Texas A&M Kappa Sigma Hazing: When “Black Urine” Means Your Child’s Body Is Eating Itself
The phone call from College Station came at a hour no parent should have to answer. Your son is in the hospital. He cannot walk. His urine is the color of dark tea or cola — what the nurses called “black urine.” And someone used a word you have never heard before: rhabdomyolysis.
We are going to tell you exactly what that word means, what is happening inside your child’s body right now, and what the law gives you the power to do about it. We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm. Ralph Manginello has spent 27-plus years in Texas courtrooms, including federal court, and right now he is lead counsel in an active ten-million-dollar hazing lawsuit against a University of Houston fraternity. Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where claims are priced and delays are engineered — before he chose to sit on your side of the table. He conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter.
What happened to your son at Kappa Sigma is not a “tradition.” It is not “boys being boys.” It is a catastrophic medical event caused by deliberate physical abuse, and under the Texas Hazing Act, the people who organized it — and the institutions that let them — are legally answerable for every damaged muscle fiber, every clogged kidney tubule, and every day your child spends learning to walk again.
Let us start with the medicine, because that is what is scaring you most.
What Rhabdomyolysis Actually Does to the Human Body
Rhabdomyolysis is not a rare condition that your son was unlucky enough to catch. It is the predictable, well-documented, textbook consequence of pushing a human body past its mechanical limits. The fraternity did not discover a new disease. They took a known mechanism of catastrophic injury and made it happen on purpose.
Here is the mechanism, in the plain language a trauma surgeon would use at the bedside.
Your son’s muscles are made of billions of cells, and inside each one of those cells is a protein called myoglobin — the molecule that holds oxygen for the muscle the way hemoglobin holds it for the blood. When muscle is healthy, myoglobin stays locked inside the cell. When muscle is destroyed — by extreme exertion, by repeated blunt force, by prolonged compression, by dehydration, by any combination of those — the cell wall ruptures and myoglobin pours into the bloodstream.
That is where the “black urine” comes from. The kidneys, which are designed to filter blood, are suddenly drowning in a protein they were never built to handle. In small amounts the kidney can clear myoglobin. Past a tipping point, the myoglobin clogs and chemically burns the kidney’s filtering tubules — specifically the distal convoluted tubules, where the damage concentrates. The kidney begins to shut down. The urine darkens to the color of cola, tea, or worse because it is carrying the wreckage of dying muscle out of a body that cannot process it fast enough.
Doctors track this with a blood test called creatine kinase, or CK. A normal CK might be in the hundreds. The conventional diagnostic threshold for rhabdomyolysis is a CK at least five times the upper limit of normal — roughly above 1,000 units per liter. But in severe hazing cases, CK levels can explode past 10,000, past 50,000, past 100,000. Published crush-syndrome research found that a CK level above 8,500 predicted kidney failure. The number is not a curiosity — it is a countdown.
And CK does not peak immediately. It climbs for 24 to 72 hours after the injury. A single early blood draw that looks “concerning but manageable” can be a snapshot of a storm that has not finished building. The only honest medical practice is serial draws — testing CK on a schedule, watching the curve, and intervening before the kidneys fail. When the chart shows one draw and then silence, that gap is not reassurance. It is a missed window.
The second killer is potassium. Every muscle cell stores potassium at high concentration. When those cells rupture, potassium dumps into the blood. Because the kidneys are failing at the same time — the organs that would normally clear excess potassium — the level climbs unchecked. High blood potassium scrambles the heart’s electrical rhythm and can stop it. Published research on crush syndrome found that approximately 20 percent of crush victims die of cardiac arrest induced by hyperkalemia or hypovolemic shock within a short time after the muscle damage occurs. The potassium number that triggers emergency dialysis is above 7 milliequivalents per liter. In a rhabdomyolysis case, that threshold can arrive fast.
Your son’s inability to walk is not dramatic exaggeration. It is the mechanical consequence of muscles that are physically destroyed — cells ruptured, tissue swollen, the muscle sheaths under so much pressure from internal swelling that blood cannot get in and nerves cannot fire. This is called compartment syndrome, and it operates on a clock of its own. The window to surgically open the fascial sheath and relieve the pressure — a procedure called a fasciotomy — is roughly six hours. Inside that window, limb function recovers almost completely. Past it, the muscle dies and the damage is permanent. When a chart shows hours of escalating pain complaints before anyone called a surgeon, that gap is not bad luck. It is a clock running out in plain sight.
