Baton Rouge Hazing Death: What Happened to a Southern University Student — and How Louisiana Law Holds the Responsible Parties Accountable
You are reading this at the hour when the house is quiet and the grief is loudest. Maybe it has been weeks since you got the call. Maybe it has been months and you are only now able to think clearly enough to type the question that brought you here. Either way, the same thing is true: someone you love is gone, and what killed him was not an accident. It was a ritual. It was preventable. And the law in Louisiana gives you less time to act than almost any other state in the country.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are a trial firm that takes hazing wrongful-death cases in Louisiana, working with local counsel and appearing pro hac vice where required. Our managing partner, Ralph Manginello, has 27+ years in courtrooms, including federal court, and is lead counsel in an active $10 million hazing lawsuit — Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston — filed in Harris County, Texas, in November 2025. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which means he knows how to find the story the other side hoped would stay buried. Our associate attorney, 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 exactly like yours. He sat on their side of the table. Now he sits on yours. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations without an interpreter.
We are going to tell you everything we know about this kind of case — the medicine, the law, the defendants, the insurance traps, the evidence that is dying while you read, and the money that a family like yours may be able to recover. We do not charge for this conversation. We work on contingency — 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial — and we do not get paid unless we win your case. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911, any hour, any day. A live person answers — not an answering service.
The One-Year Clock That Kills More Hazing Cases Than Any Defense Lawyer
Louisiana has one of the shortest wrongful-death filing deadlines in the United States. The prescriptive period — what most states call the statute of limitations — is one year from the date of the incident. For a hazing death that occurred in February 2025, the window to file a wrongful-death lawsuit is already closing. This is not a generous federal three-year deadline or a neighboring state’s two-year window. It is one year. And the clock does not pause because you are grieving.
Louisiana Civil Code Article 3492 sets this prescription period for delictual claims — wrongful death and personal injury. There are narrow doctrines that can toll or suspend prescription in limited circumstances, but relying on them is a gamble you should never take. The safe assumption is that you have one year from the date of the incident, and every day that passes is a day closer to losing the right to file at all.
“Hazing is just not a tradition. It is not brotherhood. It is not harmless. It is dangerous, illegal, and preventable.”
That is what Louisiana State Representative Vanessa Caston LaFleur told her colleagues when she authored the Caleb Wilson Hazing Prevention Act — the law named for the 20-year-old Southern University student whose death is the reason you are reading this page. She is right. Hazing is preventable. But prevention only matters before the fact. After the fact, what matters is accountability — and accountability in Louisiana has a clock that runs out in 365 days.
If your loved one died in a hazing incident in Baton Rouge, or at any Louisiana institution, the single most important thing you can do today is talk to a lawyer who builds these cases. Not tomorrow. Not after the funeral is over and the sympathy cards stop. Today — because the evidence is disappearing on a faster timeline than even the one-year deadline, and because the defendants in a hazing case have already begun preparing their defense before the body is cold.
What Is Commotio Cordis? The Medical Science of Chest Boxing
The coroner’s report in this case found that blunt force punches to the chest caused a 20-year-old’s heart to stop. Four blows. Boxing gloves. A young man who wanted to work at NASA, who played in one of the most celebrated marching bands in the American South, collapsed and died because his heart was struck at the wrong millisecond.
The medical name for what killed him is almost certainly commotio cordis — a recognized, documented phenomenon in cardiology and sports medicine in which a blunt, non-penetrating blow to the chest wall triggers sudden cardiac arrest. The word “commotio” means “disturbance” in Latin. The disturbance is electrical, not structural. The heart is typically normal — no pre-existing disease, no congenital defect, no clogged artery. The defense will try to argue there was something wrong with the victim’s heart. The autopsy will say otherwise.
