East Lansing Fraternity Hazing Death — What the Law Allows Your Family to Do
If you are reading this page, someone you love may have died or been seriously injured in a fraternity hazing event at Michigan State University or another campus in this state. You may have just learned that a young person you raised — someone who was supposed to be building a future — was found unconscious in a basement with a blood-alcohol level nearly five times the legal driving limit, surrounded by the people who were supposed to be his brothers. You are probably being contacted by people who sound sympathetic and are not. And you need to know, right now, what the law actually allows your family to do about it.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm. We are a trial firm that takes Michigan hazing wrongful-death and catastrophic-injury cases. Our managing partner, Ralph Manginello, is currently the lead counsel in an active $10 million hazing lawsuit against a university fraternity — we know this area of law because we are litigating it right now, not reading about it from the sidelines. And what we can tell you is this: the death of a 21-year-old from acute ethanol toxicity at .386 BAC during a fraternity event is not an accident. It is a predictable, documented, industry-wide pattern, and the law in Michigan gives families more tools to hold people accountable than most people realize.
The first thing you need to understand is that a hazing death is never one person’s fault, and the case is never against one defendant. The fraternity member who organized the event, the local chapter, the national fraternity organization, the university that allowed the chapter to operate on its campus, and the property owner where it happened can all be part of the accountability picture. The second thing is that evidence — the text messages, the group chats, the photographs fraternity members took of unconscious pledges, the surveillance footage, the social media posts — is being deleted right now, by people who know exactly what they did and are counting on you not acting fast enough to preserve it. That is why the first conversation we have with a family is not about money. It is about sending the letters that freeze the evidence before it disappears.
Can a Family Sue a Fraternity for a Hazing Death in Michigan?
Yes. The criminal prosecution of the individual fraternity member — the one the news calls the “pledge master” — is the state’s case, and it is important, but it is not your family’s case. Your family’s case is a civil wrongful-death lawsuit that runs on a completely separate track, in a completely separate courtroom, with completely separate defendants, and the civil case does not wait for the criminal case to finish. In fact, the civil case often moves faster, because the evidence that proves what happened is perishable in ways we will explain below.
Michigan’s antihazing criminal statute — known as Garret’s Law — is the law under which the criminal charges were filed. The Michigan Supreme Court just upheld that law against a constitutional challenge, rejecting arguments that it was unconstitutionally vague, overbroad, or a violation of freedom of association. That ruling matters to your civil case in a specific way: it confirms that hazing is a recognized, clearly-defined harm under Michigan law, and that the people who organize hazing events cannot hide behind the First Amendment when someone dies. The civil wrongful-death claim, though, is built on Michigan’s wrongful-death statute and common-law negligence — a separate body of law that lets your family seek money damages from every person and entity whose choices contributed to the death.
The civil case is where the real accountability lives, because the criminal system can only put one person in prison. The civil system can make the local chapter pay. It can make the national fraternity pay. It can make the university answer for letting a chapter with a hazing culture operate on its campus. And it can compensate your family for what was taken from you — a calculation that, for a 21-year-old, spans decades of lost life, lost earnings, and lost relationship.
Who Can Be Held Legally Responsible for a Hazing Death
This is the section where most families get misled. The obvious defendant — the individual fraternity member who organized the event — is usually the person with the least money and the least insurance. The real defendants, the ones with assets and coverage and something to lose, sit in layers above and around that individual. A hazing case that names only the pledge master is a case that will recover almost nothing, because a college student’s personal assets will not pay for a funeral, let alone a lifetime of lost earnings. Here is the full defendant map:
The individual organizer. The member who planned the event, coordinated the logistics, bought or supplied the alcohol, and physically pushed the pledges to drink. In the East Lansing case, court documents describe a member who planned the party, coordinated the event, and may have physically taped alcohol bottles to the pledges’ hands. That level of direct, physical coercion is not “encouragement” — it is the deliberate engineering of a dangerous situation. The individual faces criminal charges and civil liability, but is rarely the deep pocket.
Other fraternity members who participated. Every member who poured drinks, who pressured a pledge to consume more, who watched a person lose consciousness and did nothing, who took photographs of unconscious bodies instead of calling 911, shares in the civil liability. The photographs of shirtless, unconscious pledges with drawings on their torsos are not just evidence of the hazing itself — they are evidence of a culture in which members saw human beings in medical danger and chose to document it for entertainment rather than help.
