Fraternity advocate Michael Ayalon interprets the facts.

 Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday (center, at podium) points to a poster highlighting the two alleged main suppliers for a cocaine-trafficking ring at Penn State’s University Park campus. (Courtesy of Commonwealth Media Services)

This story was originally published by WPSU in State College. 

Pennsylvania’s Attorney General says more than a dozen current or former Penn State students at the University Park campus are facing drug trafficking charges.

All but one of the 14 people accused of drug trafficking were students at University Park during the multi-year investigation period. State College police and a Grand Jury are investigating alleged cocaine trafficking in 2023 and 2024.

One person was a student’s father, who allegedly tried to obstruct the investigation.

“Large amounts of cocaine, kilos, were brought from Philadelphia and New York to State College, where they were cut and packaged for sale, primarily to Penn State students,” said Attorney General Dave Sunday at a press conference on Monday.

When asked if investigators will pursue hazing charges, Sunday declined to answer.

Sunday said the cocaine was cut and packaged mostly at the Delta Upsilon and Sigma Chi fraternity houses.

“Packaging was done by fraternity brothers and oftentimes pledges,” Sunday said. “In fact, we found a pattern of events that showed cutting and bagging cocaine was, for some pledges, an indoctrination into the Delta Upsilon and Sigma Chi fraternities.”

Sunday said investigators did not hear of any drug packaging on campus.

In a press release, Penn State officials say they’re placing Delta Upsilon on interim suspension. Sigma Chi is not recognized by the university.

University officials also say Student Affairs is moving quickly to establish additional educational and hazing prevention efforts for the beginning of the semester. Classes begin on August 24.

 

Updated August 15, 2026

 

by Hank Nuwer, an abridged version of Nuwer’s essay in Hazing: Destroying Young Lives. Photo: Elmira criminal attorney John B. Stanchfield, Mark Twain’s distinguished friend from Elmira, NY. For film rights to this documentary story, contact Hank Nuwer at Hjnuwer@Alaska.edu

Carl L. Dingens, Cornell Class of 1896

 

Carl Louis Dingens died in Buffalo on April 30, 1927, age 54.

He was born in Buffalo March 22, 1873, the son of Joseph A. and Julia G. Dingens. He attended Canisius School in Buffalo, and entered Cornell in 1892, graduating in 1896 with the degree of M. E. For the last ten years of his life, he had been superintendent of the American Pad and Paper Company of Holyoke, Mass. Previously he had been an officer in the A.Hussey Leaf Tobacco Company and L. B.Sutter and Bros., Inc., also a leaf tobacco company. He was survived by his wife, Mabel Hobbs Dingens, and a son, Carl H.Dingens.

A Hazing Death: Human Rights and the Constitutional Right to Remain Silent: The Death of Henrietta Jackson Was Negligent Homicide: a Planned, Irresponsible Stunt…Not an Accident.   by Hank Nuwer

Cornell University sponsored a gala inauguration for President Jacob G. Schurman on November 11, 1892. The faculty and students applauded and stomped the floor. Fifteen months later, a Cornell student, in collusion with other confidantes, killed an innocent woman in a hazing incident. Here is the story of that death.

The traditional freshman dinner began on the fourth floor Masonic Hall banquet room with toasts by the freshmen officers. A kitchen adjacent to the hall was used for food preparation. Henrietta Jackson, a sturdy African-American cook, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a white cook in the massive kitchen adjacent to the banquet hall. They prepared the menu choices: blue point oysters, a bouillon soup, filet of beef smothered with Champignon mushrooms, potato croquets, escalloped apples, and lobster salad. As they labored, a prankster from the sophomore class plotted his next move from an empty office on the third floor. Days earlier, he and his co-conspirators had staked out this room situated under the banquet hall and used an augur to drill two holes in the ceiling.

A little after 11 p.m., the perpetrator connected rubber and glass tubes to two empty, dark-colored jars that once had stored soda-fountain syrup. The jars contained chlorine made with commercial potash and other ingredients found in any mercantile store. He pumped the chlorine into what he thought was the banquet room, but instead went into the kitchen.

The attacker vanished into the snowy night, believing he had succeeded in disrupting the banquet and left nothing to  trace him.

The menacing gas overtook Henrietta Jackson and the kitchen workers, some of them moonlighting students.

A server named John from Utica, New York, gasped for air. “I have got to get out of the room,” John complained, wheezing.

Henrietta Jackson wheezed. The cook had been working alongside the stove longer than  anyone, including her daughter Mary Matilda Jackson on the opposite side of the kitchen. Mary had been minimally affected, but her mother proved sensitive to chlorine poisoning.

            Upperclassmen E. A. Ladd and Thomas McNeil, III, who were serving as sentries for the freshman class to keep out invading sophomores, raced into the kitchen to render assistance, but were overcome. McNeil, an outstanding athlete, suffered respiratory issues after the chlorine incident and was destined to die an early death eleven years after the so-called chlorine incident at Cornell University.

            A worker who recognized the scent of chlorine purchased a vial of ammonia in the open store and raced back into the kitchen. The savior with the ammonia pressed some to the cook’s lips with a handkerchief t to revive her. 

Warren Kenyon, by day a clerk at Platt & Colt’s Drug Store, was on cleanup duties in the kitchen. Mary Matillda Jackson called to him that her mother needed assistance. The woozy Kenyon assisted Mrs. Jackson down the stairs. They fell at the bottom and other rescuers took her by the arms into the street. “She seemed to be very still and quiet,” said Kenyon later. “[Mrs. Jackson] walked right along quiet, and apparently had her eyes shut, I thought.”

While the Cornell Class of ‘Ninety-Seven remained in the hall and toasted one another with Roman punch, Mrs. Jackson’s bleached lungs failed her. A rescuer took Mrs. Jackson to Dr. Walter Lockerby’s home office at 26 East Seneca Street. She stumbled along the way. The physician and surgeon was an ear, nose, and throat specialist.

Just before midnight. Dr. Lockerby answered the doorbell and let Mrs. Jackson and the rescuer inside. She collapsed in the chair nearest to the door and asked for water. Her suffering was immense. Her reddish cheeks signified that her brain and heart were oxygen-deprived. The physician recognized the distinctive odor of chlorine that he used to sanitize his office. Mrs. Jackson managed to take swallows of water. Dr. Lockerby snatched her arm. Her pulse was imperceptible. She clearly was asphyxiating. Her shallow breaths made it apparent that she was at the point of death. The rescuer went back to Mrs. Jackson’s daughter.

            The physician tried to revive her heart adminsterng a teaspoon of digitalis squills, glycerin, and water. When that treatment failed, he forced ammonia spirits into her. The doctor’s wife Edith scrambled out of bed to offer assistance, but the end was at hand.

Mrs. Jackson’s body relaxed, and she sank back into the chair. It had taken five minutes, after she had entered the house, for her to die. Dr. Lockerby and his wife placed her body flat on the floor and tried to revive her.

Mary Matilda Jackson arrived. She witnessed her mother’s corpse on the floor. She ran home to summon her father William. 

After the gas subsided, kitchen workers returned while the banquet still reigned, there to be interviewed by Ithaca night sergeant John Edgar Clapp.  Clapp was a retired professional baseball catcher. The next morning, Clapp and a second officer traced the tubes from the kitchen to the source. The door’s room had been barricaded, and they had to gain entry by smashing a hole in a door panel. They found boxes with identifying labels and some tin wires hidden in a long stove used to heat flat irons. They also located the chlorine jugs stashed behind a sign.

A local paper covered the death one day after the attack. Their reporting embarrassed Cornell’s administrators. President Schurman promised that the instigators would be punished. The initial newspaper coverage, edited in the wee hours, proved woefully inaccurate. The Ithaca Journal mistakenly reported that daughter Mary Matilda Jackson, not Henrietta Jackson, had been killed. Newspapers as far away as Missouri, incorrectly announced that student worker Thomas McNeil had died.

It took a day before the Ithaca papers correctly identified Mrs. Henrietta Jackson as the deceased victim. The cook was survived by Mary, William, and an elderly mother. An Ithaca newspaper printed a brief correction acknowledging that McNeil and the other student were alive and recovering.  However, much coverage disenfranchised Mrs. Jackson. Papers described her as an overweight, elderly “colored woman” with a bad heart. One of the most disturbing aspects about Jackson affair is that out of thousands of ensuing news stories, few, if any reporters interviewed the cook’s surviving husband and daughter.

Because Mrs. Jackson’s death was a homicide, a coroner’s jury was empowered to find the individuals responsible. In charge was J. Watson Brown, M.D., a local physician who had been elected Tompkins County coroner in 1892. The grand jury was charged with determining if murder charges could be brought against the person or persons whose “act evinced [a] depraved mind, regardless of human life,” noted the Ithaca Journal on February 24, 1894.

 

A handful of Cornell class officers took up a collection to purchase an Ithaca City Cemetery grave marker. Mrs. Jackson’s funeral was held February 24, 1894, at the M. E. Zion Church. Many Cornell students attended the funeral. Seating was standing room only. Pastor J. H. Callis denounced the killing that happened because arrogant individuals took it as their due to make sport at the expense of others.

