Florida university slammed for defense in hazing death case

Florida university slammed for defense in hazing death case
By Barbara Liston
Reuters
Sep 11, 2012

(Reuters) - The family of a Florida A&M University drum major killed in a brutal hazing ritual is "appalled" by the university's claim that the student was responsible for his own death, their lawyer said on Tuesday.

"We are appalled at the audacity of this institution to blame this murder on the victim," said Christopher Chestnut, lawyer for the parents of drum major Robert Champion Jr.

He spoke in reaction to the motion lawyers for Florida A&M filed in Orange County Circuit Court on Monday, when they called for dismissal of the Champion family's wrongful death lawsuit.

The motion said the 26-year-old Champion volunteered to be hazed, in a bid to gain respect from fellow band members, and thus was responsible for his own death.

"Robert Champion, Jr. expressly assumed the risk of the hazing injuries that caused his death," wrote FAMU lawyer Richard Mitchell, in the bluntly worded court filing on Monday.

FAMU also argues that Champion, by submitting to hazing, was an active participant in a forcible felony which makes his family ineligible to win a lawsuit against the university.

"No Florida public university or college has a legal duty to protect an adult student from the result of their own decision to participate in a dangerous crime while off-campus and after retiring from university-sponsored events, as Robert Champion, Jr. did here," Mitchell said.

Chestnut, however, said the issue was not Champion's age but peer group pressure and the university's internal culture.

"There are cultural pressures within the college that is allowed here that basically facilitate this culture. For you to succeed and thrive, part of being in college and in the band is being accepted," Chestnut said.

The university has acknowledged that hazing was a longstanding problem in the band, but Chestnut said it was important to note that Champion was the first band member killed by the ritual.

"Anyone in a hazing has the expectation that I may get hurt but no one expects to be killed...

13 charged, alumni cover-up cited, in Florida A & M hazing death of drum major Robert Champion

FAMU Hazing Death Included Cover Up Conspiracy, Parents Claim
By CHRISTINA NG
ABC News
May 3, 2012

The parents of Florida A&M drum major Robert Champion, who died from a hazing attack, alleged today that there was a "calculated conspiracy" to cover-up their son's death.

The accusation follows Florida State Attorney Lawson Lamar's announcement Wednesday of charges brought against 13 individuals in connection to Champion's death in November 2011.

Champion, 26, was a member of the college's famed "Marching 100" band when he collapsed and died Nov. 19 on a bus parked outside an Orlando, Fla., hotel after a football game.

The death was ruled a homicide and Lamar said Champion's torso was covered with bruises that he said were inflicted during a brutal hazing ritual that contributed to his death.

"It did not take five months to figure out who murdered Robert Champion. This is not a murder mystery," Champion family attorney Christopher Chestnut said at a news conference today in Atlanta. "There is no excuse for the lack of accountability."

"We have learned that there was a calculated conspiracy to cover up Robert Champion's murder," he said. "We have heard that alumni were communicating with students on that bus, telling them how to respond, what to say, what not to say in order to ensure that no one would be arrested and charged for murder. That is simply inexcusable."

Chestnut said he has statements from students who revealed these communications. He would not say how many statements he has, but said that he suspects several of the statements came from the same 13 people who have been charged in the hazing.

Eleven of the 13 individuals were charged with hazing resulting in death, a third-degree felony, as well as two counts of misdemeanor felony. The other two people were charged with one count each of misdemeanor hazing. The maximum sentence for hazing resulting in death is six years...

"Obviously, someone should be charged with murder," Chestnut said. "The most severe sentence is six years. Robert Champion has a life sentence."

Chestnut said he understood that there is currently not enough evidence for murder charges, but said this was because law enforcement had "botched" the investigation.

He said the case was compromised when authorities let the students on the bus go back to school and that the physical evidence was tainted when the bus was sent back to the company without collecting sufficient evidence.

Chestnut said the Champion family "absolutely, unequivocally" will be suing FAMU.

