Education
A DEADLY
CAMPUS
TRADITION
Student hazing deaths
have intensified calls
for reform. What
will it take to change
fraternity culture?
By KATIE REILLY
TIM PIAZZA SPENT THE EARLY-MORNING HOURS OF FEB. 3 CURLED
up in pain, clutching his head and trying to stand. A Beta Theta Pi
pledge at Penn State University, he had been forced to drink a
toxic amount of alcohol in an alleged hazing ritual known as “the
gauntlet,” according to a grand jury report. He then tumbled
headfirst down a flight of stairs. Members of the fraternity carried
his limp body to a couch, where they poured liquid on his face and
slapped him in apparent attempts to wake him up. Security-camera
footage later showed Piazza repeatedly falling and hitting his head,
and then lying on the ground alone, holding his stomach. By the
time fraternity members finally sought medical aid, according to
the Centre County, Pennsylvania, grand jury findings, Piazza had
suffered traumatic injuries to his brain and spleen. He died the next
morning in an intensive-care unit. He was 19.
A year and a half earlier, the New Jersey teenager had followed
his older brother to Penn State, where he began studying to become
an engineer. He was known to his friends as a “big goofy kid” who
always looked out for others. When he decided to join Beta Theta Pi—
whose stated mission is “to develop men of principle for a principled
life”—in the winter of his sophomore year, he was searching for
community on a campus with more than 40,000 students. “He was
looking for that brotherhood and just another place that he belonged
here. It is a big place, and finding your group is tough sometimes,”
says Bennet Brooks, one of Piazza’s sophomore-year roommates.
“That was where he thought he was going to find it.”
Instead, Piazza became the latest casualty in a disturbingly
persistent pattern of fraternity misconduct that has resulted in
grievous injuries, numerous lawsuits and dozens of fatalities.
Nineteen-year-old pledge Tucker Hipps died in 2014 after
falling from a bridge during a predawn run with Clemson
University’s Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, according to a wrongful-
death lawsuit filed by his parents, who say he was a victimEvelyn and Jim Piazza
with a photo of their
son Tim, who died
in February after a
fraternity hazing ritual
at Penn State University