An autopsy destroyed the Ithaca Journal’s unmerited insinuations regarding the victim’s old age and poor health. Dr. Martin Besemer, age 46, who performed the post-mortem examination, swore at the inquisition that Mrs. Jackson was extraordinarily healthy and had the internal organs of a much younger woman. She was only fifty-three years old, not elderly. He found no sign of disease, he testified in the inquiry conducted by coroner’s jury foreman D. F. van Vleet, Esq., a Cornell alumnus, Chi Psi fraternity alumnus, and Democratic Party leader.

            The only sign of aging at all was in the left lung where the doctor found “a slight degree [an inch in diameter] of some calcareous matter.”

            “Was that deposit sufficient to have caused death? asked van Vleet.

            “No, not sufficient probably,” said the doctor. The lungs did show evidence of congestion that “could have been” due to the chlorine, however. He went on to say that either smoke from the stove or an irritant gas caused her death. Jackson’s lungs had filled with clotted blood.

            “The heart was an extraordinary specimen . . . for a woman of that age?” inquired van Vleet.

“That is the conclusion we came to,” Dr. Bessemer testified.

 

Testimony at the Inquest

Witness Edwin Gillett, a clerk at C. J. Rumsey & Company hardware dealers, testified at the inquisition. “A young man, clean face I should say, about seventeen to eighteen,” had walked into the store to purchase an augur for boring holes. He came back and talked to another clerk, saying it was too short at about six inches, and he wanted to trade for a longer one. Gillett told the inquiry that he wasn’t sure if he would be able to identify the purchaser. 

            The inquiry called Hiram Haskins, a druggist at 6 East State Street in Ithaca, and showed him some wrapping paper in a package bearing a 6 Cook Street address. He did not know who had purchased the package but was certain it contained a half-pound of permanganate of potassium, an antiseptic and disinfectant used to make chlorine. He assumed the buyer was a student. The two had a conversation about making chlorine. Haskins said he could not identify who had poisoned Mrs. Jackson. 

The jury interviewed tailor Charles F. van Houten who worked in a suite opposite the office where the gas had been released. He said several young men had been running in and out of that room for one week.  He hadn’t confronted them. He heard no sound in that room the day of the banquet. The perpetrator had operated with stealth. The testimony showed this was a planned ambush with careful planning for weeks, not a spontaneous act of hazing and NOT an accident. Although the perpetrators went on to live their lives, their unconscionable hazing stunt killed Mrs. Jackson and may have shortened the life of Thomas McNeil, III. One or all involved got away without a conviction despite committing involuntary manslaughter.

Avoiding the Inquest

Based on testimony and investigations by Ithaca police, a list of suspects was put together by prosecutor J. H. Jennings.

The coroner summoned six students who lived at the 6 Cook Street boarding house. Local newspapers named the sophomore roommates Carl L. Dingens of Buffalo and Frederick Taylor of Plainfield, New Jersey. Suspicion arose when the coroner was unable to locate them. A Cornell special student who lived at the Cook Street boarding house testified that Dingens was absent from the house for two days. Taylor turned out to be avoiding reporters at his Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house.

Prime suspect Carl Louis Dingens was the son of Joseph Dingens, a Buffalo, New York merchant known for his marketing skills. Together with his brother, Joseph ran the Dingens Brothers store at 333 Main Street in Buffalo, peddling wine, liquors, cigars, mineral waters and food products. Joseph Dingens owned a five-bedroom house with three bathrooms on Buffalo’s fashionable Park Street.

Carl Louis Dingens at Cornell

Young Dingens belonged to Cornell’s Scalp and Blade society, made up entirely of Western New Yorkers. He participated in Cornell athletic contests, although not in intercollegiate competition.

Reporters for the Buffalo Evening News camped outside the Dingens home on Park Street. A daughter who answered the door said her brother had been in Buffalo a few hours earlier, but an uncle denied that he had been home. He had been home, Carl Dingens later confirmed in his testimony at an inquest.

Two days later, a reporter talked to Taylor, learning that Carl Dingens was off to Syracuse, New York, by train to meet one of his four sisters. Another morning newspaper corralled Eugenia Dingens, Carl’s sister, for an interview. This Miss Dingens, an actress active in community theater, repeated the story that her brother was visiting an invalid sister.

The story about visiting his sister was an untruth, Dingens later admitted under oath. He claimed he had gone to Syracuse for a medical issue with his eyes, and that his doctor told him to rest his eyes and avoid reading newspapers.

Shortly thereafter, local police placed Dingens and his friends C H. Mitchell of New York City, and Charles B. Gorby of Pittsburgh, in custody for failing to cooperate. Frederick Taylor of Plainfield, New Jersey, a notable glee club singer, and Earl Stimson, a student aspiring to become a railroad engineer, cooperated with authorities—but only to a point. Newspapers pointed to what seemed a blueblood wall of silence.

            Mitchell, only recently arrived in Ithaca, was not a Cornell student. He refused to answer the jury’s inquiry whether he had been in the Masonic Hall at the time of the poisoning, but he admitted acquaintanceship with Dingens, Taylor and Gorby. He conceded to familiarity with the dry goods company of New York’s James McCreary & Co., whose wrapping paper was found on the abandoned clothing box in the Masonic Block. The box had Mitchell’s name and initials and address on the label. Mitchell had admitted to the Ithaca Journal that the package was his.

The foreman of the coroner’s grand jury attacked Mitchell with a barrage of questions, but the witness refused to out the perpetrators or to reveal their involvement.

Sophomore Charles B. Gorby appeared before the coroner’s jury. He too refused to answer questions about how the chlorine entered the Masonic Hall kitchen.

Foreman: Are you acquainted with Mr. Dingens?

            Gorby: I am.

            Foreman: Have you been frequently to his room?

            Gorby: I should say so.

            Pressed whether he had conferred with Dingens and/or Taylor the week before the banquet, Gorby refused to answer.

Another person of interest was Earl Stimson.

One week earlier, on April 24, Earl Stimson had boarded a train in Ithaca that shut down for an emergency stop. Cornell junior James Harry Root, realizing he was on the wrong train, leaped off at 30 m.p.h., and was swept under the wheels, ripping off one leg and most of another. Ithaca sheriff Charles S. Seaman was on the train and asked if Stimson could assist Root. Stimson rushed to the hospital with Root, sitting at his bedside until the victim died. After Root’s mother and sister came to the hospital, Stimson comforted them as well.

Stimson finally gave his testimony to foreman Van Vleet on March 1, 1894. The sophomore student acknowledged that he was a friend and neighbor of Dingens. He had been downtown while the banquet transpired, but he swore under oath that he had not been in the Masonic Hall that fatal day. He refused to answer whether he had discussed ways and means of breaking up the freshman banquet. He refused to answer the follow-up questions posed by the district attorney.

Stimson refused, “on advice of counsel,” to share any facts that might “throw any light” on the criminal act at the freshman banquet. He said he was obeying instructions from counsel.

 

Faulty Newspaper Reporting

 

As reporters covered the “Jackson Affair,” the oft-repeated term for death of “the colored woman,” they wrote that a confession soon would come from a perpetrator. “One of the Cornell students will make a clean breast,” promised an Ithaca paper.

Predictably, the faculty of Cornell condemned the death of Henrietta Jackson but maintained the matter was to be investigated by officers of the law, not by professors and deans. The Ithaca paper quoted Professor Charles A. Collin of the Cornell Law School who believed individual or individuals who had caused Henrietta Jackson’s death showed a “depraved mind.” However, given that the chlorine death of Mrs. Jackson was an unintended consequence, Collins thought the offense might prove eventually to be ruled involuntary homicide. Even so, it likely would bring a conviction and a mandatory prison sentence.

On March 1 the Coroner’s jury played hardball. With Carl Dingens in hiding, the jury tried squeezing the truth out of his roommate Frederick Taylor, but the latter refused even to acknowledge that Dingens was his roomie. “I refuse to answer, by advice of my counsel,” Taylor told the jury.

At that point, Taylor’s attorney, Myron M. Tompkins, insisted that Taylor was entitled to a Constitutional right to refuse to testify. Whereupon, van Vleet, the foreman of the jury, insisted the lawyer and the press leave the room.

Dingens on the Stand

Carl L. Dingens returned to Ithaca and, at last, responded to his subpoena from the coroner. Foreman D. F. van Vleet began his interrogation with simple questions to which the witness gave short responses. Dingens said hi course was electrical engineering, a popular major at the time in Buffalo, soon to be nicknamed “the City of Light.” He admitted to having taking a chemistry course. He said his counsel was Myron M. Tompkins.

The questions from the foreman became more pointed and Dingens parried them. He refused to say whether he had made certain purchases from stores such as Platt & Colt.

            Dingens acknowledged that his father had been in Ithaca as recently as the previous day. He admitted he first heard “that this colored woman was dead” about 7 a.m. on Wednesday morning, February 21.

 

Van Vleet: Were you one of the parties that helped to manufacture the gas, which was forced into the banquet hall of the Freshman class?

            Dingens: I refuse to answer your question.

            Van Vleet: Upon the ground that it would tend to criminate you?

            Dingens: It might tend to criminate me.

            The foreman dismissed Dingens.

The coroner’s jury took testimony from Dr. Lockerby His official medical opinion was that Mrs. Henrietta Jackson perished from “spasmodic contraction of the bronchial tubes” likely caused from inhaling irritant gas.