"Robert Champion...did not pass peacefully away at night," Chestnut said. "He died after being beaten to death. He was murdered. This is a murder case."

Chestnut also expressed anger at the fact that none of the students on the bus were ever put on academic probation or arrested. Four students were briefly suspended, but they were allowed to go back to school. The school's band director Julian White was fired, but later reinstated and put on administrative leave.

"Robert Champion wasn't in class at FAMU last week, but his murderers were," he said.

"FAMU cannot go on with business as usual," Champion's mother Pam Champion said at the news conference. "They need to clean house...

Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth's Hazing Abuses

"This "culture of silence," as some on campus describe it, is both a product of the Greek system's ethos and the shield that enables it to operate with impunity...

"Having a 3.7 and being the president of a hard-guy frat is far more valuable than having a 4.0 and being independent when it comes to going to a place like Goldman Sachs. And that corporate milieu mirrors the fraternity culture."

[Maura Larkins comment: The secrecy and the social politics don't sound completely different from the teachers' lounges in public elementary schools I've taught at, or, for that matter, from the politics in most schools and offices. I suspect the difference is mainly one of degree.]


Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth's Hazing Abuses
A Dartmouth degree is a ticket to the top - but first you may have to get puked on by your drunken friends and wallow in human filth
By JANET REITMAN
Rolling Stone
March 28, 2012

Long before Andrew Lohse became a pariah at Dartmouth College, he was just another scarily accomplished teenager with lofty ambitions. Five feet 10 with large blue eyes and the kind of sweet-faced demeanor that always earned him a pass, he grew up in the not-quite-rural, not-quite-suburban, decidedly middle-class town of Branchburg, New Jersey, and attended a public school where he made mostly A's, scored 2190 on his SATs and compiled an exhaustive list of extracurricular activities that included varsity lacrosse, model U.N. (he was president), National Honor Society, band, orchestra, Spanish club, debate and – on weekends – a special pre-college program at the Manhattan School of Music, where he received a degree in jazz bass. He also wrote songs; gigged semiprofessionally at restaurants throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut; played drums for a rock band; chased, and conquered, numerous girls; and by his high school graduation, in 2008, had reached the pinnacle of adolescent cool by dating "this really hot skanky cheerleader," as he puts it.

That fall, he enrolled at Dartmouth, where he had wanted to go for as long as he could remember. His late grandfather, Austin Lohse, had played football and lacrosse for Big Green, and both Andrew and his older brother, Jon, a Dartmouth junior, idolized him as the embodiment of the high-achieving, hard-drinking, fraternal ethos of the Dartmouth Man, or what Lohse calls a "true bro." A Dartmouth Man is a specific type of creature, and when I ask Lohse what constitutes true bro-ness, he provides an idealized portrait of white-male privilege: "good-looking, preppy, charismatic, excellent at cocktail parties, masculine, intelligent, wealthy (or soon to become so), a little bit rough around the edges" – not, in other words, a "douchey, superpolished Yalie."

A true bro, Lohse adds, can also drink inhuman amounts of beer, vomit profusely and keep on going, and perform a number of other hard-partying feats – Dartmouth provided the real-life inspiration for Animal House – that most people, including virtually all of Lohse's high school friends, would find astounding. This, like the high salaries that Dartmouth graduates command – the sixth-highest in the country, according to the most recent estimates – is a point of pride. "We win," is how one of Lohse's former buddies puts it.

On January 25th, Andrew Lohse took a major detour from the winning streak he'd been on for most of his life when, breaking with the Dartmouth code of omertà, he detailed some of the choicest bits of his college experience in an op-ed for the student paper The Dartmouth. "I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges' ass cracks... among other abuses," he wrote. He accused Dartmouth's storied Greek system – 17 fraternities, 11 sororities and three coed houses, to which roughly half of the student body belongs – of perpetuating a culture of "pervasive hazing, substance abuse and sexual assault," as well as an "intoxicating nihilism" that dominates campus social life. "One of the things I've learned at Dartmouth – one thing that sets a psychological precedent for many Dartmouth men – is that good people can do awful things to one another for absolutely no reason," he said. "Fraternity life is at the core of the college's human and cultural dysfunctions." Lohse concluded by recommending that Dartmouth overhaul its Greek system, and perhaps get rid of fraternities entirely.