The local fraternity chapter. The chapter is the organization that selected the pledges, ran the pledging process, and created the environment where “scrolling” — the practice of pressuring pledges to drink through relentless peer pressure — was an accepted tradition. A local chapter may be an unincorporated association, a student organization, or an entity recognized by the university. It may carry liability insurance, or it may have none. But it is a named defendant in every hazing case because the hazing was its event, run by its members, under its authority structure.
The national fraternity organization. This is the defendant most families do not know about and most defendants hope you never discover. The national organization — the entity that owns the fraternity’s name, collects dues from every chapter, sets risk-management policies, publishes anti-hazing rules, and sends representatives to inspect chapters — is the deep pocket in most hazing cases. The national fraternity benefits from every active chapter through recruitment, dues, brand growth, and alumni donations. When a chapter under its umbrella kills someone through hazing, the question is whether the national organization knew or should have known about the hazing culture, whether it enforced its own anti-hazing policies, and whether its oversight — or lack of it — contributed to the death. The national organization typically carries liability insurance, has substantial assets, and is the defendant that can actually fund a recovery that matches the loss.
The university. Michigan State University, like every major university with a Greek system, has policies against hazing, a office of Greek life, and a duty to protect its students from foreseeable harm. Hazing is not a secret — it has been a documented, public, industry-wide problem for decades, and every university knows it. The question is whether MSU enforced its policies, whether it investigated prior incidents at this chapter, whether it had notice of the hazing culture, and whether its failure to act was a cause of the death. Universities carry substantial insurance and have deep pockets, but claims against them can involve notice-of-claim requirements and governmental-immunity issues that must be analyzed early.
The property owner. Whoever owned or controlled the house where the event happened may face premises-liability claims, particularly if they knew or should have known that the property was being used for dangerous hazing activities. This could be the fraternity’s housing corporation, an alumni board, or a landlord.
The generalist files a lawsuit against the local chapter and the pledge master. The specialist maps every layer of the organizational structure — from the person who taped the bottle to the hand, up through the local chapter, the national fraternity, the university, and the property owner — and pursues every one of them, because each one has a different insurance tower and a different theory of liability, and missing any of them is how a case worth millions becomes a case worth nothing.
Michigan’s Wrongful Death Statute and the Deadline That Kills Cases
Michigan’s wrongful-death statute gives the estate of a person killed by another’s negligence the right to seek compensation for the surviving family. The statute requires that a personal representative be appointed for the estate — the one person authorized by law to bring the family’s claim. We handle that appointment. The statute also defines who can recover as a beneficiary — typically the spouse, children, and parents of the deceased — and how the recovery is distributed.
The deadline is unforgiving. In Michigan, a wrongful-death claim generally must be filed within three years of the date of death. This is the same limitation period that governs personal-injury actions in Michigan. Missing it means the case is dead — no matter how strong the evidence, no matter how egregious the conduct, no matter how many defendants you could have named. Three years sounds like a long time when you are grieving, but it is not, because the evidence that proves the case does not last three years. It does not even last three months.
There is a critical wrinkle: if the university is a defendant, Michigan’s governmental immunity laws may require a formal notice of intent to sue to be filed much earlier — in some cases, within months of the death. This is a trap that catches families who wait, because the governmental-claim clock can expire while the family is still in shock and before they have even spoken to a lawyer. Any delay in contacting counsel after a hazing death on a university campus can close the door on the university defendant — and the university is often one of the deepest pockets in the case.
Michigan also follows a modified comparative-negligence rule with a 51% bar. In plain English: if a jury decides your loved one was more than 50% responsible for their own death — “they chose to drink, they could have said no” — the family’s recovery is eliminated entirely. If the jury finds the victim 50% or less at fault, the recovery is reduced by that percentage. This is exactly why the defense in a hazing case works so hard to characterize the victim’s participation as voluntary. The counter — and it is a powerful one — is that “scrolling,” peer pressure from the people who control whether you are accepted into the group, and the physical act of taping bottles to hands is not voluntary. The entire power dynamic of pledging is designed to strip the pledge of the ability to say no, and the law recognizes coercion when it sees it.