The jury empowered its collective opinion on March 14, 1894. “The said Henrietta Jackson . . . came to her death on the night of February 20th, 1894, by reason of the inhalation of chlorine or other irritant gas manufactured and introduced into a room in Masonic Block in the City of Ithaca, New York where deceased was at work by a person or persons to this jury unknown.”

Dingens was now the prime suspect in the Jackson affair. The case now went before a grand jury before Judge Gerritt A. Forbes. The judge seemed determined to reject all refusals from those that refused to testify. Worried that his son would be jailed for contempt of court, Joseph Dingens retained Elmira criminal attorney John B. Stanchfield, to help local counsel representing his son and the other defendants. The impeccably dressed Stanchfield was a close friend of Mark Twain. Stanchfield’s wife, the former Clara L. Spaulding, was Twain’s wife’s best friend and twice visited Europe with the Clemens family.

Frederick Taylor, now well coached, invoked his constitutional guarantees to “throw himself upon the privilege . . . on the ground that it may tend to criminate me” on the Murder One charge. This became his standard response to the prosecutor’s questions about the origin of the jugs and about the purchaser of materials used to make chlorine. He almost lost that privilege by admitting he and Dingens had taken a chemistry class and knew the rudimentary steps in creating chlorine.

On March 28, 1894, Judge Forbes sent Frederick Taylor to jail for contempt for refusing to testify in the Mrs. Jackson case.  Taylor’s lawyers ran an end around Forbes’ court. They approached a judge in a neighboring county who set Taylor free and allowed him his constitutional rights.

The Party at the Jail

On April 5, Sheriff Charles S. Seaman greeted Frederick Taylor in his jail. “Mr. Taylor, you are released from my custody and are free to leave this place at any time,” said Sheriff Seaman.

            With his left hand, however, Sheriff Seaman handed a subpoena as he shook hands with his right hand. Taylor learned that he had been remanded to speak to a grand jury on April 24, 1894.

Before the sheriff dashed off to catch a scheduled train to Rochester, he told Taylor to use his official office for a celebration. Taylor’s fraternity brothers and Cornell friends came over to mob him. These fraternity fellows, glee club friends and sophomore class members celebrated the chance to visit a pal in the pokey. They accompanied him to his cell where he held forth with them for nearly two hours until exiting the building around 6 p.m. “He was in no hurry to leave jail” a local paper headlined its story.

Taylor had one complaint. The faculty had suspended him while he was in jail and unable to take required exams. “I think the faculty was rather hasty and unjust,” he said to the reporter “But I think they will do right by me and reinstate me.”

            Conspicuously missing from news coverage now were any words of contrition from Taylor about Mrs. Jackson’s survivors and how he felt about her painful end. Not one of the accused ever showed remorse. Their silence rings loud to this very day. 

            Taylor predicted rightly that the Cornell faculty had no choice but to reinstate him, and

 it did so. He was readmitted in good standing to Cornell.   

Gerrit A. Forbes faced the defendants

Now the legal ball rolled back into the court of Gerritt A. Forbes, the bearded justice of Oyer & Terminer in Ithaca. Frederick Taylor, in his testimony before Forbes, alternated between giving many “I don’t remember” statements and refusing to testify. Taylor remained silent even when Forbes browbeat him and said he wanted Taylor to make a clean breast of matters. “The court takes the responsibility under the laws of this state of squeezing, so to speak, this evidence out,” said Forbes. “Young man, you are directed to return to the grand jury room and to answer any question which is put to you in reference to anything you know about that transaction.” [1]

            Taylor, on advice of attorney, defied Judge Forbes and remained mum. A showdown was in the making.

Ably advised by Stanchfield, Taylor triumphed in the case of People ex rel. Frederick Luther Taylor against Gerritt A Forbes, the justice of the New York Supreme Court.

            Together with local attorneys for Dingens and Taylor, Stanchfield appeared before Chief Judge Charles Andrews of the court of appeals in Syracuse who blocked the rulings of Judge Forbes. Andrews agreed with counsel that Justice Forbes had stripped Taylor of his civil rights.  

            In May of 1894, attorney Leary also argued his case with justices from the state’s Court of Appeals on behalf of Taylor’s right to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege. On May 16, the court ruled that a stay of proceedings was proper. In other words, unless some witness came forth with evidence against Taylor, the case was over. There would be no grand jury indictments. The case lingered on for a little over two months more, but all that remained was posturing. Stanchfield persuaded the New York Court of Appeals to issue an extremely rare “stay of proceedings,” stopping all legal action in the Jackson murder investigation.

In mid-May, the humiliated Justice Forbes acknowledged that the sealed lips of Taylor meant that Mrs. Jackson’s murderer or murderers would never face criminal trial. He thanked the grand jury for its service and dismissed the foreman and members. Not a single newspaper ever put in a statement from Mrs. Jackson’s daughter and husband for their reaction to the disposal of their mother’s case without attributing guilt to any party.

Stanchfield’s Legal Move

Frederick Taylor’s unremitting refusal to offer testimony effectively removed Carl L. Dingens and the other suspects from trial. Based on the circumstantial evidence at hand, and no willing eyewitness to testify, the local prosecutor had no chance for a conviction. The wall of silence lasted all the way to the death of the last ‘Ninety-Sixer. No deathbed confession came from Dingens, Taylor, Stimson or any other.

            Likewise, no one came voluntarily forward to make amends with Mrs. Jackson’s descendants. William Jackson announced plans after the funeral of his wife to launch a civil suit

against Carl Dingens and Frederick Taylor, but the case never was tried, perhaps because the $5,000 Jackson sought in damages could quietly be paid him as an out-of-court settlement by the wealthy Joseph Dingens. Not one newspaper published follow-up stories reporting precisely why the civil suit failed to materialize.           

            Mrs. Jackson’s daughter, Mary Matilda Hedgepath, wife of the late William A. Hedgepath, died in 1929 after a serious illness. She had no grave marker.

The Taylor decision by the New York Court of Appeals was a nineteenth century landmark case for the protection of an individual’s civil liberties The Henrietta Jackson case ended in a cold case, all evidence from the Mason Block office destroyed over time that might have revealed, in our own time, fingerprints and DNA samples to identify the guilty parties.

            Carl L. Dingens and Frederick Taylor made up lost work at school and graduated from Cornell University and found professional employment, respectively, in the fields of business and law. Dingens became manager of the New York branch of G. Hussey and Company, leaf tobacco dealers in New York. Taylor pursued a law career in New York City.

            Carl Louis Dingens died April 30, 1927. He was the father of Carl H. Dingens and husband of Mabel Hobbs Dingens, daughter of a New York City meat wholesaler. Dingens’ last residence was on Park Street in Buffalo where he grew up, and at his last job he worked as an executive for a stationery company.  He had one patent for a stationery binder in 1915 under his name but assigned that patent to the Bigelow Binder Company of New York. After his death, a survivor wrote the alumni association a curt note demanding that all materials relating to Cornell University cease being mailed to the Dingens house. The family had had quite enough news from Cornell, the short letter said.

            Joseph A. Dingens died at 71 in 1907. He kept a pleasant journal of events almost all his life. The story of Mrs. Jackson and his own involvement and lawyering up to save his son from prison escaped the pages of his journal. He kept his own counsel.

            John B. Stanchfield continued to serve Mark Twain as his personal attorney for many years but also fielded high-profile criminal cases and was written up in newspapers for his extraordinary lucrative client billings. He tried to enter public service in New York but was defeated for New York governor in 1900 and senator from that state in 1903. He died at 66 in 1921.

            Frederick L. Taylor practiced law in New York and joined fellow attorney Raymond D. Thurber in a law partnership.  As a pastime, the defendant who had refused to sing in court sang with other Cornell alumni all his life in a New York City glee club.      

            For the final Cornell University graduation celebration in 1896, the outgoing Taylor had been chosen by his classmates to be the toastmaster. The class cheer resounded at commencement for the last time. “’Ninety-Six, Boom-rah-rix, Boom-rah-rix. We are Cornell, ‘Ninety-Six.”

            Henrietta Jackson’s body lies in her Ithaca grave, and the tombstone the Cornell community bought for her is yet readable. Her daughter’s grave is close by, but Mary Matilda’s lacks a headstone.

The last word on the trial went to news correspondent Murray E. Poole of Ithaca, New York. “It is generally believed that the students would have made a clean breast of the whole affair and taken a punishment fitted to the crime as they regarded it—a fine or short imprisonment—but the news saw so much about murder, electrocution, and death chair, that they closed their mouths tighter than an oyster.”

Now in 2026, as hazing deaths continue to plague the educational system, the legal questions remain settled. The moral questions around the death of Henrietta Jackson remain unsettled. I would love to see her story made into a documentary film.

Note from Hank Nuwer: I was able to get coroner records, testimony, etc. during an extended visit to Ithaca, New York and its courthouse, as well as the archives at Cornell University. My one forever regret was that I learned all evidence in the chlorine death of Henrietta Jackson had been long ago discarded, I believe had the tubes and chlorine jugs been preserved, law enforcement and DNA experts could pin Mrs. Jackson’s death on the co-conspirators. 