This did not go over well. At a college where two-thirds of the upperclassmen are members of Greek houses, fraternities essentially control the social life on campus. To criticize Dartmouth's frats, which date back more than 150 years, is tantamount to criticizing Dartmouth itself, the smallest and most insular school in the Ivy League. Nestled on a picturesque campus in tiny Hanover, New Hampshire, the college has produced a long list of celebrated alumni – among them two Treasury secretaries (Timothy Geithner, '83, and Henry Paulson Jr., '68), a Labor secretary (Robert Reich, '68) and a hefty sampling of the one percent (including the CEOs of GE, eBay and Freddie Mac, and the former chairman of the Carlyle Group). Many of these titans of industry are products of the fraternity culture: Billionaire hedge-fund manager Stephen Mandel, who chairs Dartmouth's board of trustees, was a brother in Psi Upsilon, the oldest fraternity on campus. Jeffery Immelt, the CEO of GE, was a Phi Delt, as were a number of other prominent trustees, among them Morgan Stanley senior adviser R. Bradford Evans, billionaire oilman Trevor Rees-Jones and venture capitalist William W. Helman IV. Hank Paulson belonged to Lohse's fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, or SAE.

In response to Lohse's op-ed, the Dartmouth community let loose a torrent of vitriol against him on The Dartmouth's website. Lohse, it was decided, was "disgruntled" and a "criminal." His "blanket and bitter portrayal of the Greek system" was not only false, complained one alumnus, "but offensive to tens of thousands of Dartmouth alumni who cherished the memories of their fraternities." Another alumnus put it this way in a mock letter to a human-resources manager: "Dear Hiring Manager, do yourself a favor: Don't hire Andrew Lohse... He will bring disgrace to your institution, just as he did when he embarrassed Dartmouth and SAE." The consensus, as another alum put it: "If you don't want to be initiated, don't pledge."

Though two of Lohse's SAE brothers have confirmed his allegations are generally on the mark, the fraternity has turned on Lohse, portraying him as a calculating fabulist who bought into the Greek system wholeheartedly and then turned against it out of sheer vindictiveness. In a letter to Rolling Stone, SAE's lawyer, Harvey Silverglate, labeled some of Lohse's most extreme allegations "demonstrably untrue" and compared Lohse to the stripper who falsely accused a number of Duke lacrosse players of raping her in 2006. "Lohse is... a seemingly unstable individual," Silverglate wrote, "with a very poor reputation for truth-telling and a very big axe to grind."

This is not the first time that SAE has come under fire for hazing abuses, or the first time the house has closed ranks against an attack: In 2009, a member of the Dartmouth faculty accused the fraternity of making pledges chug milk and vinegar until they threw up. According to Lohse and two other SAE alums, the brothers agreed to deny the charges, and discussed in detail how to respond when questioned by college officials. This "culture of silence," as some on campus describe it, is both a product of the Greek system's ethos and the shield that enables it to operate with impunity.

"The fraternities here have a tremendous sense of entitlement – a different entitlement than you find at Harvard or other Ivy League schools," says Michael Bronski, a Dartmouth professor of women's and gender studies. "Their members are secure that they have bright futures, and they just don't care. I actually see the culture as being predicated on hazing. There's a level of violence at the heart of it that would be completely unacceptable anywhere else...

"Dartmouth is a very appearance-oriented place," sophomore Becca Rothfeld tells me when I visit the campus in February. "As long as everything is all right superficially, no one is willing to inquire as to the reality of the situation... "People don't really talk about things at Dartmouth, let alone argue or get outraged about them."