Here is how commotio cordis works, and why a biomechanical engineer will be one of the most important experts in this case:
The heart beats in an electrical cycle. There is a narrow window — measured in milliseconds — during the repolarization phase of the cardiac cycle, specifically on the upstroke of the T wave, when the heart’s electrical system is uniquely vulnerable. A blow to the chest that lands during that window — even a blow that does not fracture a rib, that does not bruise the heart muscle, that leaves no visible structural damage — can throw the heart’s electrical system into ventricular fibrillation. The heart quivers instead of pumping. Blood stops flowing to the brain. Within seconds, consciousness is lost. Within minutes, the damage is irreversible.
This is why the participants’ failure to call 911 is not just a moral failing — it is the proximate cause of death in a medical sense. Commotio cordis is survivable if defibrillation is delivered within the first few minutes. Every minute without CPR and defibrillation reduces survival by approximately 10%. After ten minutes, survival is near zero. The people who were there — who watched him collapse, who did not pick up a phone, who did not start chest compressions, who waited and hoped and then fled — they did not just fail a friend. They allowed a survivable cardiac event to become a death.
Boxing gloves do not prevent commotio cordis. The gloves protect the puncher’s hands, not the victim’s heart. The force that matters is the force transmitted through the chest wall to the heart — and a gloved fist can deliver more force, not less, because the puncher swings harder when they believe the glove makes it “safe.” A biomechanical engineer can calculate the force of those blows, model the transmission through the thoracic wall, and demonstrate to a jury that four deliberate strikes to the chest at close range delivered more than enough energy to trigger the electrical catastrophe that stopped this young man’s heart.
The defense will argue that the victim consented. That he volunteered. That “everyone does it.” Louisiana’s hazing statute and the public policy of this state reject that argument — consent is not a defense to hazing under Louisiana law. But we will come to that. First, you need to understand who is responsible, because the answer is not one person and not one organization. It is a stack.
Who Can Be Held Accountable: The Defendant Map in a Louisiana Hazing Death
A hazing wrongful-death case in Baton Rouge has at least four layers of defendants, and each one carries a different theory of liability, a different insurance tower, and a different strategy for reaching them. Missing any layer means leaving money — and accountability — on the table.
Layer 1: The National Fraternity
Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. is a national organization with a charter, a constitution, bylaws, risk-management policies, and — critically — an insurance program. The national fraternity typically maintains a Commercial General Liability policy, often underwritten by a specialty carrier that caters to fraternal organizations. These policies commonly carry limits between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000, and they frequently include hazing exclusions — clauses that purport to deny coverage for injuries arising from hazing activities.
This is the first and most important insurance fight in the case. The carrier will issue a reservation of rights letter or a outright denial citing the hazing exclusion. But the duty to defend — the obligation to provide a legal defense — often survives even when indemnification (payment of a judgment) is disputed. And the “assault and battery” endorsement or exclusion becomes the primary pivot point: was the chest boxing an “assault” under the policy’s definition, or was it something else? The answer to that question can unlock or foreclose millions in coverage.
The national fraternity’s liability is vicarious — it is responsible for the actions of its local chapter — and direct, through claims of negligent supervision, failure to enforce its own anti-hazing policies, and failure to monitor a chapter it knew or should have known was engaged in dangerous traditions. The national office writes the risk-management manuals. It trains — or fails to train — its members. It disciplines — or fails to discipline — chapters that cross the line. When a pledge dies in a ritual the national organization’s own rules prohibit, the gap between the written policy and the lived reality is the case.
Layer 2: The Local Chapter and Its Officers
The local chapter of Omega Psi Phi at Southern University — the specific group of individuals who organized, participated in, and oversaw the chest-boxing ritual — are direct defendants. The chapter president, the pledge educator (often called the “dean of pledges” or similar), and every member who threw a punch are individually liable for battery and for the failure to render aid.
Louisiana’s hazing statute — Louisiana Revised Statute 17:1801.1 — establishes a statutory standard of care specifically designed to prevent this exact harm. Violation of that statute is negligence per se, meaning the violation itself establishes the breach of duty. The individual members who participated in the chest boxing violated the statute by engaging in physical hazing. The members who failed to call for medical help violated their duty to render aid to someone they had placed in peril.