“Garret’s Law is narrow and specific enough to hazing to not run afoul of First Amendment rights as pertaining to student group activities in general.”
That was the holding of the Michigan Court of Appeals, upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court, rejecting every constitutional challenge the defendant raised. What it means for your family is that the legal foundation for accountability is solid — the law is not going to be struck down, and the people who hide behind “freedom of association” when a pledge dies in their basement have already lost that argument in Michigan’s highest court.
The Medicine of Acute Ethanol Toxicity — What Actually Happens to the Body
A blood-alcohol concentration of .386 is not “very drunk.” It is in the lethal range. To understand what happened in that basement, you need to understand the mechanism, because the defense will try to minimize the medical reality — to make it sound like the victim just “had too much” rather than being systematically poisoned.
Alcohol is a central-nervous-system depressant. It enhances the brain’s inhibitory signals and suppresses its excitatory signals. As the concentration in the blood rises, the depression of brain function progresses in a predictable, dose-dependent cascade. At .08, a person is legally too impaired to drive. At .15 to .25, speech becomes slurred, balance is lost, and judgment is gone. At .25 to .35, the person enters stupor — responsive only to strong stimuli, at risk of injury from falls, and beginning to lose the protective reflexes that keep the airway clear. At .35 to .40, consciousness itself is lost, and the respiratory drive — the brainstem’s automatic instruction to breathe — begins to slow. At .40 and above, the respiratory center is so depressed that breathing can stop entirely. The person dies, most commonly, from one of three mechanisms: respiratory arrest leading to hypoxia (the brain is starved of oxygen), aspiration of vomit into the lungs while unconscious (the gag reflex is gone), or cardiac arrhythmia triggered by the metabolic chaos of severe alcohol poisoning.
A BAC of .386 sits right at the threshold where death becomes probable. A BAC of .427 — the level one of the surviving pledges reached — is even higher, and that survivor spent two days in the intensive care unit. These are not numbers a person reaches by casually “having a few drinks.” A 160-pound person would need to consume roughly 15 to 18 standard drinks in rapid succession to reach .386, and the only way to get there — especially in a time frame consistent with a single event — is through sustained, pressured, rapid consumption. That is what “scrolling” is: a structured process of pressuring pledges to drink far beyond any safe limit, as fast as possible, under the social threat that refusal means rejection from the group they are desperate to join.
The medical reality also answers the defense’s inevitable argument: that the victim “could have stopped.” At a BAC approaching .40, the brain’s ability to make decisions — including the decision to stop drinking — is already gone. The prefrontal cortex, which governs judgment and self-control, is the first region to be suppressed by alcohol. By the time the BAC is climbing past .20, the person is no longer making free choices about whether to continue. They are in a state of impaired consciousness, being pushed by peers whose acceptance they crave, in an environment designed to make refusal feel impossible. The bottles taped to the hands are the physical manifestation of the same psychological coercion that was already operating.
The cause of death listed in this case — acute ethanol toxicity — is the medical term for alcohol poisoning. It means the alcohol itself, at a concentration the body could not metabolize or survive, shut down the systems that keep a person alive. When the emergency responders arrived and found four unconscious young men in a basement, one of them was already not breathing. They attempted CPR. He could not be revived. He was pronounced dead at the scene. That sequence — unconsciousness, respiratory arrest, failed resuscitation, death — is the textbook progression of severe acute ethanol toxicity, and it is entirely preventable. It does not happen unless someone has been pushed to consume a lethal dose, and it does not happen unless the people around them failed to intervene at every stage.
For the survivors, the medical consequences extend beyond the acute event. A BAC of .427 means the brain was subjected to levels of alcohol that can cause permanent neurological injury. The ICU stay — two days of mechanical ventilation, fluid resuscitation, monitoring for aspiration pneumonia, cardiac monitoring, and the slow, dangerous process of the body metabolizing the poison — is just the beginning. Survivors of severe alcohol poisoning can face cognitive deficits, liver stress, and the psychological trauma of having nearly died while surrounded by people who were supposed to be their friends.