This winter, in the wake of Lohse's op-ed, 105 Dartmouth professors, concerned about this entrenched mindset of avoidance, signed a letter condemning hazing as "moral thuggery" and urged the college to overhaul the Greek system. It was the faculty's third concerted effort to reform the system since the 1990s. Dissent, a signature part of the undergraduate experience at many liberal-arts colleges, is, at Dartmouth, common only to the faculty. "No matter what your actual 'Dartmouth Experience' is, everyone usually falls in line and says, 'Yes, we all love Dartmouth,'" laments English professor Ivy Schweitzer... "It's really a very corporate way of thinking."

Within the Ivy League, Dartmouth is considered the most "corporate" of the schools, with a reputation for sending graduates to Wall Street and the upper echelons of the corporate world. Statistics show that roughly a quarter of each graduating class find jobs in finance and business – a figure many students consider low, given Dartmouth's prominent ties to its Wall Street alumni, who often come back to campus to recruit. "I've been at our house when a senior partner from a financial-services firm and a chief recruiter from someplace like Bain are standing around drinking with us as we haze our pledges," says senior Nathan Gusdorf...

"Presumably, you would find a lot of drinking and plenty of frat boys at any university," says Gusdorf, "but here, drunk frat boys are handed so much power right off the bat. People do incredibly bad things to one another here, because they know they're going to get away with it."

That attitude of inherent entitlement often carries over after graduation. "One of the few dependable ways into the one percent is via these elite feeder systems, like Dartmouth," says David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Power Inc., which examines the influence wielded by multinational corporations in the global era...

FAMU band director fired in wake of drum major's death

FAMU band director fired in wake of drum major's death
13 News
November 23, 2011

Florida A&M's band director has been fired, and Gov. Scott wants the state law enforcement officers to get involved.

They are the latest developments in the mysterious death of FAMU drum major Robert Champion following last weekend's Florida Classic.

As a task force begins investigating hazing at the school, a school spokesperson said the FAMU Department of Public Safety has three on-going investigations into hazing, and in two of those cases, 30 students were suspended.

Julian White, the school's band director, was placed on administrative leave with pay, with an official termination date of December 22. This is in line with the school's collective bargaining agreement.

In a letter from FAMU President James Ammons, White is accused of "alleged misconduct and/or incompetence involving confirmed reports of allegations of hazing within the department of music and the 'Marching 100'."

White has been with FAMU's faculty since 1972, and is a graduate of the school.

Gov. Rick Scott also asked Florida Department of Law Enforcement to get involved in the investigation. In a statement Wednesday he said:

The recent death of Florida A&M University’s “Marching 100” band drum major Robert Champion has generated great concern throughout the state and indeed the nation. While I recognize that the investigation into the death of Mr. Champion is being handled by the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, the reality is that the death investigation significantly impacts the University, the Tallahassee community, and the State of Florida as a whole.

Ammons suspended all practices and performances for the Marching 100 band Tuesday.

Champion died Saturday night in the parking lot of the Rosen Plaza Hotel on International Drive.

Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said hazing may have been a factor and it is an active criminal investigation.

Ammons announced the school will form an independent task force to look into the death and determine if there were ongoing inappropriate band customs or traditions.

"I am asking all that if anyone has any information to fully cooperate with the Orange County Sheriff's office. There will be no consequences or retaliation for helping. There will however be consequences for anyone who tries to impede it," said Ammons.

Champion's fellow bandmates likewise had no idea how he died.

Deputies said Champion threw up and complained about not being able to breathe beforehand.

The school has had problems with hazing in the past. Ammons said the school will cooperate with Orange County deputies who are investigating.

Wednesday, the Florida Civil Rights Association called for further action by asking the governor and FAMU Board of Trustees to fire Ammons, assistants to Dr. White and the entire leadership of the Marching 100 program.

The organization said in a statement:

The current administration within the University and in the Florida A&M Marching 100 has created a culture of corruption that tacitly approves of the persistent and deadly hazing that occures within the Marching 100 and Florida A&M University.

FCRA likened the situation to the scandal with the coaching staff and administrators at Penn State University. Read the full statement here.