Layer 3: Southern University and Its Board of Supervisors
Southern University, a public HBCU and a proud institution, owes its students a duty of care that includes reasonable supervision of campus organizations. The university had prior legislative mandates — the Max Gruver Act of 2018, passed after an LSU student died in a hazing incident with a blood-alcohol level of 0.495 — requiring training, reporting, and discipline for hazing. If the university failed to implement sufficient safeguards despite those mandates, it bears a share of responsibility.
But here is the critical limitation: Southern University is a public entity, and Louisiana’s governmental claims framework caps non-economic damages against public bodies at $500,000. This cap does not apply to the fraternity or to individual perpetrators — only to the university. This is why the university is one defendant in a larger case, not the whole case. The real financial recovery lives in the private fraternity’s coverage tower and in the individual members’ assets, not behind the state’s governmental cap.
Layer 4: The Individual Perpetrators
Every person who threw a punch, every person who organized the ritual, every person who stood by and refused to call 911 while a 20-year-old lay dying on the floor — each is an individual defendant. They face intentional-tort claims (assault and battery) and gross-negligence claims (failure to render aid). Some of them may face criminal prosecution, which runs parallel to the civil case.
The individual perpetrators are unlikely to have substantial personal assets. But their participation is the key to piercing the national fraternity’s liability and coverage. The fraternity’s insurance carrier will try to characterize the hazing as an “unsanctioned” event — something the national office did not authorize and therefore should not have to pay for. Our answer is that the national organization’s failure to enforce its own anti-hazing policies against a chapter it knew or should have known was engaged in physical “traditions” is the negligence that caused this death. “Unsanctioned” is not a shield — it is an admission of failed supervision.
Louisiana’s Hazing Laws: The Max Gruver Act, the Caleb Wilson Act, and the Statute That Establishes the Standard of Care
Louisiana has a layered hazing legal framework, and understanding it is essential to building the case.
The foundational anti-hazing statute — Louisiana Revised Statute 17:1801.1 — prohibits hazing at colleges and universities and establishes the statutory standard of care whose violation constitutes negligence per se. This is the law the individual chapter members violated when they conducted the chest-boxing ritual.
The Max Gruver Act, passed in 2018 after Maxwell Gruver, an LSU freshman, died in a Phi Delta Theta hazing incident with a blood-alcohol level of 0.495 — more than six times the legal driving limit — established training requirements, mandated that schools suspend or expel students involved in hazing, and mandated reporting of hazing incidents. It was the first major legislative response to hazing deaths in Louisiana. It was not enough.
The Caleb Wilson Hazing Prevention Act, signed by Governor Jeff Landry on May 22, 2025, and effective August 1, 2025, is the second response. It passed the Louisiana legislature without opposition. It requires expanded training at several levels — new students, advisors, and organization leaders must receive enhanced training in what the law prohibits and how to report violations. It requires organizations to report to universities when they discipline members for hazing or when a national organization disciplines local members. It requires universities to make public certain details of hazing incidents by reporting them to the Board of Regents and displaying them on a public website. Universities that fail to comply risk losing the ability to seek Bond Commission approval for construction bonds — a financial enforcement mechanism that puts real teeth behind the reporting requirements.
And it establishes what the bill’s author called “permanent banishment” — if hazing activities result in a death, the organization faces permanent removal from the campus.
The new act’s training requirement does not go into effect until the fall semester of 2027 — a gap that means the law’s strongest preventive provisions are not yet live. But for a wrongful-death case, the act’s passage matters in a different way: it establishes, in legislative findings and public debate, that hazing is a recognized, dangerous, and preventable harm. It strengthens the foreseeability argument. It makes it harder for any defendant to claim they did not know hazing was dangerous.
Louisiana operates under a pure comparative fault system under Civil Code Article 2323 — a plaintiff’s recovery is reduced by their percentage of fault. But in hazing cases, Louisiana’s public policy generally rejects consent as a defense. The statute itself and the legislative history demonstrate that the law’s purpose is to protect people from exactly the kind of pressure that makes “consent” meaningless in a hazing context. A pledge who submits to chest boxing because he wants to belong, because his brothers are watching, because the culture demands it — that is not consent. That is coercion. And Louisiana law does not let the people who created the coercion hide behind the victim’s submission.
