• Hazing Deaths Database:
  • Blog
  • Storytelling
  • Bio
  • High School Sexual Hazing Incidents
  • Campus Speaker: Hazing & Binge Drinking
  • Hank Nuwer: selected media coverage
  • World Hazing Incidents
  • “Hazing,” “Sons of the Dawn,” “Legend of Jesse Owens”

Hank Nuwer's Hazing Scholarship Site

Follow me on Social Media

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

NPR interviews the Piazza family

February 2, 2018 By Hank Nuwer Leave a Comment

Here is the link and an excerpt

 

Evelyn Piazza wears a heart-shaped pendant around her neck. It has her son Timothy’s thumb print on it. When she runs her finger across it she says it’s like holding his hand.

Piazza’s son was a sophomore at Penn State last year, when he died from injuries suffered after fraternity hazing rituals. Now she dreads the days leading up to the first anniversary of Timothy’s death on Sunday.

“It’s going to be a rough three days because each day is going to be, ‘This is the day that he was hazed and got hurt.’ ‘This is the day that we spent in the hospital — that nightmare.’ And, ‘This is the day that he died,'” Piazza says while sitting in her Readington, N.J. home.

“You don’t send your child off to school thinking they could come home in a casket,” Jim Piazza says.

In an open letter the Piazzas offer advice to other parents in their new roles as anti-hazing activists. Later this month they plan to meet with other families who’ve lost children because of hazing.

“One of the things we’d like to do is look at legislation across the country and see if we can influence legislation in states that may not have significant or any hazing laws whatsoever,” Jim says. Working collectively, he says the families hope they can bring even more attention to the country’s hazing problem.

Much of what happened to 19-year-old Timothy at the Penn State Chapter of Beta Theta Pi fraternity was caught on surveillance cameras.

Prosecutors say pledges were run through something called “the gauntlet.” They drank large amounts of alcohol very quickly. As NPR previously reported, Piazza was given 18 drinks in 82 minutes.

At around 11 p.m. Timothy fell head-first down a flight of stairs. He was moved to a couch where he stayed for a few hours. Then prosecutors say he stumbled around the house before again falling down the same stairs. His new fraternity brothers didn’t call for help until about 12 hours after the first fall.

4 Ex-Fraternity Members Sentenced In Pledge's Hazing Death

THE TWO-WAY

4 Ex-Fraternity Members Sentenced In Pledge’s Hazing Death

Some of the fraternity brothers were charged with crimes — ranging from involuntary manslaughter to aggravated assault and hazing. But a new Centre County district attorney was sworn in late last year and he has forwarded the case to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro because of an unspecified conflict. Shapiro’s office says the case is still under review.

The Piazza case has brought new attention to the hazing issue.

Elizabeth Allan, professor of higher education at the University of Maine, studies how prevalent hazing is and how to prevent it. She defines hazing as, “Any activity expected of someone joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them regardless of a person’s willingness to participate.”

Allan surveyed college students and found many of them don’t even know that they have experienced hazing.

“When we asked students what they had experienced in order to become a member of their club, team or organization, 55 percent reported behaviors that would meet the definition of hazing,” Allan says. But only about 1-in-10 of those students said they had been hazed.

Filed Under: Hazing News

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Contact Inquiries

Hank Nuwer

Correspondence: Hank Nuwer at Hnuwer@hanknuwer.com   Phone number upon request.  Available presentations USA, … Email to book a date.

Sons of the Dawn

Sons of the Dawn: A Basque Odyssey: Hank's novel is for teens 11-18 but also meant to be enjoyed by … Read More

Hazing Deaths Database:

… Read More

Suicide allegedly tied to hazing at Nebraska-Lincoln

Here is the link. Rahat Jalil, UNL Lambda Phi Epsilon

Thank you, AFA

New scholarship from Brazil: Hazing at the university and gender violence: a literature integrative review

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.7213/psicolargum.39.103.AO02 Trotes na universidade e violência de gênero: uma revisão integrativa de literatura Hazing at the university and gender violence: a literature integrative review   Novatadas en la universidad y violencia de género: una revisión integradora de la literatura Adriane Roso https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7471-133X Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM), adriane.roso@ufsm.br Janine Gudolle de Souza https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6477-4190 […]

A Poland-Union City Love story.

Here is the link. Hank   My wife Gosia earned her Green Card in October 2019. She gave eight-weeks’ notice at her chief accountant job in Poland and shipped what she could to Indiana. “Wait, how did a fellow from Indiana meet a Polish lass,” you may ask? I persuaded Gosia in June of 2015 […]

Archives


Hank Nuwer's Hazing Scholarship Site is proudly powered by WordPress