The Evidence Clock — What Exists, Who Holds It, and How Fast It Disappears
Every hazing case is an evidence race, and the family that calls a lawyer in the first week has a fundamentally different case from the one that waits six months. Here is what exists, where it sits, and how fast it can legally die:
Group chat messages and text messages. Fraternity members communicate through group chats, text threads, and messaging apps. The planning of the event, the instructions to the pledges, the “scrolling” coordination, the post-event reactions — all of it was likely in writing on someone’s phone. These messages can be deleted by any user at any time. There is no federal law forcing a messaging platform to retain them. The moment a member realizes a pledge died, the deletion begins. A preservation letter — sent immediately, naming every platform and every device — is the only thing that freezes this evidence.
Photographs and videos. The article describes pledges being photographed shirtless while unconscious, with drawings on their bodies. Those images are evidence of both the hazing and the depraved indifference of the people who took them. They may live on phones, in cloud backups, on social media, or in group chats. They can be deleted. They can be “lost” when a phone is replaced. The preservation demand must name every member present at the event and demand preservation of every device.
Surveillance footage. The house where the event happened may have had security cameras, a doorbell camera, or neighboring properties with surveillance. This footage shows who came and went, the condition of the pledges as they arrived and as they left (or were carried out), and the timeline of the event. Surveillance systems overwrite on rolling cycles — commonly 30 to 90 days. If no one demands preservation, the footage is gone.
The fraternity’s own documents. Pledge manuals, bylaws, event calendars, risk-management plans, the chapter’s own anti-hazing acknowledgments — these documents reveal the culture and the organizational knowledge of hazing. The national fraternity’s policies, inspection reports, and prior incident files show whether the national organization knew about the hazing culture. These are in the custody of the fraternity and its national headquarters. A litigation hold and discovery demand are how we get them.
University records. MSU’s conduct records, prior complaints about this chapter, Greek-life office inspections, disciplinary actions, and any reports of prior hazing at this fraternity are all discoverable, but some are also subject to FERPA and university retention policies that can destroy them on a fixed schedule. A public-records request and a preservation demand to the university must go out early.
Medical and autopsy records. The BAC results, the autopsy report, the EMS run sheets, the ER records — these are the objective proof of the harm. They are held by the medical examiner, the hospital, and the EMS agency. Hospital records are generally retained for several years, but EMS run sheets and dispatch records can have shorter retention windows. These are the foundation of the damages case and must be pulled and preserved.
Cell phone data. Location data, communication records, and deleted-message recovery from the phones of the fraternity members present at the event can reconstruct the timeline and the coordination. But cell phone data is fragile — providers have varying retention windows, and physical devices can be “lost,” factory-reset, or replaced.
Witness statements. The other pledges who survived are witnesses. So is every fraternity member who was present. These witnesses are college students — they graduate, they move, they hire lawyers, they stop talking. The ones who are most afraid are often the ones who know the most. Identifying and interviewing witnesses before they have been coached by the defense is time-critical work.
The preservation letter is the first document we send. It goes to every potential defendant and every third party that holds evidence — the local chapter, the national fraternity, the university, the property owner, every individual member we can identify, and every technology platform involved. That letter converts routine deletion into spoliation. If a defendant lets evidence die after receiving a preservation letter, the court can impose sanctions — including an adverse-inference instruction telling the jury to assume the destroyed evidence was as bad as the plaintiff says. That is leverage, and it begins the day you call.
The Insurance and Money Reality in a Hazing Death Case
A hazing wrongful-death case has multiple potential sources of recovery, and the defense will try to point you at the thinnest one. Here is the coverage map:
Individual members’ homeowners’ insurance. Some homeowners’ policies provide liability coverage for the negligent acts of a household member, even away from home. But many policies contain exclusions for intentional acts, criminal conduct, or acts arising from the furnishing of alcohol. Whether an individual member’s policy covers hazing conduct is a policy-by-policy, exclusion-by-exclusion fight that must be analyzed early.
Fraternity liability insurance. Some local chapters carry liability insurance. Some do not. The national fraternity organization typically carries a general-liability program that may or may not extend to the local chapter’s conduct. The coverage tower — primary, excess, and umbrella layers — determines how much money is actually available. In a wrongful-death case involving a 21-year-old, the potential damages can exceed any single policy, which is why reaching multiple defendants and multiple towers is the entire strategy.
