10. Forced Consumption Timothy Piazza just wanted to be part
of a brotherhood. At least, that's what the Penn State fraternity pledge’s girlfriend has said.
She recently spoke out about the terrifying death of her boyfriend Timothy,
who was killed during hazing at the Beta Theta Pi campus frat house. Timothy drank so much alcohol
that he got blackout drunk. The alcohol was basically forced upon him, with his fraternity
brothers pushing him to drink more and more. They got Timothy so wasted that he fell down a set of
stairs and hit his head on the bottom. But by the time his supposed brothers called the ambulance,
several hours after the incident, it was too late. Timothy was already dead.
The tragedy came as a huge surprise to Timothy's friends and family. The first surprise was that
Timothy joined a fraternity at all. He was never into the party scene, he very rarely touched
alcohol in high school, and he never expressed any desire to be in the whole frat house scene.
He has been described by those who knew him as a truly good person. In fact, both his girlfriend
and his father say that had the roles been reversed and it was a different pledge who
had gotten injured, Timothy would have picked that person up and taken them to the hospital himself.
But that's not how things turned out. The frat brothers intentionally gave Timothy a lethal
dose of alcohol and then let him lie on the bottom of the stairs for 12 hours before they called an
ambulance. Timothy's family is now trying to bring up charges against the boys who let their son die.
If they had taken him to the ambulance hours earlier when the accident first happened,
Timothy would probably still be alive. 9. Unscheduled Train
Mortimer Legget may have been the very first fraternity initiation death, but they started
to happen quite frequently after that. In 1905, the freshman Stuart Lathrop Pierson also perished
in a violent fraternity initiation ceremony. It happened at about 9:40 PM on October 28.
Stuart was a pledge with Delta Kappa Epsilon at the Kenyon College.
His fraternity brothers directed him to a railroad bridge and told him to stay there
until they went back for him. However, there are a few different versions of the story. One of them
suggests that his fraternity brothers bound him to the tracks and blindfolded him. Either way,
the end result was the same. An unscheduled train came roaring down along the Kokosing River.
Little Stuart Pierson either didn't see the train coming, didn't react quickly enough,
or simply couldn’t get out of the way because he was tied up. He got ran over
and died instantly from the brute force of the train plowing through his squishy human body.
When asked why Stuart was left on the train tracks, the fraternity members claimed it was
supposed to be a quiet time of reflection for Stuart to contemplate his potential membership.
The train was supposedly unscheduled. Nobody had known that the train was coming, or else
the fraternity members probably wouldn't have accidentally killed their pledge.
Since 1905, the area around Kenyon College has changed quite a bit.
The old railroad bridge has been turned into a bike trail. Some people say they still see the
ghost of Stuart Pierson loitering around it, trying to complete his initiation ceremony.
8. Internally Bleeding Michael Davis died from the injuries
that he suffered during a savage fraternity hazing ritual over 25 years ago. The ritual
went down at Southeast Missouri State University. Michael Davis was trying to become a member of the
Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. It was February 15, 1994. He went through the entire hazing ritual
and came out the other side seemingly OK. But a day later he collapsed dead and had to be taken to
the hospital for an autopsy. Doctors found that he had a fractured rib, his lung was damaged,
his liver was damaged, and his kidney was basically ruptured. He also had a bruised and
bleeding heart and a spinal hemorrhage. That's a lot of damage for one individual to take.
But what's interesting about this case is that there were four other pledges
being tortured at the same time. The hazing involved nothing more than physical beatings.
They were slapped on the neck, kicked, hit, punched in the chest, and body slammed. And while
the other four walked away with all their organs intact, Michael Davis’ body didn't prove quite
as strong. His insides were all mixed up, causing him to die within 24 hours of internal injuries.