The long-term threat is the kidney. Acute kidney injury from rhabdomyolysis can require dialysis — sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. A meaningful fraction of severe rhabdomyolysis survivors do not fully recover renal function and progress toward chronic kidney disease and lifelong dialysis. If the damage is severe enough, a kidney transplant enters the conversation. That is why the financial value of these cases ranges so widely — a full recovery in two weeks and a lifetime on dialysis are both possible outcomes from the same starting injury, and the medical records built in the first 72 hours are what determine which path your son is on.
This is not “sore muscles.” This is a body eating itself, and the evidence is in the toilet and in the blood.
The Texas Hazing Act: Consent Is Not a Defense
Texas wrote its anti-hazing law with full knowledge of the fraternity defense playbook. The statute is the Texas Hazing Act, found in the Texas Education Code, and it was built to close every escape hatch the “he agreed to it” crowd would try to open.
The single most important sentence in the entire statute, for your family, is this one:
Under Texas law, consent is not a defense to a charge of hazing.
That sentence is the wall between your son and the fraternity’s first argument. They will say he volunteered. They will say he could have walked out. They will say every pledge goes through it, that it is tradition, that he wanted to be a brother. Texas law already answered them, in advance, in writing: none of that matters. Consent does not convert hazing into something lawful. The statute was written precisely because the legislature knew that fraternity pledging is coercive by its nature — the power imbalance between actives and pledges, the desire for belonging, the threat of social exile — and that “he said yes” is not a defense to deliberate physical abuse.
The Texas Education Code §§ 37.151 through 37.157 define what hazing is, make it a criminal offense, and establish the civil liability framework. Texas Education Code § 51.936 requires universities to report hazing incidents and maintain records. These are not advisory guidelines — they are a statutory standard of care that the Kappa Sigma Tau chapter and its members were legally bound to meet.
Texas also follows a modified comparative negligence rule with a 51 percent bar, meaning a plaintiff’s recovery is reduced by their share of fault and barred entirely if they are 51 percent or more at fault. But in hazing cases, this rule is rarely a factor — the coercive nature of fraternity pledging generally invalidates any “assumption of risk” defense, and the Texas Hazing Act’s consent-is-not-a-defense provision strips away the main argument the defense would use to pin percentage points on the injured pledge. Charitable immunity, which some organizations use to shield themselves from liability, generally does not apply to social fraternities in Texas.
The Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Chapter 41 governs exemplary damages — what most people call punitive damages. When conduct is done with fraud, malice, or gross negligence — and “torturing pledges” until their muscles break down and their kidneys fail is the textbook definition of gross negligence — Texas law allows a jury to award punishment damages on top of compensation. That exposure is what gives a hazing case its leverage. The fraternity’s insurer knows that a Brazos County jury hearing what was done to your son may return a verdict that exceeds the policy limits, and that knowledge is what forces real money to the table.
Who Is Liable: The Fraternity’s Corporate Structure
A fraternity is not one thing. It is a stack of separate legal entities, each with its own insurance, each designed to point at the others when someone gets hurt. Understanding this structure is the first step to holding the right defendants accountable — because naming the wrong entity or missing a layer can mean the difference between a real recovery and an empty judgment.
The national organization — Kappa Sigma Fraternity — is the deep pocket. It licenses the chapter, collects dues, sets the risk-management policies, and claims authority over its chapters when it is convenient and disclaims responsibility when it is not. Its liability runs on two theories: vicarious liability for the actions of its chapter, and direct negligence for failing to implement and enforce the mandatory anti-hazing protocols it promised its insurance carrier and its members it would maintain. The Fraternal Institutional Programming Group, or FIPG, guidelines set the industry standard for fraternity risk management — and if the national organization’s own guidelines were violated, that violation is strong evidence of a breached duty of care. Discovery at the national level is where we look for evidence that they were on notice of previous incidents at the Tau chapter — the “minor” infractions that were never acted on, the warnings that were papered over, the chapter that should have been pulled but was not.