The national fraternity’s assets. The national organization is typically a 501(c)(7) or similar entity with substantial assets — headquarters, endowments, investment accounts. If the national organization is found liable for failing to supervise its chapter, its own assets are on the table beyond any insurance policy.
The university’s insurance. Universities carry substantial self-insured retentions and commercial liability towers. If the university is found to have breached its duty to protect students from foreseeable hazing harm, its coverage is among the deepest pockets in the case. But governmental-immunity defenses and notice-of-claim requirements can complicate this path — which is why early legal analysis is essential.
Michigan does not generally cap non-economic damages in tort wrongful-death cases. Unlike some states that cap pain-and-suffering recoveries, Michigan’s tort system does not impose a blanket cap on non-economic damages in a wrongful-death case (medical-malpractice cases have a separate cap regime that does not apply here). This means a jury can award the full measure of human loss — the companionship, the guidance, the society, the emotional devastation of losing a child — without a statutory ceiling. This is a meaningful advantage in a hazing case, where the human loss is the core of the harm.
The damages categories in a hazing wrongful death include:
Economic losses: medical bills (emergency response, ER, attempted resuscitation), funeral and burial costs, and — most significantly — the lost future earnings and earning capacity of a 21-year-old who had an entire working life ahead. A forensic economist projects what that young person would have earned, with raises and benefits, across a 40-plus-year career. For a college student at a major university, that number alone can reach into the millions.
Non-economic losses: the conscious pain and suffering the victim experienced between the onset of the dangerous condition and death — the terror, the physical distress, the loss of bodily function. Also the loss of companionship, society, and guidance suffered by the family. In Michigan, the wrongful-death statute defines the beneficiaries and the categories of loss available to them.
Exemplary or punitive damages: Michigan law allows exemplary damages in cases involving intentional misconduct or gross negligence. A fraternity event where bottles were taped to pledges’ hands, where “scrolling” was an organized practice, where members photographed unconscious bodies — that is not ordinary negligence. Whether exemplary damages are available depends on the specific facts and the specific defendants, but the facts of a hazing death often support the argument.
Case value context: We are currently litigating a hazing wrongful-death and injury case valued at $10 million-plus. That case involves a different fraternity at a different university, but the structure is the same — a young person harmed by an organized hazing culture that the chapter, the national organization, and the university should have stopped. Hazing wrongful-death cases involving young adults with full earning careers ahead of them are high-value cases because the economic loss alone is enormous, and the human loss is beyond calculation. We do not promise a number — every case depends on its facts — but we can tell you that these are not small cases, and the defense knows it.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
The Defense Playbook — What the Other Side Will Do and How We Answer
In a hazing case, the defendants share a common set of defensive moves. The insurance adjusters, the fraternity’s lawyers, and the university’s counsel all run variations of the same playbook. Here is each play and our counter:
Play 1: “They chose to drink — it was voluntary.” The defense will frame the victim as a willing participant who could have stopped at any time. This is the assumption-of-risk argument, and it is designed to trigger Michigan’s 51% comparative-negligence bar — if the jury finds the victim more than 50% responsible, the family recovers nothing.
Our counter: The entire structure of pledging is coercive. The power dynamic — where a group of older members controls whether a younger student is accepted into a social organization they deeply want to join — strips the voluntariness out of every “choice.” When the practice is called “scrolling,” when peer pressure is the documented mechanism of consumption, and when alcohol bottles are physically taped to the pledges’ hands, the word “voluntary” does not apply. The medical reality reinforces this: by the time the BAC is above .20, the brain’s decision-making center is already suppressed. The person being “pressured” is no longer neurologically capable of the judgment the defense demands they should have exercised.
Play 2: “The local chapter is independent — the national organization isn’t responsible.” The national fraternity will argue that each chapter is autonomous, that it sets its own traditions, and that the national cannot be liable for a local chapter’s hazing event it did not direct.
Our counter: The national organization owns the brand, collects the dues, publishes the risk-management policies, sends representatives to inspect chapters, and recruits new members using the chapter’s existence. It benefits from every active chapter. When hazing is a documented, industry-wide problem that every national fraternity has known about for decades, a national organization that does not actively investigate, enforce, and sanction hazing at its chapters is not “uninvolved” — it is negligent. Prior incidents at the same chapter, anti-hazing policies the national published but never enforced, and inspection reports that missed or ignored the hazing culture are all evidence of the national’s contribution to the harm.