 

Photo: Attorney for the defense Stanchfield

Carl Louis Dingens is the blonde man, row two, second from night,

By Hank Nuwer

 

Editor’s Note (2026): This chapter originally appeared in 1918. References to laws and statistics reflect the state of knowledge at the time of publication. Since then, Congress enacted the Stop Campus Hazing Act, and additional research has expanded our understanding of prevention. In addition, Hank Nuwer’s Hazing Deaths Database Clearinghouse information is accessible at HazingInfo.org, where you can access, interact with, and download data on all recorded hazing deaths from 1838 to the present. HazingInfo, the University of Maine, University of Washington and Hank Nuwer are pleased to announce that the hazing deaths database is live on the HazingInfo website. The Clery Center and Stophazing and the University of Maine’s Elizabeth Allan have united as a formidable activist force.

Every single year, 1959-2026, the United States has seen someone or several people perish due to a pernicious and often deadly practice that dates back to the founding of the first collegiate fraternities in the nineteenth century.

In spite of growing antihazing sentiment, laws against hazing at the federal level and in forty-four states and campus crackdowns, hazing persists as a rite of passage and tradition in colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. This chapter examines the roots and manifestations of hazing in university-based fraternities and sororities in the United States. It includes a discussion of university policies and practices to curtail it by national fraternal organizations and antihazing activists.

Best hazing-prevention practices include the encouragement of bystander intervention to halt hazing as it happens, along with the mandating of alcohol-free fraternity houses, putting an end to the pledge period, delaying rush until a student’s second semester, putting responsible live-in adults in Greek houses as supervisors, offering orientation for parents on signs of hazing and substance abuse, transferring governance of the Greek system from self-governing interfraternity councils to university control, and requiring transparency of all schools by publishing all infractions on their websites in easily accessed locations. Also needed is accountability, namely prompt and even harsh action to expel or suspend a chapter as soon as hazing acts are verified, as occurred in January 2017 when Delta Tau Delta suspended its Indiana University chapter for hazing, and in February of 2017 when Penn State shut down its Beta Theta Pi chapter after pledge Timothy Piazza died accidentally on bid day.

Passage of federal legislation against hazing in 2024 was meant to give prosecutors a potent weapon, but as of 2026, the law is being ignored by many universities and by the stripped-down U.S. Department of Education. The bill garnered widespread congressional interest owing to the diligent activism of families who lost their children and who had the facts about hazing to use as an argument for passage of the law. One deduction to make from the passage is that  universities need to revise their web and print publications, deleting or rewriting all hyperbolic accounts of Greek Life if such information gives students and their guardians a false portrait of fraternities and sororities with regard to risks and student safety.

On the other hand, there are a substantial number of Greek groups that provide a safe, nurturing home-away-from-home environment, stressing comradeship, philanthropy, values, scholarship, and other laudable aims of founders. Their schools and national organizations must support such chapters, but even exemplary non-hazing groups must not rest until hazers in their midst no longer are welcome at the table.

How does one know if a fraternity is responsible? Trust Aristotle, who wrote this: What are its habitual actions? In short, to know the behaviors is to know the chapter and whether or not it is responsible. We pull for the characters in a book or movie because they truly want something above all else. The chapter that wants to continue hazing will trumpet that it is hazing-free, but in reality its behavior will not end until the chapter’s charter is yanked and its members are expelled.

 

Defining Hazing

The number of serious researchers devoted to studying and highlighting hazing is still limited, but the subject is attracting increasing study from social scientists and other academics concerned with trying to end the unabated string of deaths that have occurred every year from 1969 to 2017 in fraternal chapters, as well as in other collegiate clubs, bands, and sports teams. An updated list of all deaths on campuses from hazing can be found at HankNuwer.com. Scholarly research on hazing as late as 1978 was confined primarily to abnormal psychology and education journals and dissertations. Today, excellent research is conducted by scholars in psychology, ethics, history, education, folklore, popular culture, sociology, literature, athletics management, student affairs, and on and on.

What exactly is hazing? Researcher Aldo Cimino defines the term as “the generation of induction costs (i.e., elements of the experiences necessary to be acknowledged as a ‘legitimate’ group member) that appear unattributable to group-relevant assessments, preparation, or chance.” He uses calisthenics being required by a fraternity as an example of hazing and cites automatic accrual theory to explain why higher-status fraternities with more and better benefits for a pledge can demand far more severe tests of hazing than a chapter with less status and fewer benefits can expect.[1]

Most higher education institutions in the United States use the definition of the practice of hazing devised by the Fraternity Executives Association and endorsed by the Fraternal Information Programming Group, the leading fraternal organization addressing risk-management issues. According to these organizations, hazing is “any action taken or situation created intentionally, whether on or off fraternity premises, to produce mental or physical discomfort, embarrassment, harassment, or ridicule.” All higher education institutions and all national and international fraternities and sororities in the United States publish strict policies forbidding hazing. Umbrella groups such as the North-American Interfraternity Conference, National Panhellenic Conference and National Pan-Hellenic Council vociferously condemn hazing.

Hazing also meets a definition of bullying if fraternal members put newcomers through tortures intended to make the pledges, neophytes, or associate members quit a chapter, as opposed to the usual hazing methods of putting newcomers through stressful and illicit conditions in order to welcome them eventually into the group. When hazing gets carried away to include elements of torture, the gap between welcoming a newcomer and bullying him or her appears wide indeed.[2]

The term hazing has been used by journalists, educators, legislators, and researchers to fit conduct such as performing silly tasks or errands on up to paddling a pledge or requiring the guzzling of alcohol alone or with other neophytes. Hazing becomes difficult enough to define in a generally accepted legal sense, and it becomes near impossible when lawmakers attempt to define the term, especially if they are looking at a single highly publicized case, such as the Piazza tragedy, instead of a wide range of hazing cases. Additional public debate needs to address when the line gets crossed between a pledge participating willingly and being coerced, often to protect other members of a pledge class that get punished when one pledge displays defiance.

Not surprisingly, undergraduates have a simple classification all their own. They refer to “big H” hazing and “little h” hazing. As a consequence, many fraternity and sorority members view bottle exchanges, drop-offs of pledges in the country, lineups, and other events as “little h” offenses. However, even these “little h” activities have at one time or another have resulted in serious injury or death as participants cross lines and reject boundaries and civility.

Hazing: Cross-Culturally Widespread and Persistent

Early research work by Lionel Tiger of Rutgers University promoted the term “male bonding” and made a case for the evolutionary aspects of hazing from his neo-Darwinian perspective. In 1969, in his book Men in Groups (revised in 2004 by Tiger as “Males Courting Males” in The Hazing Reader), he focused on hazing in male fraternities as a means of addressing and explaining some hazing activities he witnessed firsthand at McGill University, a Canadian institution of higher learning. Tiger states that men attracted to high-status groups, actual or perceived, are attracted in part because they define their own self-image from attractive, higher status males. In groups such as fraternities that haze (and not all do haze), Tiger states in that the males staunchly try to defend the status quo by incorporating new members willing to show they are a suitable “fit” by performing and successfully participating in whatever hazing practices the group deems appropriate. These practices at the chapter level can be crude, even demeaning, and run counter to what the national or international umbrella fraternal groups may approve. Thus, all the over-the-top practices in a chapter get hidden away in hazing episodes done clandestinely, behind closed doors, and out of sight of advisors and national executive officers.

Tiger stresses that the ability to consume copious amounts of alcohol, in the presence of other fraternal values, is a common bonding practice carried out by some fraternities and other high-status male groups such as athletes. In “Males Courting Males,” Tiger also observes that many fraternal chapters that haze require members to participate in activities that appear homoerotic in nature, requiring pledges alone or in the pledge group to be fully or partially nude during one or more hazing sessions and occasionally assuming submissive poses in front of dominant senior members. Once initiated, the pledge is given the opportunity to buy a costly ring with the fraternity’s Greek letters on the stone, and the ring is worn on the finger traditionally reserved for a wedding ring. There also are pins with the fraternal insignia reserved for females that members find attractive.

Tiger’s observations on the need for new fraternal members to achieve a “clubby” bond with senior members have echoes in the well-established “groupthink” theory of researcher Irving Janis.[4] In 1999 I adapted Janis’s term to “Greekthink.”[5] The basis for groupthink and Greekthink is that the clubby nature of groups noted by Tiger reflects the overarching quest for camaraderie and a desire for harmonious relationships seen in high-status groups such as fraternities, even rising to a US president’s inner circle of advisers and cabinet members, athletes, and so on. Which may not be so surprising given that Inside Greek U author Alan DeSantis counts seventeen US presidents since 1877 that claimed fraternity affiliations as collegians.[6]

Groupthink neatly sums up fraternal organizations and their compulsive need and appreciation for camaraderie and the approval of current members, and even much older alums, whose presence at several hazing incidents in which a pledge died I noted in Broken Pledges. Groupthink captures the behavior of members performing acts of hazing in a group that, prior to joining, they as individuals likely would have dismissed as deplorable. Groupthink also explains why fraternal members can display a delusional belief in their own invincibility while encouraging or ordering hazing activities in order to foster group unanimity. The groupthink theory espoused by Janis also explains the deception, denial, and dishonesty that hazing chapters often demonstrate after a risky practice leads to serious injury or death and an associated investigation. Janis’s extensive study in group dynamics further points out that the group’s excessive need for solidarity colors the judgment of its members, leading them to approve and carry out activities such as hazing and alcohol overconsumption that, if exposed, can lead to that hazing chapter losing its charter. The cost of losing that charter includes the consequence that the university and its national organization order individual members to disband for anywhere from a year to forever and lose the privileges and status of membership during that ban. Yet, in spite of so much to lose, hazing continues, and also continues to attract media coverage and legislative attention.

Because actual acts of hazing are so widely different, ranging from beatings to drinking extravaganzas to nude groping and lining up to take verbal abuse, it is difficult to point to a single behavioral cause of hazing. Many hazing researchers refer to “The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group” by Elliott Aronson and Judson Mills as of crucial value. The two researchers established through experimentation that hazing leads to tighter group solidarity because severe initiation practices cause initiates to appreciate and like the group more than do initiates who are simply invited to join a group without hazing-like demands and sacrifices.[7]

Another observer of hazing behavior is James C. Arnold, who applied the work on cults by Margaret Thaler Singer, author with Janja Lalich of Cults in Our Midst, to fraternities.[8] Arnold asserts in his long essay “Hazing and Alcohol in a College Fraternity” published in Nuwer’s The Hazing Reader that many fraternities fall under the category of “addictive organizations.” Such groups quite convincingly are compared to individuals obsessed with alcohol, for example, and are similar to a dysfunctional family unit. In short, the chapters that haze use cult-like systematic manipulation and coercion to effect psychological and social influence. In particular, cults and hazing fraternities alike purposely engender enforced dependency by instituting ways and means to make potential members and new members spend the majority of waking and sleeping hours in the company of current members and their fellow newcomers. Such organizations promise the new initiates enduring abuse that if they only persist all will be well in the end, and they will experience many incentives once awarded membership when the time of trial expires.

In addition to his essay in The Hazing Reader, Arnold undertook close participant observation as a doctoral student over a long period of time under the supervision of George Kuh, well-known Indiana University Professor of Higher Education and Director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA). Arnold on many occasions observed his study chapter perform acts of hazing and alcohol abuse while he performed research for his dissertation on higher education at Indiana University.[10] He was allowed by the local fraternity chapter, its national organization, and Indiana University to have nearly complete access to such fraternity customs as rush, in which attractive newcomers get invited to the house for inspection under party conditions and then are given a “bid” if enough members agree they possess the “right stuff” for membership.

Sometimes, the bid results in a good fit, and sometimes it results in conflict when an independent thinker among the new class of pledges raises concerns about the illicit or even illegal behaviors that the newcomers must brush away. The desired outcome of hazing is to achieve 100 percent pledge-class unity—that is, the class becomes fully and wholly subservient to the wishes of the veteran members. Ironically, to get the “trust” of the pledges, the senior members may lie, deceive, and deny all responsibility, noted Arnold. What occurs during the stress and chaos of a pledgeship marked by hazing is what ethnographer John van Maanen refers to as “cultural learning” for a group.[11]

In its barest form, the pledgeship involves full indoctrination of the new members and total obeisance on the part of pledges as a socialization practice. Members justify their poor treatment of pledges and force them to endure oft-squalid living conditions for weeks under the justification that everything asked of the pledges serves some important bonding purpose, observed Arnold. The chapter he lived with even used such terms as “responsible hazing” and “responsible drinking” that were oxymoronic since from rush until initiation the chapter’s behavior was flagrantly irresponsible and reckless. In the end the outward result of an entire chapter as a model of control is a hazing chapter that Arnold stresses must live with “denial, dishonesty, self-centeredness, [and] confusion.” All this is done by a group that projects what Arnold says is an “illusion of control.”

All hazing chapters strive to admit members who respect the status quo and work to maintain the often illicit and even criminal behaviors that mark homogenous Greek chapters. Nothing incurs the collective wrath of a hazing group’s members more than a pledge that refuses to cower and reports hazing to the school or police or who quits pledging and rejects future membership in that hazing group. Arnold establishes that the group treats the unhappy quitter as a pariah with disdain, anger, and even threats. Conversely, male fraternity pledges—away from the security of family and home—who buy into the addictive chapter mentality then get rewarded by the senior members with a supply of alcohol, parties, and access to desirable women who tolerate or even support the practices of the addictive chapter. Arnold says addictive groups and members have a dualistic approach to perceiving the world. Everything is all right or all wrong, and pledges are told it is “our way or the highway.” Whatever good philanthropic activities the chapter supports are, in part, an attempt to cover up the confused, addictive nature of the chapter, Arnold concludes, citing the theories on the pervasive and persistent nature of addiction noted by The Addictive Organization authors Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel—that the national organizations and Greek Life staffs at colleges can make a difference if “they can turn away from a model of control and continued participation in an unhealthy system and through their actions demonstrate a healthier way of being.”[12]

Symbolic Interactionism Theory

Stephen Sweet uses a frame of symbolic interactionism to explain how some undergraduates attracted to hard-hazing groups will do whatever it takes to belong. Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionist construct, cited with regard to fraternal groups by Sweet, declares that human beings react to events because the events have meaning for them based on the social interaction they have with one another, and then they interpret those events with some selectivity—perhaps even outright justification and rationalization for activities banned by society. Blumer’s theory in particular fits when applied to fraternal group members whose concept of self is, at the time of pledging, being crucially shaped. Sweet notes that the fraternal rings, T-shirts, and paddles represent part of the identity pledges are accepting as they enter a crucial stage of their lives. In turn, the social relationships with those who already wear the colors and paraphernalia of the group they aspire to join can be a powerful lure to those young people who see enduring hazing as a necessary price to pay to get into an organization that has value. Conversely, says Sweet, those who quit pledging rather than endure not only suffer guilt because their pledge brothers will be asked to carry an additional burden, but they also lose a tie and part of their identity by forgoing all connection to the chapter they already may have sacrificed much for during early hazing.[13] The research by Thomas A. Leemon, who lived with a fraternity chapter for one entire pledging period to observe it, demonstrates that fraternity chapters very deliberately in the hazing process set out to manipulate and to alter each pledge’s concept of self.[14]

The work of researcher Ricky L. Jones also takes a close look at hazing in his book Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities. Jones postulates that veteran fraternity members in hazing chapters love their pledges even if they put them through beatings with canes, fists, and paddles. While not every African-American Greek chapter hazes, the heaviest hazing chapters, according to Jones, demand the ability for pledges to withstand such sacrifices to demonstrate their readiness and willingness to maintain the group. Significantly, physical hazing at the chapter level is fundamentally the exact opposite of the relatively tame requirements for initiation that the national organizations put out in pledging manuals. Jones persuasively argues thatdemonstrate a requirement to endure physical challenges and a demonstration of sacrifice on the part of initiates. While the physical hazing may be a part of the black membership process in groups that violate their national organization’s mandate to be hazing-free, it is also very much present in the rites of even some integrated chapters or all-Caucasian chapters that have seen new members hospitalized with physical injuries.

Jones, himself a member of a black fraternity, has become a nationally known antihazing activist, particularly outspoken in his objections to hazing of a severe physical nature.[15]       Psychologist Susan Lipkins, in her book Preventing Hazing: How Parents, Teachers, and Coaches Can Stop the Violence, Harassment, and Humiliation, maintains that even short-term hazing can lead to long-term, even lifelong, psychological and physical consequences for hazing victims. Short of death, psychological trauma due to hazing may be even more pernicious a problem than physical injuries. The latter nearly always heal, while traumatized victims report an inability to get on with their lives in normal fashion due to the afflictions of hazing, according to Lipkins.[16]

Hazing in U.S. Universities

Hazing in fraternities and sororities in the United States involves expectations of senior members that potential new members—often called pledges or associate members—will perform stunts that demean, degrade, or endanger them. Those that endure the group’s humiliation prove their willingness to conform to a perceived status quo. The members that insist newcomers endure such barbaric initiations claim they are merely protecting established tradition and ensuring group solidarity. They maintain that hazing weeds out potential members that lack the wherewithal to do anything the fraternal chapter asks of those who seek membership. It also establishes a senior pecking order in which new members learn the rules of precedence and a need to respect both senior members and alumni.

Thus hazing is common, albeit forbidden, among fraternities and sororities whose reason for being at educational institutions is to instill a lifelong commitment to leadership, community service, and the worth of lasting friendships and mentoring. This general “mission” coincides with functionalist theories of rites of passage extending back to Arnold van Gennep, the first prominent researcher to note similarities in initiation rituals from society to society.[17]

Hazing in university and college fraternities and sororities is an illicit rite of passage (against the rules of the institution) that provides opportunities for veteran members to include or exclude new members on the basis of a variety of trials that involve varying degrees of physical and psychological stress. In all too many cases, the theory of social exchange put forth by psychologists Harold H. Kelley and John W. Thibaut describes the recurring reality. According to this theory, newcomers submit to whatever torture or trials are asked of them, comforted by the assurance that all abuse will cease after the organization declares them full members. During the next cycle, the new veterans get to turn the tables and haze the next set of newcomers.[18]

All new pledge classes experience much of the same brutal hazing their predecessors endured. Hazing can increase in intensity if members are inebriated or inclined toward sadism. After initiation, the hazed become the hazers and return the ordeals they experienced in equal or greater intensity and measure to the next pledge class. The rule of reciprocity in social psychology dictates that newly initiated members will keep watch over their pledge-class members to make sure they all replicate the ordeals on the new pledge class that they once had experienced. Many a fraternity and sorority member has felt the displeasure of peers for being too soft on neophytes. A rare but occasionally lethal form of hazing occurs when veteran members for shortcomings of one kind or another punish an initiated member.