The local chapter — Kappa Sigma, Tau Chapter, at Texas A&M — is directly liable for planning and executing the hazing activities that caused your son’s rhabdomyolysis. The chapter is where the decisions were made: what the pledges would be forced to do, how long, how hard, with what “instruction” to be careful. The chapter’s officers — the pledge educator, the rush chair, the president — are individually liable for the intentional torts of assault and battery and for violations of the Texas Hazing Act. Individual members who participated can be named personally. In a case where pledges were rendered unable to walk, the people who ordered the physical activity and the people who enforced it are not shielded by the fraternity’s corporate structure. They face personal liability.
The fraternity housing corporation is a separate entity that may own or manage the property where the hazing occurred. If the hazing happened on property controlled by a housing corporation that knew or should have known about the illegal activities taking place there, premises liability attaches. This entity is often overlooked by lawyers who do not know the Greek-life structure — and it is often where additional insurance coverage sits.
Texas law allows us to pursue joint and several liability for the indivisible injury of rhabdomyolysis. That means every participant in the hazing ritual who contributed to the harm — the national organization that failed to supervise, the chapter that planned it, the officers who ran it, the members who enforced it, the housing corporation that provided the space — can each be held responsible for the full damage. The kidney does not care which specific brother caused which specific percentage of the muscle breakdown. The injury is indivisible, and Texas law treats it that way.
The Evidence That Is Disappearing Right Now
Every hour that passes after a hazing incident, proof is dying. The fraternity knows this. The evidence clock is the single most important reason to call a lawyer now, not after your son is discharged.
GroupMe, WhatsApp, and Snapchat logs are the first to go. Fraternity communications about hazing live on disappearing-message platforms by design — Snapchat messages vanish by default, GroupMe threads can be deleted by any participant, and the “code of silence” is the fraternity’s strongest institutional defense. The messages that prove the hazing was planned, that prove the “be careful” instruction was given, that prove the cover-up started the moment your son could not stand up — those messages are being deleted right now, some of them automatically, some of them by hand. A preservation letter from our firm demands that these communications be frozen. Without that letter, they disappear into the platform’s auto-delete architecture, and no subpoena can bring them back.
Medical records — the CK levels, the myoglobin results, the creatinine readings, the kidney function panels, the nursing notes documenting when your son arrived and what he could and could not do — are stable. They exist in the hospital’s electronic medical record system. But they need forensic review. A single CK draw is a snapshot of a curve. The trend — whether the CK was climbing, how fast, when it peaked — is what tells the story of severity. We work with board-certified nephrologists who can read those trends and testify that “black urine” is the literal visual signature of a body consuming its own muscle tissue under extreme trauma. Those records are the scientific proof of what was done to your son.
Fraternity pledge books, ritual manuals, and chapter meeting minutes are the documents that establish this was not a one-time lapse but a tradition. The pledge book may contain the calendar of pledge activities, the “pt” schedule, the assignments that escalated until your son’s muscles failed. The ritual manual may describe the practices that the national organization either authorized or should have known about. These documents have a high risk of destruction once an investigation begins — they are physical objects, easily burned, easily “misplaced,” easily claimed to have been lost in a house renovation. The preservation demand must reach the chapter and the housing corporation before the shredder does.
Surveillance footage from the fraternity house, from campus cameras, from nearby businesses — this is the most critical and most fragile evidence of all. Video that shows the state of the pledges — whether they were carried out, whether they were stumbling, whether they were visibly in distress — can be overwritten on a 7-to-30-day cycle. Once the system cycles, the footage is gone forever. This is why the preservation letter goes out the day you call us, not the week after. The footage from the night your son was injured is on a clock measured in days.
When a defendant lets required evidence die after receiving a preservation demand, the law answers. An adverse-inference instruction allows the jury to assume the lost record was as bad as the plaintiff says it was. Spoliation sanctions can range from monetary penalties to, in the most egregious cases, default judgment. The leverage begins the moment the letter is on file.
What a Hazing Rhabdomyolysis Case Is Worth
The value of a rhabdomyolysis hazing case is driven by one medical variable: whether your son’s kidneys recover. The range is wide because the outcomes are wide.
At the low end — a case where the kidney injury is acute but reversible, where dialysis is temporary or avoided, where your son regains full function after weeks of treatment and rehabilitation — the case value framework begins around $750,000. That figure covers the emergency room stabilization, the ICU monitoring, the physical therapy, the medical follow-up, the pain and suffering of a hospital stay where your child’s urine was the color of used motor oil, and the mental anguish of knowing it was done to him deliberately by people he was trying to earn the trust of.
At the high end — a case where the kidney damage is permanent, where your son faces chronic kidney disease, where dialysis becomes a regular part of life, where a kidney transplant is on the horizon — the value framework reaches toward $6,000,000 and potentially beyond. A lifetime of dialysis costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. A kidney transplant costs hundreds of thousands more, and the immunosuppressant medications required to prevent rejection run tens of thousands annually for the rest of the recipient’s life. A life-care planner builds a cost stream that runs from the first hospital day through every future surgery, medication, therapy session, and lost year of earning capacity. A forensic economist reduces that stream to present value. The number that results is not a demand pulled from the air — it is arithmetic, built on your son’s actual medical record and his actual projected needs.
Non-economic damages — the physical pain of muscles destroying themselves, the inability to walk, the terror of watching your urine turn black, the mental anguish of being tortured by people who called it brotherhood — are recoverable in Texas and are not subject to a cap in a non-medical-malpractice personal injury case.
Exemplary damages under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Chapter 41 are highly probable given the intentional and reckless nature of the conduct. When the evidence shows that fraternity officers organized physical activities designed to push pledges past their bodies’ limits, that they continued after visible signs of distress, and that they instructed others to “be careful” as if that phrase were a substitute for stopping — that is the conscious indifference that Texas law defines as gross negligence. A jury that hears what was done to your son is a jury that can punish the people who did it, and the fraternity’s insurer knows that.
When multiple plaintiffs are involved — and in a pledge-class hazing incident, they usually are — the pressure on the fraternity’s insurance tower increases. A global settlement above policy limits becomes the realistic path, and a Stowers demand — a formal settlement offer at or near the policy limits that puts the insurer on the hook for any verdict exceeding those limits if they refuse — is the tool that forces the insurer to choose between paying now or risking far more later. Lupe Peña knows this mechanism from the inside, because he spent years on the other side of it, in the rooms where insurers decide whether to accept a Stowers demand or gamble on a jury.
The Playbook: How Fraternities and Their Insurers Try to Silence Families
Fraternities and their insurance carriers have a playbook. Lupe Peña knows it because he used to run it. Here are the plays, in the order you can expect them, and here is what each one is designed to do.
The first play is “brotherhood.” Within days — sometimes within hours of the hospital admission — active members will reach out to your son. They will visit his room. They will tell him they are praying for him. They will remind him that he is still their brother, that the fraternity takes care of its own, that things “got out of hand” but they never meant for this to happen. This is not compassion. It is evidence suppression. The purpose is to keep your son inside the fraternity’s emotional orbit, where loyalty will prevent him from cooperating with investigators or signing a civil complaint. The counter is simple: your son’s legal interests and the fraternity’s survival interests are now opposite. What is good for the fraternity — silence, loyalty, “handling it internally” — is bad for your son’s medical recovery and his legal case. A lawyer in the family’s corner breaks that spell.
The second play is the quick check. A representative of the fraternity’s insurance carrier may contact the family early — before the full medical picture is known, before the CK has peaked, before anyone knows whether the kidneys will recover — and offer a settlement. It will sound generous. It will come with a release. The purpose is to close the file before the real cost of the injury declares itself. The counter is: no release is signed before the medical record is complete. A rhabdomyolysis case cannot be valued in the first week because the kidney outcome is not yet known. Any check offered that early is a fraction of what the case is worth, and the release on the back of it is designed to make sure you can never come back for more.
The third play is the “consent” defense — the argument that your son agreed to the activities, that he could have quit, that hazing is voluntary. The counter is already written into Texas law. The Texas Hazing Act expressly provides that consent is not a defense. The coercive nature of fraternity pledging — the power imbalance, the social pressure, the threat of rejection — means “he agreed to it” is not a legal answer to deliberate physical abuse. The statute was written to close this exact door.
The fourth play is social media mining. The fraternity’s insurance investigator will scour your son’s social media for anything that can be used to minimize his injury — a photo of him smiling in the hospital, a post about feeling better, a picture from before the incident where he looks athletic and healthy. The counter is a total blackout on social media until the case is resolved. Nothing about the recovery, nothing about the hospital, nothing that can be screenshotted and brought to a deposition. The defense is building a narrative that your son was not that badly hurt; do not hand them the raw material.
The fifth play is the code of silence. Other pledges who were also injured — because in a pledge-class hazing, yours is rarely the only one — will be pressured not to cooperate. The fraternity will remind them of their own exposure, their own participation, their own fear of disciplinary action by the university. The counter is: the first family to act sets the tone. When one pledge’s family hires a lawyer and files a preservation demand, the others gain permission to do the same. Multiple plaintiffs transform the pressure dynamic — a single case can be stonewalled; a group of families with the same medical records and the same witness list cannot.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do Now
The medical emergency comes first. If your son is still in the hospital, every minute of his medical care is also the foundation of the legal case. Here is what matters, in order.
Make sure the CK is being drawn on a schedule — not once, but serially, every 6 to 12 hours, to track the curve. Ask the nephrologist directly: is the kidney function stable, declining, or unknown? Ask whether dialysis is on the table. Ask for copies of every lab result, every nursing note, every imaging study. You have a legal right to your son’s medical records, and those records are the evidence that proves what the hazing did to his body.
Document the visible evidence. If your son’s urine is dark, photograph it — with a timestamp. If he has visible swelling, bruising, or muscle damage, photograph it. If he cannot walk, record a short video of the attempt. These are contemporaneous records that no defense expert can explain away later.
Do not speak to the fraternity, the chapter president, the pledge educator, or any active member about what happened. Do not accept visits. Do not respond to texts. Do not agree to any “internal investigation” or “hearing.” Everything you say to them can become evidence against you; everything they say to you, without a lawyer present, is harder to use as evidence for you.
Do not post on social media. Not a photo of your son in the hospital bed. Not an update on his condition. Not an expression of anger at the fraternity. The defense will find it, screenshot it, and use it. Total blackout.
Do not sign anything. Not a release, not a waiver, not a “disciplinary agreement” from the university, not a “statement” for the fraternity’s insurance carrier. Nothing. If someone hands you a document, put it in a drawer and call us.
Call a lawyer who knows hazing cases. Not a general personal injury lawyer — a lawyer who has actually litigated fraternity hazing, who knows the Greek-life corporate structure, who has read the FIPG guidelines and can identify the violations, and who knows how to preserve evidence that is disappearing on a clock measured in days. The preservation letter — the document that freezes the GroupMe logs, the Snapchat histories, the surveillance footage, the pledge books, and the fraternity house records before they are destroyed — goes out the day you call. Every day you wait is a day the fraternity has to delete, shred, and “misplace” the proof of what they did.
Your son has a two-year statute of limitations under Texas law for personal injury claims (Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003). Two years sounds like a long time. It is not. The evidence clock is measured in days and weeks, not years. The legal deadline is the floor — the evidence deadline is the emergency.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is rhabdomyolysis and why is my son’s urine black?
Rhabdomyolysis is the medical term for catastrophic muscle breakdown. When muscle tissue is destroyed by extreme exertion, blunt force, or prolonged compression, the muscle cells rupture and release their contents into the bloodstream — including a protein called myoglobin, which is what turns the urine dark. The kidneys, which filter blood, cannot handle the flood of myoglobin, and the protein clogs and damages the kidney’s filtering tubules. “Black urine” is the visible signature of muscle dying inside the body. It is a life-threatening medical emergency, not a side effect of a tough workout.
Can the fraternity say my son consented to the hazing?
No. Under the Texas Hazing Act, consent is not a defense to a charge of hazing. The Texas Legislature wrote this provision specifically because it understood that fraternity pledging is inherently coercive — the power imbalance between actives and pledges, the social pressure, the threat of rejection — and that “he agreed to it” is not a legal answer to deliberate physical abuse. The fraternity cannot escape liability by arguing your son volunteered for the activities that hospitalized him.
Who can be sued for what happened to my son?
Multiple parties can be held legally responsible. The Kappa Sigma national organization faces vicarious liability for its chapter’s actions and direct negligence for failing to enforce anti-hazing protocols. The local Tau Chapter at Texas A&M faces direct liability for planning and executing the hazing. Individual fraternity officers and members face personal liability for assault, battery, and violations of the Texas Hazing Act. A separate fraternity housing corporation may face premises liability if the hazing occurred on property it controlled. Texas law allows joint and several liability for indivisible injuries, meaning each participant can be held responsible for the full damage.
How long do I have to file a lawsuit?
