Daytona Beach Shores -- An Embry Riddle University fraternity is under investigation for hazing after five pledges were arrested for trying to steal an alligator from a mini-golf course during "Hell Week." On April 17, Daytona Beach Shores police arrested the Sigma Alpha Epsilon pledges after several were caught on camera armed with sticks and tape and leaping into a pit packed full of small alligators.

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Initially, police released no evidence suggesting the stunt was related to fraternity hazing. But after Channel 9 discovered the five members arrested make up more than half the fraternity's spring pledge class, a university spokesman confirmed Friday the school is looking into the matter as hazing.

The attempted alligator theft was performed during a period in the pledge process known as "Hell Week," where pledges are required to perform bizarre and disgusting rituals, according to the chapter's former vice president, Kenneth Dechmerowski.

Dechmerowski described one ritual where pledges are forced to eat onions covered in some of the spiciest hot sauce money can buy. According to some estimates, the hot sauce used is up to 200 times hotter than a standard jalapeno pepper and half as hot as self-defense pepper spray. He provided Channel 9 photo evidence of the ritual being carried out in 2005. The photos showed pledges appearing extremely uncomfortable and vomiting into trash bags after taking a bite out of the onions dubbed "happy apples," after the hot sauce is applied.

"I would tell them, 'No, don't do it, you don't have to do it,'" Dechmerowski said. "And then they got mad at me."

Dechmerowski said he was voted out of his chapter in 2006 after he and his girlfriend, Sara O'Brien, filed an unrelated hazing report with school officials. Late last year, the two said they provided school officials with photo evidence of the "happy apple" ritual, but said school officials did nothing.

"They want to shove things under the rug," O'Brien said. "They don't want anyone to know how bad it is."

They said the school brought the embarrassment of having its students arrested on itself by creating an atmosphere where hazing goes unpunished and where fraternity brothers are always trying to take hazing stunts to the next level.

"It's the little things they get away with," Dechmerowski said. "And then it gets more and more and more."

Aside from promising to look into the matter further, school officials declined to further discuss the allegations with Channel 9. Phone calls placed to fraternity members asking for their side of the story were never returned.

The hazing investigation into SAE at Embry Riddle University comes about one year after the SAE chapter at the University of Central Florida was suspended from campus for hazing. Within the last three years, Sigma Phi Epsilon, Pi Kappa Phi and Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity chapters were also suspended from UCF for hazing violations.