Under Florida Statute, any death that happens as a result of hazing is a third-degree felony.

Is secrecy buying these girls a better life?

A cop says this about a Los Angeles sorority: ""I've had an easier time infiltrating street gangs than penetrating this organization."

Sandy Banks of the Los Angeles Times reports on a lawsuit regarding two girls, Kristin High and Kenitha Saafir who died during a sorority hazing for Cal State Los Angeles. Banks' reporting is all the more interesting because she reveals that she is glad she pledged a sorority and went through hazing when she was in college.

Kristin's mother told Banks, "Kristin was always a type-A daughter. Super student, athlete, campus leader, mother of a 2-year-old son. Joining Alpha Kappa Alpha was something she had always wanted.

The reporter continues:
"But [Kristin's] mother said the weeks-long process of pledging was more grueling than Kristin had imagined. She'd straggle home late at night, exhausted and edgy. She wouldn't talk about what was going on. "I didn't worry as much as I should," Strong-Fargas said this week. "There were things I missed, because I trusted her. Kristin was always on top of things."

"According to her family's lawsuit, Kristin, Kenitha and two other pledges were worked nightly to exhaustion, in sessions that often lasted until 1 or 2 a.m.

"The night they died, the lawsuit claims, they'd spent hours at the beach doing calisthenics before they were ordered to walk backward into the ocean. A wave hit Kenitha and knocked her down. Kristin knew Kenitha couldn't swim, so she went in after her. Both were dragged by high waves under the water, the lawsuit alleges.

"That is what Kristin's mother believes, based on witness accounts collected by the family's private investigator, Robert Freeman.

"She doesn't know for sure because the two pledges who survived won't talk to her.

"The next day, when the young women brought Kristin's car home, her mother said Kristin's pledge journal was missing and numbers had been deleted from her cellphone. "They wanted to just drop the keys and run," Strong-Fargas said when I interviewed her this week at the small Christian school she runs in South Los Angeles.

""These were girls who had spent hours at our home, who had eaten with my family, played with Kristin's son. They were the only ones who could tell me what happened to my daughter. And they couldn't even look at me in my face.""

"...According to those who track hazing injuries, more than 80 pledges have been killed or injured around the country in the last 15 years during rites that involve binge drinking, beatings or extreme physical exertion. But the deaths of Kristin and Kenitha had special resonance among Greek-letter organizations. "Their deaths were like 9/11 for fraternities and sororities," said Lawrence Ross Jr., the author of a book on black Greek organizations and an anti-hazing lecturer on campuses. "It forced a lot of people out of denial."

"As a reporter, I covered the story when they died. I suspected from the first bare-bones account that this was no simple jaunt on the beach. Because when I was a college student, I pledged a sorority.

"The insults, the paddling, the forced exercise routines that I endured went beyond humiliating and veered perilously close to dangerous. But I didn't balk.

"Then, I believed the party line: Surviving brutality was a badge of honor, keeping secrets a measure of loyalty. Now, I'm not so sure.

"I've always been glad that I pledged and proud I made it through. As difficult as it sometimes was, the process gave me confidence, and taught me to draw on an inner strength that's served me well in adulthood.

"But then I made it out alive.

"Now, 35 years down the line, I'm no longer courting the respect of would-be sorority sisters. I'm a mother with a daughter in college. And I'm wondering what secrets I'll be willing to share if she comes to me one day and says, "Mom, I'm thinking of pledging a sorority.""

Full article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks15sep15,1,36756.column?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

Here is a link to the attorneys who represented Kristin's family:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.tobinpr.com/newsLetter2/images/Kristin_High_Photo.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.tobinpr.com/newsLetter2/html/KristinHigh.htm&h=901&w=593&sz=46&hl=en&start=1&sig2=51rU7Do6DFMi9pwDEflsxQ&tbnid=QThZJeWXYAaejM:&tbnh=146&tbnw=96&ei=YDjsRpKNJKaYggPaj4i8AQ&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522kristin%2Bhigh%2522%26gbv%3D2%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG