One of the fatalities of the April 27 tornado was Marcus Smith, a member of the Sigma Pi fraternity at the University of Alabama.

In the days that followed the storm, Smith’s pledge brother, Chris Flynn, received a phone call about Smith’s death.

“I knew that everything had changed when the city I had lived in the for the last three years had been completely devastated, but I kept hoping that it would end there, that I wouldn’t lose anybody really close to me,” Flynn said. “When I got the call from our former president [about Marcus], I couldn’t believe it – everything just kind of stopped.

“The first thing I could think to do was to send out a chapter email and suggest things to do for his family, because I can’t imagine what they were going through at the time,” said Flynn, a senior majoring in economics and history.

However, consoling his family wasn’t enough for members of the Sigma Pi chapters at West Alabama and Auburn. They wanted to support Alabama’s chapter as true brothers and decided to create a plaque in honor of Smith and present it to Alabama’s chapter with a dedication ceremony.

That ceremony was held this past weekend at the Sigma Pi house in Tuscaloosa. The plaque was presented at that time from the Auburn chapter’s former president, Allen Stroud, to the Alabama chapter’s current president, Jacob Adrian.

“We pray for Marcus’s family through the healing process and extend all of our thoughts to them,” Stroud said, leading the group in prayer on Sunday. “We thank you for this occasion and gather here today in his honor.”

Stroud was first contacted by Sigma Pi at West Alabama a week after the tornado and asked if he would be interested in participating in this gesture to honor Smith. After Stroud agreed, the designing process of the plaque began. Dylan Cooper from West Alabama came up with the design, but the design wasn’t initially Cooper’s first priority.

“I worked on it for a little while and then decided it was time I do more than just sit there and design a plaque,” Cooper said. “So, all the brothers from Livingston [West Alabama] decided to drive to Tuscaloosa and help with the cleanup.”

Brothers from West Alabama and Auburn were in Tuscaloosa a few days after the tornado, volunteering and helping out wherever they could. Stroud’s last final of his college career was on April 3, but he was in Tuscaloosa helping with the tornado relief effort up until a few hours before it began.

For the Sigma Pi chapter at Alabama, the volunteer work and the plaque from their fellow chapters spoke volumes about their unity as brothers.

Adrian said he was touched by his brothers’ [from the West Alabama and Auburn chapters] kindness toward his own chapter and their fallen brother, whom they had never even met.

“The incredible outpouring of support from the other Alabama chapters has definitely brought us all much closer together,” said Adrian, a senior majoring in economics. “It really shows that ‘brotherhood’ isn’t something you only find within a pledge class or a single chapter, but that it’s truly far-reaching throughout our entire organization.”

Flynn agreed with Adrian and said he believes the experience has caused men from different chapters to bond together as true brothers, a bond that he said doesn’t always seem to extend beyond a university campus.

“You don’t really have the same kind of brotherhood with men in other chapters like the one you share with the men in your own chapter, mainly because you don’t know a lot of the guys, and you haven’t shared experiences with them,” Flynn said. “But because of this, these three chapters have grown a lot closer, and that sense of brotherhood has grown stronger because of the compassion shown by the Auburn and West Alabama chapters – I can’t even describe the amount of respect we have for those guys.”

On the plaque, there is a quote that reads, “Unity, to be real, must stand the severest strain without breaking.”