Play 3: “The university didn’t know about this specific event.” The university will argue that it cannot be liable for a private fraternity event it had no specific notice of, and that it has anti-hazing policies on the books.
Our counter: Hazing is not a surprise to any university with a Greek system. It is a documented, recurring, foreseeable risk that every major university has been on notice about for decades. The question is not whether MSU knew about this specific event — it is whether MSU enforced its anti-hazing policies, investigated prior incidents at this chapter, monitored the Greek system adequately, and took meaningful action against chapters with hazing cultures. A policy on a website that is never enforced is not protection — it is a document designed to provide legal cover while the danger continues.
Play 4: The fast, friendly settlement offer. Within weeks of a hazing death, an insurance adjuster or a fraternity representative may contact the family with a settlement offer — often a number that sounds large to a family in shock but is a fraction of what the case is worth. The offer comes with a release that, once signed, extinguishes every claim against every defendant.
Our counter: Never accept a settlement offer before the full scope of the harm is understood, before every defendant is identified, and before the evidence is preserved and examined. A $100,000 offer in a wrongful-death case involving a 21-year-old with a full earning career ahead is not a settlement — it is a surrender. The family that signs a release in the first month, before they have a lawyer, has given away a case worth exponentially more for a number that will not even cover the funeral. The first call should be to a lawyer, not the first acceptance of a check.
Play 5: Social media surveillance. The defense will monitor the family’s social media posts and the posts of anyone connected to the victim, looking for anything that can be twisted into evidence that the family is not really suffering or that the victim was reckless.
Our counter: We tell every family from day one: do not post about the case, the death, the fraternity, the university, or your grief on any platform. The defense is watching. Everything you say can and will be used. Grieve privately. Let the case be fought in the courtroom, not on a Facebook feed.
How We Build a Hazing Wrongful-Death Case — The Proof Story
Here is how a case like this is actually assembled, from the first phone call to the courtroom:
Week one. The preservation letters go out — to the local chapter, the national fraternity, the university, the property owner, and every individual member we can identify. These letters order the recipients to freeze all evidence: text messages, group chats, photographs, videos, surveillance footage, fraternity documents, university records, and physical evidence from the house. We begin the appointment of the personal representative, which Michigan law requires to bring the wrongful-death claim. We file any necessary notice of intent to sue against governmental defendants. We pull the medical records, the autopsy report, and the EMS run sheets. We identify and begin interviewing witnesses — the surviving pledges, former fraternity members, anyone with knowledge of the chapter’s hazing culture — before they have been coached by defense counsel.
Weeks two through eight. The records demands go out. We demand the fraternity’s bylaws, pledge manuals, risk-management policies, event records, prior-incident files, and the national organization’s inspection reports and disciplinary history for the chapter. We demand the university’s Greek-life office records, conduct files for this fraternity, prior hazing complaints, and the university’s own anti-hazing enforcement records. We subpoena phone records and preserve devices. We engage a forensic toxicologist to explain the medicine — to translate a BAC of .386 into the specific, progressive shutdown of the brain and body that it represents, and to explain why the consumption was not voluntary. We begin building the damages model with a forensic economist.
Months two through six. Discovery. The depositions begin. We depose the fraternity members who were present — and their answers, under oath, either confirm the hazing culture or expose the lies that prove consciousness of guilt. We depose the national fraternity’s risk-management director about what they knew and what they did. We depose the university’s Greek-life administrators about their enforcement of anti-hazing policies. The defense deposes the family — and we prepare them for every question, because the defense will try to make the victim look like the problem.
The number. The case value is built from the evidence. The economic loss is a calculation: a 21-year-old’s projected lifetime earnings, reduced to present value, plus medical costs, funeral costs, and any other out-of-pocket losses. The non-economic loss is the human cost: the pain the victim suffered, the companionship the family lost, the future that was stolen. The exemplary-damages argument is built from the conduct: the organized nature of the hazing, the documented culture, the failure of every institution above the individual to stop it. All of it is presented to a jury in the Ingham County Circuit Court — twelve people from the community where this happened, who understand what a fraternity is, what hazing is, and what a life is worth.
The First 72 Hours After a Hazing Death — What Your Family Should Do
If the death just happened, here is what matters most, in order:
Medical first. If anyone was injured and is still hospitalized, make sure they are receiving appropriate care. Request copies of all medical records. If there are surviving victims who were discharged, encourage them to follow up with medical care — the full extent of alcohol-poisoning injury may not be apparent immediately.
Do not sign anything. If a fraternity representative, an insurance adjuster, a university official, or anyone else asks you to sign a document — a release, a waiver, an acknowledgment, a settlement — do not sign it. Do not accept money. Do not agree to anything. Everything can wait until you have a lawyer.
Do not post on social media. Do not post about the death, the fraternity, the university, the event, or your grief. The defense is already watching. If you have already posted, stop now. Do not delete posts (deletion can itself create problems) — just stop adding. Grieve privately, with your family, off the public record.
Preserve what you have. If your loved one’s phone, computer, or belongings are available to you, secure them. Do not attempt to access or search the devices — preserve them as-is for forensic examination. If you have any photographs, documents, or communications related to the death or the fraternity, keep them and bring them to your first meeting with counsel.
Write down what you know. While your memory is fresh, write down everything you know about the event: how your loved one was recruited, what they told you about the pledging process, any changes in their behavior, any communications with fraternity members, anything they said about the event before it happened. Memory degrades, and a written timeline created in the first days is the most reliable record you will have.
Call a lawyer. Not next month. Not after the funeral. Now. The preservation letters that freeze the evidence are the most time-critical step in the entire case, and they only work if they are sent before the evidence is deleted. The notice-of-claim deadline for a university defendant may be running. The statute of limitations is running. The evidence is dying. A free consultation costs you nothing and commits you to nothing — but it starts the clock working for your family instead of against you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue a fraternity for a hazing death in Michigan?
Yes. A civil wrongful-death lawsuit is separate from any criminal prosecution. The criminal case is the state’s — it can send an individual to prison. The civil case is your family’s — it can make every person and entity that contributed to the death pay compensation. The individual member who organized the hazing, the local chapter, the national fraternity organization, the university, and the property owner can all be defendants. The civil case does not wait for the criminal case to finish, and it often moves faster because the evidence is perishable.
How long do I have to file a hazing wrongful death lawsuit in Michigan?
Michigan generally requires wrongful-death claims to be filed within three years of the date of death. But do not wait. If the university is a defendant, a governmental notice-of-claim deadline may require action much sooner — potentially within months. And the evidence that proves the case — text messages, group chats, surveillance footage, photographs — can be deleted in days. The statute of limitations is the outer deadline. The real deadline is the evidence clock, and it runs much faster.
What if the fraternity says my loved one “chose” to drink?
This is the defense’s first move, and it is designed to trigger Michigan’s 51% comparative-negligence bar. But the entire structure of pledging is coercive — older members control whether a younger student is accepted into a group they desperately want to join. “Scrolling” — the documented practice of pressuring pledges to drink through sustained peer pressure — is not voluntary. Taping bottles to someone’s hands is not voluntary. And by the time the blood-alcohol level is above .20, the brain’s ability to make free choices about whether to continue drinking is neurologically suppressed. The defense calls it a choice. The medicine calls it poisoning.
Does the national fraternity organization have any liability for what a local chapter does?
Potentially, yes. The national fraternity owns the brand, collects dues, sets policies, sends inspectors, and benefits from every active chapter. When hazing is a documented, industry-wide problem that every national organization has known about for decades, a national that does not actively investigate, enforce, and sanction hazing at its chapters is not “uninvolved” — it is negligent. Prior incidents at the same chapter, anti-hazing policies the national published but never enforced, and inspection reports that missed or ignored the hazing culture are evidence of the national’s contribution to the harm. The national organization is typically the deep pocket in a hazing case, and it is the defendant the defense most hopes you never find.
Can the university be held responsible for fraternity hazing?