Deaths of pledges in Greek organizations have occurred under bizarre circumstances as the database of hazing deaths attests. Some have consumed lethal amounts of alcohol, being required by members to fill garbage pails with the collective vomit of new members. Some have perished after being dropped off far from campus (with victims dying in falls, in auto accidents, and by drowning). Some have endured hours of strenuous exercise in steam rooms with fatal results. Some have died after being on the receiving end of beatings with paddle, fists, or cane. Pledges and new members Tim Piazza, Gabe Higgins, Chad Meredith, Harrison Kowiak, and Gordie Bailey all died pledging fraternal chapters—in all cases veteran members delayed calling 911, and in some cases actually castigated other members who suggested calling emergency services.

 

History of University Hazing in the United States and Abroad

Rampant hazing in medieval European universities, such as the fifteenth-century practice of penalism, developed over the following two hundred years into sometimes-savage hazing practices quite similar to the aptly named hell nights of today’s hazing fraternities and sororities. In France and Germany, the hazed pledges donned a foolish cap similar to the beanies worn by pledges until nearly all national groups began outlawing them as symbols of hazing around 1979. At Cambridge and Oxford in England, physical beatings and enforced servitude among even the aristocracy was carried out in a custom known as “fagging,” where new boys on campus became the manservants of older students.

Hazing deaths weren’t always historically attributed mainly to fraternities, however. Rather, they were a greater problem in so-called “class hazing” that pitted first-year students against upperclassmen. (While female class hazing existed, not once did a death occur to either a first-year or second-year female, but a female cook did perish in 1894 when an undergraduate piped chlorine gas into a class party to disrupt it). Eighteen of the twenty-five hazing deaths of males that occurred on US college campuses from 1838 through 1927 were a result of freshman-sophomore class hazing excesses during battle royals, pranks, and organized fights to capture class flags, but not because of fraternity hazing. Fraternity hazing has claimed the lives of seven young men 1838–1927, according to the appendix of deaths in Broken Pledges.[19]

During the late 1920s, thanks to more awareness on campus and an outpouring of condemnation of hazing by students themselves, hazing of first-year students included fewer battles for class flags and class pennants that had seen so much violence earlier in the century. From 1928 to March 2014, only two first-year class-hazing deaths occurred (a Cheyney State College beating and a University of Richmond accidental drowning), and the rest were committed by hazers in fraternities, sororities, athletic teams, and one band (Florida A&M University).

Fraternities and sororities often trace their origins back to literary and honor societies that flourished back in 1776. The first fraternity per se was the Kappa Alpha Society founded in 1825 at Union College in New York State. The first fraternities and sororities emulated early literary societies in their educational values, and their founders were students themselves who wanted to engage in intellectual debate as well as to socialize. In addition to establishing the solemn initiation rituals that often borrowed symbolism from Masonic initiations, the early fraternity chapters also hazed new members on occasion in ordeals known as “stunts.” Some stunts included riding a real or mechanical goat or tossing a newcomer in the air on a blanket. Injuries occasionally occurred as a result of youths getting carried away. Broken Pledges documents injuries to two University of Georgia Zeta Chi pledges that jumped out a window when an older member whipped out a pistol as a prank.[20]

The first US fraternity death was Kappa Sigma Society member Mortimer Leggett in 1873 at Cornell University. At least one newcomer has perished while enduring hazing every year from 1969 to 2017, which I’ve documented in my book Wrongs of Passage and an internet list of verifiable hazing deaths. There occurred fifteen collegiate hazing deaths from January 1, 2014, to the autumn of 2017.

Some years more than a single death have occurred in Greek organizations. Because some law enforcement officers lack a clear understanding of what hazing actually is, it is plausible that the number of hazing deaths on my list is lower than might actually be the higher total. Local school officials, police, and/or prosecutors investigating the incident wrongfully have dismissed more than one hazing death as a mere accident. Similarly, neither universities nor Greek national organizations are eager to claim a death as related to hazing lest that admission result in damages during civil litigation.

Hazing deaths are not limited to on campus or to fraternities and sororities, but those two groups have experienced the majority of incidents. In the United States, the vast majority of hazing deaths from 1838 to 2017 have involved newcomers in fraternities and, to a lesser extent, in sororities. Far more males than females have perished in Greek organizations because of hazing.

According to a University of Maine national survey conducted by Elizabeth Allan and her colleagues, about half of all students acknowledge that they belong to groups that haze. Thus, while hazing in sororities is often reported, it only occasionally rises to the level of an actual crime and is more likely to be addressed by the hazers’ institution as an infraction rather than by a criminal prosecution. It is important to note that deaths in local, unrecognized, or suspended fraternities have resulted in deaths at several institutions, including the University of Nevada, SUNY Plattsburgh, Chico State University, and SUNY Geneseo. Deaths by hazing also have been reported in countries such as the Philippines, India (where it is termed “ragging”), Japan, Canada, and Great Britain.

<A>Hazing and Alcohol Abuse<\>

Alcohol was consumed by fraternal chapters in the nineteenth century through 1939, but such factors as alumni, faculty, and administration supervision of chapters resulted in far less tolerance for drunkenness or using alcohol as a sort-of litmus test of new member readiness during hazing. Significantly, fraternities likely did not experience a single reported hazing death due to alcohol until 1940. That year, Hubert L. Spake Jr. died following a mandatory drinking session at the University of Missouri while pledging Theta Nu Epsilon. Clearly, with the escalating number of hazing deaths from 1969 to 2017 (compared to 1838–1968), a case can be made that the presence of alcohol has made hazing rituals far more extreme and life-threatening than they were when many chapters banned or limited alcohol consumption. For example, from 2005 to 2008, ten of twelve hazing deaths (83 percent) were related to alcohol abuse. From 2004 to 2011, sixteen of twenty-one hazing deaths (76 percent) were alcohol-related.

My research on hazing deaths demonstrates that the majority that occurred in Greek groups from 1970 to August 1, 2017, involve an overdose of alcohol. Other victims from 1873 to 2017, have died from beatings, car wrecks, pedestrian accidents, falls from buildings or high elevations, burns, drowning, choking, ingestion of many gallons of water or other liquids, and other causes. A small number of suicides have occurred immediately following hazing activities and are listed on the list of hazing deaths with the caveat that it is difficult to prove that a suicide was the direct cause of hazing since other factors must also be considered.

Here are six examples of hazing deaths due to alcohol from my “List of Hazing Deaths” maintained on my website:

NOTE:

• In 1980, University of South Carolina Sigma Nu pledge L. Barry Ballou choked to death after passing out at a ritualized drinking session attended by an alumnus and members.
• In 2007, Phi Kappa Tau pledge Gary DeVercelly Jr. died of alcohol poisoning during a hazing incident at Rider University. He was a baseball player from California prior to coming to Rider. His parents subsequently became hazing activists, board members of the Clery Center for Security on Campus, and advocates for strict governance of Greek houses.
• In 2008, eighteen-year-old Theta Chi pledge Harrison Kowiak of Lenoir-Rhyne University died following a physical hazing “game” that the school and local Theta Chi chapter were reluctant to term hazing. Harrison’s mother Lianne Kowiak became an antihazing advocate and winner of HazingPrevention.org’s Hank Nuwer Anti-Hazing Hero Award.
• In 2012, Pi Kappa Alpha pledge David Bogenberger, a Northern Illinois University freshman, died after being asked to chug copious amounts of hard alcohol. Police charged twenty-two individuals with crimes.
• In 2013, members of Baruch College’s Pi Delta Psi pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and other serious charges after pledge Chung Hsien (Mike) Deng was beaten and died. Members refused to call 911 in a timely manner.
• In 2016, Nevada-Reno pledges were given enormous amounts of alcohol to consume as they cleaned house, watched strippers perform, and violated school and national regulations on drinking. Pledge Ryan Abele died in a fall. <\>

 

Laws Against Hazing

Hazing may be illicit (i.e., against the rules of a collegiate institution) or forbidden by state law. As of July 2026, hazing was illegal by statute in forty-four states, and there is a 2024 federal law regulating hazing. In most states, hazing is at best a misdemeanor offense. Florida has the strictest possible penalty among all US states, allowing a sentence of six or more years to be imposed upon conviction for felony hazing. As this article appears, the parents of a Southern University student killed in a hazining are advocating for an even more potent federal law, as well as a tougher hazing law in Louisiana.

Nonetheless, outside of Florida, California, and New York, the courts have traditionally imposed light jail sentences, often requiring merely community service or fining individual hazers and/or their chapters. Hazing can be hard to establish since these illegal actions often take place behind closed doors. The fact that Tim Piazza’s hazing was captured by security cameras from start to finish has added a dimension to the subsequent hazing inquiry seldom seen in the courtroom.

In addition, after a death or serious incident, uncooperative members refuse to share details of what took place when investigators interview them. This is why prosecutors for the state often file more easily proven charges, such as assault or serving alcohol to a minor, because hazing is a more difficult crime to prove in court. Felony convictions for repeated hazing beatings were imposed on a Florida A&M fraternity, and a Chico State fraternity member was convicted of a felony following the death of pledge Matthew Carrington who was required to drink so much water that his body chemistry was altered.

University Hazing Practices and Deaths

The increasing numbers of prospective members injured or killed by hazing reveals that prospective members stand ready to do whatever is necessary for acceptance into an organization. When a fraternity or sorority pledge fails to complete the pledge process, it can be a traumatic experience for individuals that fail to cross the liminal space, particularly if they feel less than full-fledged adults and must ask either their parents or school officials to intervene on their behalf.

Sororities have been connected to eight deaths of females and one death of a male in alleged hazing incidents. In 1970, an Eastern Illinois sorority member became the first female Greek member to die after she perished from effects of a head injury incurred in a vehicular accident after she had resisted being “kidnaped” by pledges that intended to abandon her in the country as a prank. Three female deaths have been attributed to drowning in dangerous ceremonial initiations, one at Virginia State and two at California State, Los Angeles.

A 2012 lawsuit launched by the mother of a deceased sorority pledge at East Carolina University maintained that the 2010 deaths of her daughter and a second pledge were directly caused by sleep deprivation due to hazing. According to that lawsuit, twenty-year-old Delta Sigma Theta pledges Victoria Carter and Briana Latrice Gather died in a car accident. In addition to the aforementioned two sorority deaths at Eastern Carolina University, one additional death occurred at Plymouth State University during an automobile accident while pledges allegedly were made to lie flat on the floor of an SUV that then overturned.

None of these deaths involved alcohol. However, in 2008, a total of twelve Chi Omega sorority and Sigma Nu fraternity members at Utah State University were charged with crimes following the alcohol-related hazing of eighteen-year-old Michael Starks. In addition, in March 2014, an alleged hazing incident involving Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Connecticut resulted in the hospitalization of a sorority member admitted with a life-threatening blood-alcohol concentration, according to widely published media accounts and a personal email from the victim.

In addition to pledge deaths, so-called pledge “sneaks” routinely occur in which pledges haze senior members to retaliate for what they themselves have gone through and endured, and these have resulted in deaths at schools such as Eastern Illinois University, University of Texas, and University of Georgia. Such a practice of rebellion is often encouraged by the membership as a means of forging pledge solidarity. The latest example of the reverse hazing of members by pledges has been the death of Sigma Alpha Epsilon member George Desdunes who was “encouraged” by pledges to drink what proved to be a deadly amount of alcohol in a spurious question-and-answer session at his Cornell University chapter house in 2011.

As mentioned, hazing can also have serious consequences even without a death. Many male and female students have been hospitalized for acute alcohol intoxication, for example. Greek chapters have been punished for such behaviors as activities of a sexual nature, physical pummeling, verbal abuse, overwork, sleep deprivation, branding with chemicals, and a host of bizarre pranks intended to amuse veteran members.

To be sure, hazing can also involve activities that do not qualify as deadly or particularly demeaning, such as requiring a pledge to sing a song or carry a veteran member’s books. Nonetheless all national and international fraternal organizations ban these activities as well since the possibility exists that a rogue member or members might get creative with a relatively noninjurious act of hazing and take the activity to a potentially harmful level. In addition, what may seem like innocuous hazing to a perpetrator may be perceived as threatening to a newcomer. Fraternal leaders routinely refer to resultant psychological trauma as a type of “hidden harm.” Even the most stable of new recruits can break down when subjected to night after night of verbal abuse, subjugation, and sleep deprivation, particularly when forced to sleep on a floor in confined quarters and to leap up on the instant to carry out some inane errand that a veteran member has conjured up. These latter cases are examples of cult-like systematic hazing.[21]

 

Prosecuting and Preventing Hazing

From the first fraternity hazing death in 1873 to deaths in 1973, there appear to have been few arrests and no convictions of any consequence for fraternity and sorority hazing deaths.[22] And while the adviser in the 1974 shooting death for a hazing at Bluefield State was convicted and served time for killing a Tau Kappa Epsilon pledge, and a North Carolina A&T University fraternity member in 1987 received a two-year sentence for pledge beatings, it was not until 1999 that tightened state laws and increasing media attention led to observable and verifiably stricter enforcement, and a small number of arrests resulting in convictions. Most notable was the 2007 sentencing of nearly two years in prison for two Florida A&M fraternity men who pleaded no contest to felony charges of beating a Kappa Alpha Psi pledge; they served jail time but on appeal had the charges expunged from their records.

By 2010 more arrests and a handful of convictions for serious hazing cases began to get the attention of the press. For example, two young men were convicted of misdemeanor hazing in the 2008 death of Cal Poly Sigma Alpha Epsilon pledge Carson Starkey and received jail sentences of thirty days each. On the other hand, in the 2010 death of a Radford University fraternity pledge, the court punishment was merely $1,000 each and no jail time for five Tau Kappa Epsilon members in a plea deal.[23]

Other efforts curtailing hazing have been attempts by international organizations, such as Sigma Alpha Epsilon, to ban or shorten the pledge period. By March 2014, according to the website of the parent SAE organization, all pledging has ceased due to the deaths of ten SAE pledges. Another effective best practice was the dry house movement followed most conspicuously by all chapters of the large national fraternity Phi Delta Theta, which in 2000 removed alcohol from the premises of chapter houses, thereby eliminating the substance that has been linked to the most hazing deaths after 1970.

Civil lawsuits in the aftermath of an injury or death blamed on hazing have become quite common. The parents of Chad Meredith, a University of Miami pledge who drowned when forced to swim across a lake by older Kappa Sigma members, resulted in a $14 million judgment against those young men. The highest settlement ever paid by a university in a fraternity hazing death was $6 million in 2002 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the parents of Scott Krueger, who died of alcohol intoxication following a Phi Gamma Delta pledge party. The largest settlement in a hazing band death was $1.1 million by Florida A&M in 2015 to the parents of Robert Champion.

Prevention of Hazing

As might be expected, since deaths by hazing largely occur in fraternities and to a lesser extent in sororities, the main antihazing activists are parents of dead or injured pledges, undergraduate members, alumni, and national officers of fraternities and sororities. The two most influential organizations are the web-based StopHazing.org, created by University of Maine hazing researcher Elizabeth Allan, and the national group HazingPrevention.org, inspired and founded by Tracy Maxwell, a nationally known antihazing activist from Colorado.

StopHazing’s Allan is a professor at the University of Maine in Higher Education Leadership, one of the few academic programs offering a hazing studies concentration. She and former Maine colleague Mary Madden completed in 2011 a three-year research project on hazing with responses from 11,482 college students enrolled in fifty-four colleges. The survey response rate was 12 percent.

Slightly more than half of all respondents acknowledged participating in acts of hazing as members of student groups such as fraternities and sororities. In her essay for The Hazing Reader titled “Hazing and Gender: Analyzing the Obvious,” Allan notes that empirical research on gender differences is scant, but while a national survey distributed to Greek professionals found that 44 percent had to deal with reported hazing cases, the number of violent and otherwise physical hazings were far fewer than those committed by male students.[24]

HazingPrevention.org is a Georgia-based national activist organization dedicated to empowering people to prevent hazing in college and university student groups. HPO’s board of directors and numerous volunteers and small staff provide antihazing education through conferences, webinars, and training sessions. HPO sponsors its annual Hank Nuwer Anti-Hazing Hero Award that to date has honored mainly fraternity and sorority undergraduates who effected positive changes in their own chapters to curb hazing practices, but also it has honored the likes of former National Football League quarterback Peyton Manning and Lianne Kowiak, an antihazing activist and mother of a pledge killed in a Theta Chi hazing incident.

In addition to these two antihazing groups, there is a college archive that attempts to put all hazing scholarship under a single collection. Buffalo State College’s Butler Library has since 2006 sponsored an extensive Hazing Collection available without charge to hazing researchers and undergraduate students alike. Under the direction of archivist Daniel DiLandro, the Hazing Collection has set an eventual goal to house every hazing-related scholarly article, doctoral dissertation, master’s thesis, book, and miscellaneous research item for free use by researchers. Before the collection was established, one difficulty facing researchers was that the relatively small amount of literature related to hazing was scattered at widely separated libraries and institutions, making research an expensive, time-consuming challenge for researchers.

While a number of best practices to curtail hazing have been championed by a number of educators, no single solution has been found to stamp out hazing. Allan, Maxwell, myself, and other authors have argued that bystander intervention might have prevented specific hazing incidents from leading to serious injuries and deaths in a number of fraternity tragedies. Bystander intervention refers to the practice of emboldening those who witness crimes or potential criminal behavior to step in and take action to halt the behavior before it escalates. The writings and seminars by hazing intervention expert Alan Berkowitz and National Federation of State High School Associations spokesperson Elliot Hopkins target bystander intervention as an important means of stopping a hazing activity before it reaches the point of no return. In addition, a great many US educational institutions use social norms data in an attempt to discourage binge drinking and hazing by stressing to undergraduates that such unacceptable practices are anything but normal. In an attempt to sway behavior changes, there have been marketing campaigns such as posters in college classroom buildings and residence halls.