Over a dozen men were prosecuted, the fraternity was banned, and Michael’s
mother earned $2.25 million as part of a lawsuit. How do you feel about hazing initiations that are
literally just an excuse for fraternity members to beat up the pledges? Let us know your thoughts
in the comments below, and if you’re liking this video, be sure to hit the thumbs up and subscribe
buttons if you haven’t already! :) 7. Banned for Ten Years
A national fraternity was banned from Pennsylvania for 10 years and ordered to pay a measly fine of
$112,500. The reason goes back to 2013, to the death of Chun Michael Deng at Baruch College in
New York. The fraternity, Pi Delta Psi Inc., was found guilty on one felony count of involuntary
manslaughter, as well as a few other charges – though they did get free of the murder charge.
With this punishment, one of the first ever passed down to a fraternity, they are no longer
allowed to do business in Pennsylvania. That also means that the fraternity can't operate
any of its other chapters or colonies. Why did the fraternity get in so much
trouble? Well, let's keep going through the list of people who got in trouble here.
Four individuals were sentenced on felony charges of voluntary manslaughter:
Kenny Kwan, Raymond Lam, Charles Lai, and Sheldon Wong. Each of them got around 24 months in prison,
along with seven years of probation. The murder that started this whole
business happened in December of 2013. The fraternity brothers were doing an outdoor
ritual known as the “glass ceiling.” The ritual involved Michael Deng being blindfolded while
other fraternity members tackled him, issuing blunt-force trauma to both his head and chest.
According to the Pocono Mountain Police, the brutal game required the pledges to try and break
through the line of fraternity members while being tackled. But Michael Deng never made it. He was
tackled once too hard, his head hit the ground, he lost consciousness, and he never woke up.
6. Ritual Kidnapping On the morning of February 25,
2011, a Cornell sophomore named George Desdunes was found unresponsive
and unconscious on a couch. He was dead just a few hours later. The police were able to do a
quick investigation and determine that he died following a horrible fraternity hazing ritual.
George, who was an aspiring doctor, was forced to drink too many shots of vodka. He was then
subjected to reverse kidnapping. He was bound with zip ties, the fraternity brothers blindfolded him,
they forced him to sing songs from the musical Rent, and he was quizzed on fraternity folklore.
And all the while, he was continuously drinking vodka. At the time of his death, his blood alcohol
content was .409, over five times the legal limit. Three of the fraternity brothers who actually
kidnapped George were charged with first-degree hazing,
but they were acquitted of all criminal charges. In the end, nobody really got in any trouble for
what happened, although Cornell came down pretty hard on hazing and basically abolished it.
5. A Sudden Collapse A very long time ago in 2001,
a medical examiner ruled that Joseph T. Green Jr. died as a result of being hazed
by his fraternity brothers at Tennessee State University. Joseph was in the middle of jogging
around a local high school track at around 6 in the morning when he collapsed suddenly.
Before his collapse, he had been complaining about heart problems and breathing difficulties. The
official cause of death was hypothermia induced by exercise and joined by an acute asthma attack.
Joseph had been forced to perform extreme physical activities as part of
his initiation into the fraternity Omega Psi Phi. This is one of the stranger fraternity initiation
fails because Joseph wasn't beaten, he wasn't blindfolded, and he wasn't abusing alcohol. He
was literally just exercising too hard. His fraternity brothers had asked him to do a
bunch of physical activities, such as jogging around the track and performing calisthenics.
If anything, It should have been good for the boy. But he probably wasn't used to exercising so much
and all the physical motion in the cool night air caused him to die.
4. Copious Amounts of Alcohol This most recent fraternity fatality happened
just a few months ago in 2021. Eight students have so far been indicted for the terrifying death of
Stone Foltz at Bowling Green State University. On March 5, 20-year-old Stone Foltz was hospitalized
after consuming what his family lawyer has described as a copious amount of alcohol.
Jacob Krinn is being charged with first-degree involuntary manslaughter, five others are charged
with third-degree involuntary manslaughter, and two other students are facing hazing charges.
Plus, four out of eight students have been charged with tampering with evidence.