Texas has a two-year statute of limitations for personal injury claims under the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. However, the evidence that proves your case — electronic communications, surveillance footage, pledge books — disappears far faster than that. Surveillance video can be overwritten in 7 to 30 days. Snapchat messages vanish automatically. GroupMe threads can be deleted by any participant. The legal deadline is not the urgent deadline. The evidence deadline is measured in days, not years.
What if my son was not the only pledge injured?
In a pledge-class hazing incident, multiple pledges are typically injured — sometimes all of them, to varying degrees. Multiple plaintiffs increase the pressure on the fraternity’s insurance tower and make a global settlement above policy limits more likely. If other families are in the same situation, coordinating legal action strengthens every family’s position. The first family to hire a lawyer and send a preservation demand often gives other families the permission and the roadmap to do the same.
Will the fraternity try to contact my son?
Almost certainly. Active members may visit the hospital, send messages, or have a “concerned” chapter officer reach out to express sympathy. This is not compassion — it is evidence suppression. The purpose is to keep your son inside the fraternity’s emotional orbit, where loyalty will prevent him from cooperating with investigators or pursuing legal action. The code of silence is the fraternity’s strongest institutional defense. A lawyer representing your family breaks that spell and puts a buffer between your son and the people who injured him.
How much is a rhabdomyolysis hazing case worth?
The value depends on whether your son’s kidneys recover. If the kidney injury is acute but reversible, the case value framework begins around $750,000. If the kidney damage is permanent — requiring dialysis, transplant, or lifelong medical management — the value can reach toward $6,000,000 or beyond. A life-care planner builds the cost stream of future medical needs, a forensic economist reduces it to present value, and non-economic damages for pain, suffering, and mental anguish are recoverable on top. Exemplary (punitive) damages under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Chapter 41 are probable given the reckless and intentional nature of hazing that causes rhabdomyolysis. Every case is different. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Can my son still pursue a case if the university is also investigating?
Yes. The university’s disciplinary process and your civil lawsuit are separate tracks. A university investigation can produce evidence — witness statements, findings, disciplinary records — that supports the civil case, but the university process cannot compensate your son for his medical bills, his future kidney care, his pain, or his lost time. Only a civil action against the fraternity, its officers, and its insurer can do that. You do not need to wait for the university to finish its investigation before talking to a lawyer — and given the speed at which evidence disappears, you should not.
Why Our Firm
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are Legal Emergency Lawyers. We take hazing cases because we have seen what they do to families, and we know how to fight the institutions that let them happen.
Ralph Manginello has spent 27-plus years in Texas courtrooms. He is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Houston Bar Association. He is lead counsel in an active ten-million-dollar hazing lawsuit against a University of Houston fraternity — a case that is being fought right now, in Harris County, with the same legal theories, the same institutional defendants, and the same code of silence that your family is facing. He did not learn hazing law last week. He is living it this week.
Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before he joined our side. He sat in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like yours. He knows how the fraternity’s insurer will set its reserve in the first 48 hours — before the real injuries are diagnosed. He knows how the quick check arrives with a release printed on the back before the lab results do. He knows the recorded-statement call that is engineered to get your son to say “I’m feeling okay.” He uses that insider knowledge for your family now. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. If your family prays in Spanish, your lawyer can listen in Spanish.
Our firm has recovered over $50 million in aggregate for injured clients — including a $5 million-plus brain-injury settlement, a $3.8 million-plus amputation settlement, and a $2.5 million-plus truck-crash recovery. Those are not hazing numbers, and we tell you that honestly — hazing litigation is a specific battlefield, and the case we are fighting right now is the one that proves we know it. What transfers from every catastrophic-injury case we have ever handled is the medicine, the corporate-accountability fight, and the institutional-negligence architecture. The mechanism of harm is different. The fight against an institution that put profit or tradition ahead of safety is the same.
We work on contingency. The fee is 33.33 percent if the case settles before trial, 40 percent if it goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The first consultation is free, and it is confidential. Our 24/7 hotline is staffed by live people — not an answering service — because the call from College Station does not come during business hours. We serve your family fully in English or in Spanish. Hablamos Español.
If we are not the right fit for your family, we will tell you. But if your son is in a hospital bed with black urine and a CK level that is still climbing, and a fraternity in College Station is already deleting the messages that prove what they did — then the phone call you make next matters more than any call you have ever made.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win.
The preservation letter goes out the day you call. The evidence stops disappearing the day you call. The fight starts the day you call.
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.