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HBO: The life-shattering hits that killed Robert Champion on the band bus. His roommate Rikki Wills talks

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Excerpt:
Rikki Wills, Champion’s former roommate, spoke about what happened last November that led to Champion’s death. Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel debuts on HBO Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET/PT. CBSSports.com obtained an advance copy of the segment reported by Real Sports correspondent Frank Deford.

Eleven FAMU band members face felony hazing charges and two others face misdemeanor counts for alleged roles in Champion’s hazing. Wills is one of the 13 charged and the first defendant to speak publicly about the incident, according to HBO. He said he tried to protect Champion during the hazing.

The band’s initiation is called “Crossing Bus C” and took place on the band’s bus after an FAMU football game behind the band’s hotel in Orlando, Fla., Wills told Deford.

Before Champion participated in the hazing ritual, which requires a member to walk from the front to the back of the bus while getting hit and beat by “about two dozen” band members Wills said he asked Champion if he wanted to do it.Wills said Champion told him “I want to get it over with. I just want to do it.”

“They were hitting him hard: haymakers, kidney shots,” Wills said. “They had percussion sticks, I saw belts. He’s just sitting there like a sitting duck. He was like ‘I can’t breathe, can’t breathe. Need air, need air.’ And then he started complaining. He said ‘I can’t see; can’t see.’

“He [Champion] said he couldn’t see. His eyes were wide open. He was looking at us. He said he couldn’t see. He started jerking in and out. He was like [panting], you know trying to gasp for air. He started saying ‘Oh, Lord, Jesus, please help me. Please help me.’ Those were probably the last words he said. He started panicking again and he just kind of passed out.”

Champion had bruises on his chest, arms, shoulder and back and died Nov. 19, 2011 from internal bleeding, specifically “hemorrhagic shock due to soft tissue hemorrhage, due to blunt force trauma,” the Orange County, Fla., medical examiner reported. Champion was 26. Witnesses told emergency dispatchers the drum major was vomiting before he was found unresponsive aboard the bus.

“We kept telling ourselves ‘Rob’s gonna be all right. It’s big Rob, you know?’ ” Wills said. “And it was about an hour later, where we received a phone call and, you know, they said that, you know, he had passed. We all kind of just broke down.”

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FAMU trustees face lawsuit, challenge of hiring a new president

Here is the story link from ABC News

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Florida A & M Academic Records Released in FOIA Request

Here are the key findings from documents

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Hazing News

What has to happen to prevent hazing deaths? Author Ricky Jones tells the Orlando Sentinel

Here is the link to the opinion column by Dr. Jones

 

We must engage it because lives are at stake, but talking about the culture of hazing among Greek-letter organizations and groups (such as the FAMU band) that mimic them is distasteful. This is so because Greeks, members of hazing bands and their advocates are so immersed in self-importance and group narcissism that they seem to believe the world revolves around them and their organizations.

When challenged, they rarely intelligently argue facts. Contrarily, they quickly sink to ad hominem attacks that do not merit the attention of sensible people. They usually don’t do so in person, but through the anonymity of the Internet, they puff their chests, blame injured and dead victims for choosing to be beaten, and brand anyone who opposes them and the cultures of their organizations as uninformed, not “real” members, haters or sellouts. Even death does not stop them.

FAMU is a sad case study of this toxic reality. This is the same school that had members of Kappa Alpha Psi jailed for hazing in 2007. Less than a month before Champion’s death, fellow FAMU band member Bria Hunter was hazed so badly that she suffered severe bruising, blood clots, and a broken thigh. This incident was reported to the university. Weeks before Champion was killed, 26 band members were suspended because of hazing by now-retired band director Julian White. Others at the university obviously knew about the suspensions.

With this and hazing incidents in the band spanning over a decade under consideration, how in the world is it possible that band activities were not shut down before Champion’s death? This is administrative neglect of the highest order.

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Hazing News

What is the Life of a Fraternity Pledge Worth? Court Rules $1,000 Fine: Hank Nuwer

Opinion from the Orlando Sentinel by Hank Nuwer, Moderator of the Hazing Blog

One thousand dollars.

One thousand dollars per man was the penalty a Virginia court imposed on five Radford University students in the death Tau Kappa Epsilon pledge Samuel Mason from alcohol poisoning. He was 20.

Predictably, a sentence of two years for each of those men was suspended by that court.

Why predictably? Because in the 138 years that young men and women have been dying in fraternity and sorority initiations, not one person has ever served a sentence longer than two years for a hazing incident.

The first hazing death in America was of Cornell student Mortimer Leggett in 1873. In order to be initiated into Kappa Alpha Society, Leggett was made to walk along a railroad trestle blindfolded. He fell into a ravine and died. Since then, hazing deaths have rarely resulted in severe consequences for their perpetrators, and the severity of the practice has only worsened. From 1970 to 2012, at least 104 people have died as a result of hazing.

What hasn’t changed at all these last 42 years? In spite of death after death from hazing, the U.S. legal system and college administrations still haven’t come up with a way to deter hazing.

Colleges themselves have certainly been part of the problem since hazing was introduced at Harvard almost simultaneously with its founding.

If colleges really want to stop the hazing deaths related to alcohol, they must insist all fraternity houses be dry or shut down (with alcohol allowed on campus in regulated campus bars). Also, when a chapter is shut down for hazing, nationals must stop the bad business practice of granting the expelled members alumni status since the presence of bad-news alums at a number of hazing deaths has been documented.

In addition, colleges must provide potential new members a list of all fraternities caught hazing the previous three years — something the University of Texas and a handful of schools now do.

Finally, colleges need to advocate for a federal hazing law that primarily would require all criminal hazing statistics to be kept and published just as campus hate crimes, burglaries and sexual assaults now are routinely reported in compliance with the Clery Act.

This is why the arrests of multiple Florida A&M band members on felony charges in the alleged hazing death of 26-year-old band leader Robert Championwill be historically important if, upon conviction, they are sentenced to hard time of five or more years in prison. (There also were two misdemeanor arrests.)

Florida has the toughest penalty in the U.S. for hazing involving bodily harm. Under the Chad Meredith Act, named for aUniversity of Miami student who died after being hazed in 2001, the students could face the aforementioned five years in prison. Thus far, the law already has been invoked to result in two-year sentences for Florida A&M fraternity members convicted of nonlethal but violent hazing.

Legislators in every state need to urge passage of legislation that would make hazing at least punishable by the five-year felony terms that Florida now has in place. They need to look at the Florida law, which not only is tough but enforceable and proven constitutional.

Let the courts sentence those involved in hazing deaths to many years in prison and watch the practice die and pledges live.

However, having first written about hazing since the mid-1970s, and having watched case after case conclude with the lightest possible punishments, I expect the Florida A&M defendants — particularly first-time offenders — to accept plea bargains from the state of Florida and serve little or no jail time whatsoever.

Yet one can hope the prosecution will demand something more of each person that teaches more responsibility than a $1,000 fine.