The Evidence That Is Disappearing Right Now
If we are not already involved in this case, the evidence is dying. Not metaphorically. On a legal clock, with a legal expiration date, in systems the defendants control.
The Group Chats — EXTREME URGENCY
The planning, the coordination, the “tradition” — it all lives in the digital footprint. GroupMe threads, WhatsApp groups, text-message chains, Instagram direct messages, Snapchat conversations. These are where the chapter members discussed the ritual, where they organized the time and place, where they may have joked about what was going to happen, where they panicked when he collapsed, where they coordinated what to tell the police and what to leave out.
Digital evidence is the most volatile material in any hazing case. The moment a criminal investigation begins — and it will begin, or already has — the people in those group chats start deleting. Phones get wiped. Accounts get deactivated. Messages get “unsent.” GroupMe threads get archived or deleted by administrators. Every hour that passes without a preservation letter is an hour in which the proof of planning, knowledge, and coordination can be erased.
We send preservation and spoliation letters the day we are retained. These letters — formal legal demands addressed to the national fraternity, the local chapter, the individual members we can identify, and the university — order the recipients to freeze all electronic evidence, including group chats, text messages, social-media communications, photographs, videos, and any document relating to the ritual, the victim, or the organization’s hazing activities. Once that letter is on file, the destruction of evidence becomes sanctionable — and a court can instruct a jury to assume the lost evidence was as damaging as we say it was.
The Coroner’s Autopsy and Histology — HIGH PRIORITY
The East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner’s Office performed the autopsy. The report — already cited in public reporting — found that blunt force punches to the chest caused sudden cardiac arrest. The histology slides, the toxicology results, the photographs of the chest injuries, and the pathologist’s working notes are the medical foundation of the case.
This evidence is critical because the defense will try to argue that something else caused the death — a pre-existing heart condition, a substance in the victim’s system, an anomaly the autopsy “missed.” The full autopsy file, including the histology slides, lets our forensic pathologist independently review the findings and confirm that the cause of death was the chest blows, not a hidden defect. We subpoena the complete file — not just the summary report, but the underlying data, the slides, the raw lab results.
University Disciplinary Records — MEDIUM PRIORITY, DISCOVERABLE
Southern University’s disciplinary records may reveal whether this fraternity chapter had prior incidents, warnings, or sanctions related to hazing. Were there complaints? Were there investigations? Did the university know — or should it have known — that this chapter was engaged in dangerous traditions?
These records are subject to FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), which protects student educational records. But FERPA does not make records undiscoverable — it means they must be produced under a subpoena with appropriate privacy protections. A court can order the university to produce disciplinary records relating to the fraternity, prior hazing complaints, and the university’s response to them. These records establish notice — they prove the university and possibly the national fraternity knew about a pattern and did not stop it.
The National Fraternity’s Risk Management Manual — MEDIUM PRIORITY, REQUIRES DISCOVERY
The national fraternity’s own risk-management policies, anti-hazing training materials, incident reports from other chapters, and internal communications about hazing at this specific chapter are discoverable through formal litigation. These documents establish the internal standard of care the national office set for itself — and the gap between that standard and what actually happened on the ground in Baton Rouge.
If the national fraternity’s manual prohibits physical hazing in specific terms, and the local chapter was doing exactly that, the manual is the standard the national office failed to enforce. If the national office had received prior reports about this chapter — from other pledges, from parents, from concerned alumni — and did nothing, those reports are the notice that makes the national organization’s failure more than negligent. It makes it a choice.
What This Case Is Worth: The Damages Map
Hazing wrongful-death cases in Baton Rouge carry a damages profile that reflects both the economic loss and the moral outrage of the conduct. Based on the forensic analysis of this case, the estimated case value range is $2,500,000 to $8,500,000 — and the reasoning behind that range matters more than the numbers themselves.
