Local police recently retrieved a four-foot-long piece of weaponry from a Stevens fraternity, igniting debate over how and for how long it had been in the organization’s possession.
On March 26, the Jersey City Bomb Squad, in coordination with Hoboken police and the university, removed from 530 Hudson St., the house of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, a “World War II-era ordnance,” according to a joint statement. The Hoboken Fire Department first identified the object during a “routine inspection” of the house. A Stevens spokeswoman later added that the object was considered an “antique,” though details about it remained murky.
In interviews with The Stute, several members of the fraternity helped shed light on the object’s history at the house, the events that took place on the day it was taken, and the plans to commemorate the history and meaning behind “Trixie the Torpedo,” the name given to the projectile by the fraternity.
“Hey, by the way, a bomb squad’s about to be rolling up, we have to evacuate.” This was the description from Dustin Conway, the group’s Chief Historian, of what he was told by another fraternity member on the unusual afternoon of March 26. “So I threw on shoes and went outside, which is not a very good idea without socks.”
Another member described the distant sound of sirens as the tip-off that not all was as usual. “I was just on Babbio patio, and I hear a bunch of sirens going off, and I check our personalized channel and see ‘Huh, there’s a bomb squad at our house,’” Clark Gabriel Laforteza, the group’s Deputy Chief Historian, described.
The police stayed at the house for several hours, which allowed for other fraternity members, such as freshman Connor McGinley, to notice the commotion. “I was walking to the house, and there were five other brothers standing outside, and they told me, ‘The cops came. They’re taking the bomb.’”
The source of all this commotion was a bomb, though one which turned out to be not much of a bomb at all. According to Conway, the object first came to the organization’s house in the 1960s and was, in fact, unable to explode. “It started off as a dummy missile that was being used in the Davis lab for testing that they threw out, and someone in our organization brought it back to the house.” The hollow object, never able to explode in the first place, was then filled with concrete. “We painted it, put our Greek letters on it, and from there it became a part of our signing ceremonies.”
Conway stressed that this was oral history and that the earliest documented evidence of the missile was from the 1990s, when a new member can be seen signing the object in a photo shown to The Stute.
This history was unfortunately unknown to the Hoboken fire department. According to Conway, while doing a routine inspection on March 25, the department expressed concern at the bomb residing in the house, where it lay propped up against the wall in the main hallway. When the police came the next day, some members described their annoyance at the lack of thought given towards their cherished charge. “I briefly talked to one guy sitting in the bomb squad car, asking him to send us a video of them exploding it, to which he then proceeded to laugh and drive away,” Conway stated.
The importance of the bomb to the brothers of Sigma Phi Epsilon has only grown since its departure. “It was a heavy loss for us,” Conway said, but the group is determined to remember it with the newly instituted “Ordnance Day.” “Ordnance Day is something we’re gonna do every year to remember the legacy of one of our oldest relics in this chapter,” Conway said, with many ideas.
Amid the turmoil of the bomb’s departure and the attention the missile received, there was one thing that the brothers of the New Jersey Alpha Chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon could agree on.
“It was really heavy.”
