23, a blog post was published on the anarchist blog War on Society claiming responsibility for the Jan. 14 vandalism incident.

The blog said out of UNC’s fraternities, the Chi Psi house was chosen at random to be vandalized.

“We did this for anyone who has ever been afraid to walk the streets of this town because of harassment for their body, gender or sexuality,” the post said.

“All fraternities are sites of conscious self-organization for patriarchal power and the homophobia that supports it.”

Mecimore said the police department deals with a handful of cases each year in which things are thrown into or out of fraternity windows.

He said most of these cases are pranks.

“It’s not terribly uncommon for us to have one fraternity damaged by another,” Mecimore said.

“There’s no indication that that’s the case here, but that’s certainly something we’ve seen in the past.”

Contact the desk editor at city@dailytarheel.com.