Economic Damages: The NASA Trajectory
Caleb Wilson was a 20-year-old mechanical engineering student at Southern University whose stated goal was to work at NASA. He had met NASA astronaut Victor Glover — who piloted the Artemis II mission around the moon — at Essence Fest as a child, and that encounter shaped his entire academic path. He was a member of the Human Jukebox, the university’s renowned marching band, which means he was disciplined, talented, and already achieving at a high level.
A mechanical engineering graduate who goes on to a career at NASA — or in the aerospace industry, or in any of the high-tier engineering fields that a mechanical engineering degree from a respected institution opens up — has a lifetime earning capacity that runs into the millions. A forensic economist projects that earning capacity over a 40+ year career, accounting for education, age, projected career trajectory, and industry compensation data. The lost-earning-capacity figure alone in this case could exceed $2 million — and that is before any non-economic damages are considered.
Louisiana’s wrongful-death statute allows recovery for the survivors’ losses — the financial support the victim would have provided, the services he would have rendered, the gifts and benefits he would have bestowed. The survival action, under Civil Code Article 2315.1, allows the estate to recover for the pain, suffering, and terror the victim experienced from the moment of the first strike until his death — the conscious agony of a young man who felt his heart stop and knew, in the seconds before he lost consciousness, that the people around him were not going to help.
Non-Economic Damages: The Grief and the Outrage
Non-economic damages — the human losses that no receipt can measure — include the parents’ profound grief, the loss of the relationship, the loss of the son who would have graduated, married, had children, built a career, contributed to his community. These damages are not capped as to the private defendants (the national fraternity, the local chapter, the individual perpetrators). They are capped at $500,000 as to the public university under Louisiana’s governmental claims framework.
Punitive Damages: Louisiana’s General Rule and the Gross Negligence Exception
Louisiana generally does not allow punitive damages unless specifically authorized by statute. There is no specific hazing statute that authorizes punitive damages. But the gross-negligence threshold — conduct so reckless it demonstrates a conscious disregard for the safety of others — can be used to overcome certain immunity defenses and to argue for the maximum available damages under every available theory. The decision to conduct a chest-boxing ritual, to strike a pledge repeatedly, and then to fail to call for medical help when he collapsed is, on its face, gross negligence.
The case value range of $2.5 million to $8.5 million reflects the combination of a high earning-capacity floor (driven by the NASA trajectory), the egregious nature of the conduct (chest boxing + failure to render aid), the jury “anger value” in a parish where substantial awards are common in cases involving the loss of promising young lives, and the offset of the state cap on the public entity portion of the case through private fraternity liability.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
The Insurance Playbook: How Fraternity Carriers Deny Hazing Claims
Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm. He was the person on the other side of the table — the one who reviewed hazing claims, decided how to handle them, and deployed the carrier’s playbook. Now he sits on your side. Here is what he knows the other side will do, and what we do about each play.
Play 1: The Hazing Exclusion Denial
The moment the claim is reported, the fraternity’s insurance carrier will issue a denial letter citing the hazing exclusion in the Commercial General Liability policy. The carrier will argue that hazing is specifically excluded and therefore no coverage exists. The duty to defend — the carrier’s obligation to provide a legal defense — may be triggered even if indemnification (payment of any judgment) is disputed, but the carrier will try to avoid both.
Our counter: We attack the exclusion’s language, its breadth, and its application to the specific facts. Was the chest boxing “hazing” under the policy’s definition, or was it a “social activity” or “athletic event”? Does the exclusion apply to the national organization’s negligent-supervision claim, or only to the individual members’ conduct? The duty to defend is broader than the duty to indemnify, and getting the carrier to appoint defense counsel — which it must do while reserving its rights — puts the carrier’s own lawyers in a position where they must act in the insured’s best interest, even as the carrier tries to deny payment.
Play 2: The “Unsanctioned Event” Argument
The national fraternity will argue that the chest-boxing ritual was “unsanctioned” — not approved, not authorized, not part of any official fraternity activity. This argument is designed to distance the national organization from liability and to position the death as the act of rogue individuals.