Potentially, yes. Every major university with a Greek system knows that hazing is a documented, recurring risk. The question is whether the university enforced its anti-hazing policies, investigated prior incidents at the chapter, monitored its Greek system, and took meaningful action against chapters with hazing cultures. A policy on a website that is never enforced is not protection — it is legal cover. Claims against a public university in Michigan may involve governmental-immunity defenses and notice-of-claim requirements that must be analyzed and acted on early, which is another reason not to wait.
What evidence disappears fastest in a hazing case?
Group chat messages and text messages — these can be deleted by any user at any time, and there is no federal law forcing a platform to retain them. Surveillance footage — typically overwrites on a 30-to-90-day cycle. Photographs on phones and social media — can be deleted instantly. Witness availability — college students graduate, move, hire lawyers, and stop talking. The preservation letter is the first document we send, and it goes out the day you call, because it converts routine deletion into spoliation — a separate violation the court can punish.
How much is a hazing wrongful death case worth?
Every case depends on its facts, and we do not promise a number. But the structure of the loss is significant: a 21-year-old had a full 40-plus-year earning career ahead, and the forensic-economic projection of that lost income alone can reach into the millions. The non-economic losses — the conscious pain and suffering the victim experienced, the loss of companionship for the family, the emotional devastation — are recoverable in Michigan without a general cap. And if the conduct was egregious enough — organized hazing, physical coercion, documented indifference to human life — exemplary damages may be available. We are currently litigating a hazing case valued at $10 million-plus. These are not small cases. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What is Garret’s Law and how does it affect my civil case?
Garret’s Law is Michigan’s criminal antihazing statute — the law under which the individual fraternity member in the East Lansing case was charged. The Michigan Supreme Court just upheld its constitutionality, rejecting arguments that it was vague, overbroad, or a violation of freedom of association. That ruling matters to your civil case because it confirms that hazing is a clearly-defined, legally-recognized harm under Michigan law. Your civil wrongful-death case is built on Michigan’s wrongful-death statute and common-law negligence — a separate legal framework from the criminal statute — but Garret’s Law’s survival means the defendants cannot argue that the legal standard for hazing is unclear.
Should our family talk to the insurance adjuster who called us?
No. Do not give a recorded statement. Do not answer questions about the event. Do not accept a settlement offer. Do not sign anything. The adjuster’s job is to minimize what the insurance company pays your family, and every word you say will be recorded, transcribed, and used to reduce or eliminate your claim. The adjuster sounds sympathetic and is not. If an adjuster contacts you, say: “I need to speak with a lawyer first,” and end the call. Then call us.
What does it cost to hire a hazing wrongful death lawyer?
Nothing upfront. We work on contingency — we do not get paid unless we win your case. Our fee is 33.33% of the recovery before trial and 40% if the case goes to trial. We front every cost of the case — the preservation letters, the records demands, the expert witnesses, the court filing fees — and those costs are reimbursed from the recovery. If there is no recovery, you owe us nothing. The first consultation is free, it is confidential, and it commits you to nothing.
Why This Firm
Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims from people exactly like your family. He sat across the table from the lawyers who represent fraternities and universities. He knows how they value a claim, how they set reserves, how they pick their doctors, and how they engineer delays. Now he sits on your side of that table, and he uses that inside knowledge for injured families. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter.
Ralph Manginello has 27-plus years in the courtroom, including federal court. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which means he knows how to find the story the evidence tells and how to tell it to a jury. And he is currently the lead counsel in an active $10 million-plus hazing lawsuit — Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston — a case that targets the same layered defendant structure we pursue in every hazing death: the individual, the chapter, the national organization, and the university. We are not reading about hazing law. We are litigating it.
Our firm has recovered $50 million-plus in aggregate for injured clients. We work on contingency — no fee unless we win. We are available 24/7, with a live staff, not an answering service. And the first call is always free. If, after we talk, we are not the right fit for your family, we will tell you — and we will point you to someone who is.
If your family has lost someone to hazing in East Lansing, at MSU, or anywhere in Michigan — or if someone you love survived a hazing event with serious injury — call us now. The evidence is dying. The deadlines are running. And the people who caused this are counting on you to wait.
1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911). Free consultation. No fee unless we win. Contact us.
Hablamos Español. Lupe conducts full consultations in Spanish, without an interpreter, for families who need it.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. This page is legal information, not legal advice. Contacting the firm is free and confidential.