Other education experts, including Christopher Bollinger, coauthor of Violence Goes to College, have argued for the value of substituting useful, benign group-building activities in place of hazing practices.[25] HazingPrevention.org’s Kim Novak of the Novak Institute for Hazing Prevention offers Greek Life professionals and administrators hands-on, scientifically sound strategies to make their campuses safer.

In 2013, the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, founded by the surviving families of a 2007 Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) school shooting massacre, brought together nine experts (including myself) to create a new project termed “32 NCSI” (the 32 National Campus Safety Initiative), which has identified best practices for institutions to employ that counter violent campus behaviors such as hazing and sexual assault. A pilot program was initiated with a number of institutions to provide a voluntary rating system so that an individual institution not only can judge how it measures up in terms of combatting hazing and other behavioral maladies, but also to take steps to shore up areas where deficiencies appear to occur. In 2017 the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) entered into a partnership with 32 NCSI.

As the number of deaths associated with hazing continues to climb, a trend of late has been the zero tolerance toward the practice by a number of institutions. In addition to the expulsion of chapters caught hazing, a number of universities also have created hazing task forces composed of faculty, staff, and, in some cases, outside experts.

For example, following the hazing death of George Desdunes, then Cornell University President David Skorton issued a clear warning to fraternal groups that the new hazing policy was zero tolerance. The new no-nonsense policy resulted in nine fraternities cited and/or punished by Cornell for hazing from 2012 to March 2014, according to that institution’s website, and additional fraternities were reprimanded from March 2014 to August 1, 2017. In addition, Cornell established the Recruitment, Acceptance, Retention, and Education (RARE) Task Force, with one of its main agenda items being to find and research best practices for curtailing hazing in fraternities and other student groups.[26]

In California, following the alcohol-related birthday death of a Chico State University pledge that institution president Paul Zingg (now retired and a member of the AHA! Movement Board) termed hazing-related, all campus fraternities and sororities were suspended in November 2012. The unprecedented step was taken because of a rash of nonhazing-related deaths at the same time, as well as the fact that this was the fourth hazing death at Chico State. Likewise, Central Florida University, which had a near fatality during pledging for Kappa Alpha Psi, put an end to all pledging and fraternal social activities in 2013, concerned by reports that pledging activities had in some cases escalated into hazing, The University of Virginia ordered all pledging to cease immediately in 2013 or the offending chapters would be shut down.

If these hardline steps fail to work, universities should follow the example of Alfred University and threaten to ban Greek life if reforms are not authentic solutions. In 2002, following a number of hazing deaths in local and national fraternities, the Alfred board of trustees decided regulation of Greek groups was not working. Consequently, the board moved to shut down all Greek houses permanently. However, it is unlikely the majority of colleges will risk alumni outrage by banning fraternities and sororities. National fraternities and sororities vociferously defend the right of public universities to maintain a freedom of association, making it unlikely that any educational institutions (besides the occasional private college) will ever ban the entire Greek system. At present, besides Alfred, the handful of private colleges in the historic past to close their Greek systems included Middlebury College (1990), Williams College (1962), and Colby College (1983). A few private colleges, such as Bates College in Maine, never have permitted fraternities. The last public university to ban pledging for a semester was the University of Alabama in November 2012. A committee at the University of South Carolina in 2016 recommended a permanent ban on pledging, but the matter was tabled for one year by the veto of the USC president. In July of 2017, Harvard University debated a measure that, if passed, would phase out fraternities and sororities because of faculty objections to serious issues perceived to be associated with Greeks.

In the end, however, in spite of all these well-intended and laudable hazing prevention strategies, the demeaning and sometimes deadly rites of hazing clearly will continue until undergraduates and high school students themselves universally condemn and shame their peers who haze. Such a needed change demands nothing less than a nationwide paradigm shift.

Editor’s Note: Every generation inherits a choice: preserve dangerous traditions or create better ones. The future of hazing depends less on laws than on whether students themselves refuse to confuse cruelty with brotherhood. The author is writing this at age 80 after a fight against hazing that began in 1975 and a 1978 article for Human Behavior he wrote condemning hazing. If hazing is to end in his lifetime, far more needs to be done by universities, athletic departments, local and national fraternities and sororities, and individuals.

 

BIO: Hank Nuwer is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He has written The Hazing Reader (Indiana University Press) and Wrongs of Passage: Fraternities, Sororities, Hazing, and Binge Drinking (Indiana University Press).

Editor’s note: In the eight years since I first wrote this encyclopedic entry in 2018, deaths directly and indirectly attributable to hazing have taken the lives of four-year-old bystander Marco Lee Shemwell, Joseph Little of Phi Gamma Theta, Collin Wiant of Sigma Pi, Nicky Cumberland of the Texas Cowboys, Andrew Walker of Kappa Sigma, Tyler Hilliard with Alpha Phi Alpha, Alexander Belatis of Theta Chi, Marlon Jacson of Kappa Alpha Psi, Noah Caleb Domingo of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Sebastian Serafin-Barzan of Sigma Pi, high school student Anna Sophia Aslanian, Bae Castro of Chi Sigma Phi, Samuel. (Sam) Martinez of Alpha Tau Omega, Anthony Tsialis of Phi Kappa Psi, Rahat Jalil of Lambda Phi Epsilon, Justin King of Kappa Sigma, Dylan Hernandez of Phi Gamma Delta, Gracie LeAnn Dimit of Kappa Phi Alpha sorority, Lyon College baseball player James Gilfedder, Adam Oakes of Delta Chi, Stone Foltz of Pi Kappa Alpha, Lofton Hazelwood of Farmhouse fraternity, Bailey Broderick (pedestrian), Phat Nguyen of Pi Alpha Phi, Lamoree Leandra Moore, Luke Tyler of Theta Chi, James Madison University students Joshua Mardis, John Fergusson, Nicholas Troutman, Dartmouth College student Won Jang, football rookie Calvin Dickey, Sawyer Updike of Sigma Chi, and Caleb Mitchell of Omega Psi Phi. Don’t let even one more name join this list–Hank Nuwer.

 

 

 

[1] Aldo Cimino, “Predictors of Hazing Motivation in a Representative Sample of the United States,” Evolution and Human Behavior 34 (2013): 446–452.

[2] See also Aldo Cimino, “Fraternity Hazing and the Process of Planned Failure,” Journal of American Studies (December 2016): 1–23.

[3] Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York: Random House, New York, 1969). Revised as “Males Courting Males” in The Hazing Reader, ed. Hank Nuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

[4]Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

[5] Hank Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage: Fraternities, Sororities, Hazing, and Binge Drinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), xxiv–xxv.

[6] Alan D. DeSantis, Inside Greek U.: Fraternities, Sororities, and the Pursuit of Pleasure, Power, and Prestige (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007), 6.

[7] Elliott Aronson and Judson Mills, “The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59 (September 1959): 177–181.

[8] Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich, Cults in Our Midst (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 4–36.

[9]James C. Arnold and George D. Kuh, Brotherhood and the Bottle: A Cultural Analysis of the Role of Alcohol in Fraternities (Bloomington, IN: Center for the Study of the College Fraternity, 1997).

[10] James C. Arnold, “Hazing and Alcohol in a College Fraternity,” in The Hazing Reader, ed. Hank Nuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 51–105.

[11] John van Maanen and Edgar Schein, “Toward a Theory of Organizational Socialization,” Research in Organizational Behavior 1 (1979): 209–264.

[12] Arnold, “Hazing and Alcohol in a College Fraternity,” 105. See also Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel, The Addictive Organization (New York: Harper One, 1988).

[13] Stephen Sweet, College and Society: An Introduction to the Sociological Imagination (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2001). Revised as “Understanding Fraternity Hazing” in The Hazing Reader, ed. Hank Nuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 1–13.

[14] Thomas Leemon, The Rites of Passage in a Student Culture (New York: Teachers College Press, 1972).

[15] Ricky L. Jones, Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities, rev. ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).

[16] Susan Lipkins, Preventing Hazing: How Parents, Teachers, and Coaches Can Stop the Violence, Harassment, and Humiliation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 19–26.

[17] Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Paris: Noutery, 1909).

[18]Harold H. Kelley and John W. Thibaut, The Social Psychology of Groups (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1969).

[19] Hank Nuwer, Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing (Atlanta: Longstreet, 1990), 286–294.

[20] Nuwer, Broken Pledges, 119–120.

[21] Hank Nuwer, “Greek Letters Don’t Justify Cult-Like Hazing of Pledges,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 1999.

[22] Nuwer, Broken Pledges, 286–298.

[23] Hank Nuwer, “What’s the Life of a Dead Fraternity Pledge Worth?” Orlando Sentinel op-ed, July 11, 2012.

[24] Elizabeth Allan, “Hazing and Gender: Analyzing the Obvious,” in The Hazing Reader, 252–274.

[25] Christopher Bollinger and Hank Nuwer, 2009, “Hazing” in Violence Goes to College, ed. John Nicoletti, Sally Spencer-Thomas, and Christopher Bollinger (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas), 185–203.

[26] David Skorton, “A Pledge to End Fraternity Hazing,” New York Times, August 23, 2011.