Here's how it all went down. On the night of March 4, the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity held their
traditional “Big Brother Night.” It’s a pretty common event in fraternities across the country
involving the pledging process. Pledges are introduced to active members who are
supposed to serve as their big brother through the night. But what it really means is that everyone
gets extremely intoxicated. Stone Foltz and the other pledges were forced to drink hard liquor,
about 40 shots each, as part of their initiation into the fraternity. Sometime in the night,
Stone Foltz was dropped off at his apartment. His roommate found him unconscious on the
floor sometime after that and called 911. Stone Foltz never did regain consciousness.
He died from alcohol poison. His parents are now fighting desperately to end hazing nationwide.
There is a dramatic reform happening at the moment in which most scholastic institutes are adopting
a zero-tolerance policy for hazing. But Stone’s parents
are now on a diehard mission to make sure these policies are upheld.
3. Off the Road Victoria T’nya-Ann Carter was
killed in a devastating car crash on November 20, 2010. She was one of two East Carolina University
students who died in the crash when the car they were in went off the road and plowed into a tree.
The driver was Kamil Shaunay Arrington from Nashville, Tennessee. She was charged with
two counts of misdemeanor death by vehicle for being behind the wheel. All the girls in
the vehicle that night were pledging to become members of the Delta Sigma Theta fraternity.
The lawsuit filed by Victoria Carter’s mother claims that the whole reason behind the accident
had to do with a bad case of hazing. The lawsuit claims the sorority members
were hazing the pledges in such a way that incidentally caused them to crash their car.
One of the hazing activities included depriving the girls of sleep. Because of this, since the
girl behind the wheel was so exhausted from being abused by the sisters of the fraternity
she was trying to enter, she fell asleep while driving. She crashed the car on the way to a
sorority appointment early in the morning. To make matters worse, the sorority tried
to cover up what they had done by deleting emails and text message records, some of which
included threats to pledges. The chapter of the fraternity has been suspended until 2025.
Even though this happened over ten years ago, the lawsuit still hasn’t been settled.
2. Head-First Into a Brick Wall Speaking of a lawsuit, here’s another lawsuit.
Haley Ellen Hunt put together an enormous lawsuit against the Clemson University head coach, his two
assistants, the schools’ athletic director, and at least 14 members of the team. The lawsuit,
which was filed back in August of 2014, claims that on a night in 2011, Haley Hunt was hazed by
the members of her team. Hazing has been a team tradition at Clemson University since the 1990s,
but now it’s become something of a problem. The ex-women’s soccer player says she received a
traumatic brain injury after she was blindfolded, thrown into the trunk of a car, and then forced to
perform humiliating acts. When she was let out of the trunk, she couldn't see where she was running
because of the blindfold. She ran away from the field and sprinted head-first into a brick wall.
The result of her head hitting that wall was brain trauma. She was forced to quit soccer
in 2012 because a concussion specialist said her brain just couldn't handle it.
By 2016, Haley had settled her lawsuit with all except one of her defendants, though we don’t know
how much money was involved or what exactly the terms of the settlement ended up being.
1. The First Fatality Mortimer Dormer Leggett was born in 1821.
That's such a long time ago that he was a general in the Union Army.
But it was Mortimer’s son in 1873 who became the first fatality that we know about from a
hazing incident gone wrong. The boy had the same name as his father: Mortimer Leggett.
He was going through initiation at Cornell University to enter a chapter of the Kappa
Alpha Society in October. He was a young fella, not too large and maybe not too bright.
He allowed his potential fraternity brothers to put a blindfold over his eyes
and then coerce him across a railroad trestle with a group of other initiates. But as he was walking
along the trestle, he fell and landed on the back of his head. The strike was so hard that Mortimer
Leggett died, making him the first college fraternity death to happen during an initiation.
It was quite sad for his father, who went on to live a pretty long life even after his son died.
What’s the worst hazing ritual you’ve ever seen or been a part of? Let us know all about it in
the comments and thanks a lot for watching the video! Remember to hit that subscribe button
and check out more awesome content from the channel! See you next time! Bye! :)