MCALLEN, Texas — A fraternity initiation gone wrong resulted in law enforcement officers and college students having a 45 minute standoff at a ranch in the small border city of Alton. The standoff ended with some embarrassed students receiving misdemeanor charges for disturbing the peace and the fraternity being suspended by the university.
Alton Police responded to a ranch on the 1400 block of Glasscock Road to calls of shots fired. When officers arrived they heard three or four gunshots, The Monitor reported.
The officers sought cover and called for backup. Various other agencies responded to the scene including Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Deputies, Texas State Troopers and one of their helicopters.
According to the The Monitor, authorities used loudspeakers to talk to the individuals inside of the property to get them to come come out. After 45 minutes, authorities went into the ranch and detained 54 alleged college students who were inside the ranch attending a fraternity party. The college students, who were all between the ages of 19-24, claimed to be part of the Kappa Sigma fraternity at the University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Four of the students reportedly told authorities that they had fired the shots in connection to an initiation ritual. Authorities seized two rifles and a shotgun.
The local newspaper also reported that UTRGV has begun their own investigation and sent a cease and desist letter to the fraternity.
The area around Alton, where the standoff took place, has historically been used by human smugglers an drug traffickers to set up stash houses as part of their business models. As Breitbart Texas previously reported, the high trafficking of illicit goods and persons has resulted violent confrontations among rival groups as well as in regular police chases and stash house raids by authorities.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.