(Photo courtesy of Utah's Hogle Zoo) Carved reusable pumpkins were broken at Utah's Hogle Zoo on Saturday, Oct. 17, 2020, after members of the Sigma Chi fraternity at the University of Utah visited the BooLights exhibit.
A fraternity’s Saturday night visit to Utah’s Hogle Zoo turned to vandalism and an alleged threat with a knife, zoo officials said.
According to a description posted Monday morning on the zoo’s Facebook page, members of the University of Utah’s Sigma Chi fraternity bought 150 tickets to the zoo’s BooLights event — a socially distanced Halloween-themed display of colored lights. The buyers took every available spot for that particular time slot.
In the parking lot, according to zoo officials, the students drank alcohol, and smashed bottles and cans. Inside the zoo, officials wrote in the Facebook post, they broke wooden fencing and punched out faces of carved reusable pumpkins.
Someone “flashed a pocketknife toward our carousel operator, forcing security to close the event one hour early,” the post said.
Representatives of the Sigma Chi fraternity and the university contacted the zoo Monday morning, as did other fraternities, zoo officials said in an updated post.
That updated post from the zoo noted that, after the first post Monday morning, “things got a little heated rather quickly.”
Zoo officials said they posted images of the damage from the zoo, as well as social media images from students they believe attended Saturday night, “in the hopes of discouraging future behavior, but also to find families who may have witnessed something and/or had their evenings cut short.”
The initial post, however, also led “to people tracking down students on social media and sending mean messages, even death threats.” The photos from the initial post were removed, and zoo officials apologized “to anyone inadvertently implicated.”
The University of Utah, on its Twitter feed, said it “is working with the leadership of the chapter as well as representatives of the national Sigma Chi organization to investigate. … We take these matters very seriously and are working to make sure those responsible are held accountable.”
The Sigma Chi chapter posted a statement on its Facebook page Monday, saying, “We are extremely disappointed in what has occurred on Saturday night. … We are doing everything in our power to investigate any misconduct that has taken place. We will make sure that those found responsible will be held accountable for their actions.”
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