Our counter: “Unsanctioned” is an admission, not a defense. If the national organization did not sanction this event, it means the event happened because the national organization failed to supervise its own chapter. The question is not whether the national office approved the chest boxing. The question is whether the national office knew — or should have known — that its chapters engage in physical traditions as part of the pledging process, and whether it took adequate steps to prevent them. Discovery will target the national office’s incident reports from other chapters, its risk-management audit findings, and its internal communications about hazing at this specific chapter.
Play 3: The Consent and Comparative Fault Attack
The defense will argue that the victim voluntarily participated — that he chose to be a pledge, that he showed up to the ritual, that he submitted to the blows. Under Louisiana’s pure comparative fault rule, they will try to assign him a percentage of fault to reduce the recovery.
Our counter: Louisiana public policy rejects consent as a defense to hazing. The hazing statute exists precisely because the legislature recognized that “consent” in a hazing context is coerced, not freely given. A pledge who submits to being punched in the chest by older, larger men he is desperate to impress is not consenting — he is enduring. The power imbalance between pledges and initiated members, the social pressure, the threat of exclusion — these strip the word “voluntary” of any real meaning. We will argue this to the court and to the jury, and we will ask that no fault be assigned to a young man who died because he wanted to belong.
Play 4: The Fast Settlement Offer
Some carriers, when they see a case with this much public attention and this much anger value, will move quickly to offer a settlement — one that is a fraction of the case’s true value. A quick check arrives with a release attached, before the family has had time to think, before the medical records are reviewed, before the full extent of the liability is mapped.
Our counter: We never let a carrier set the timeline. The first offer is the floor, not the ceiling. We build the case — we freeze the evidence, we retain the experts, we map the full defendant stack and the full coverage tower — and then we talk about numbers. A family that takes the first offer is a family that will never know what the case was worth.
Play 5: The Recorded Statement Trap
Within days of the incident, a “friendly” claims adjuster or investigator — working for the fraternity’s carrier or for the fraternity’s lawyers — will reach out to the family. The call will sound sympathetic. The person will say they just want to “understand what happened” and “get the facts.” Everything said on that call is recorded, transcribed, and designed to be quoted against the family later.
Our counter: Do not give a recorded statement to anyone — not the fraternity’s insurance company, not the university’s risk-management office, not the fraternity’s lawyer, not a “neutral investigator.” If someone contacts you, take their name and number and say you will have your attorney call them back. Then call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. Every statement you make without counsel is a statement that can be used to undermine your case.
How We Build the Case: The Proof Story
Here is what happens when you call us — not in the future tense, not as a promise, but as the process we follow in every hazing wrongful-death case we take.
Week one: The preservation letter goes out. We identify every defendant — the national fraternity, the local chapter, every individual member we can name, the university, and any third party that may hold relevant evidence. We send formal preservation and spoliation letters demanding that they freeze all electronic communications, physical records, photographs, videos, disciplinary files, and insurance documents. The moment these letters are received, the destruction of any listed evidence becomes sanctionable.
Weeks one through four: Evidence seizure. We send subpoenas and discovery demands for the GroupMe and WhatsApp threads, the social-media communications, the coroner’s complete autopsy file (including histology slides and toxicology), the university’s disciplinary records relating to this fraternity, and the national fraternity’s risk-management manuals and incident reports. We work with local counsel to file in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge — the court that handles high-stakes litigation in East Baton Rouge Parish and that has historically handled cases involving student deaths, including the Max Gruver litigation.
Months one through three: Expert retention. We retain a forensic pathologist to independently review the autopsy and confirm commotio cordis as the mechanism of death. We retain a biomechanical engineer to calculate the force of the boxing-glove strikes and demonstrate that the blows delivered lethal energy to the heart during its vulnerable repolarization window. We retain a forensic economist to project the victim’s lost earning capacity based on his age, education, career trajectory, and the NASA/aerospace industry compensation data. We retain a life-care planner if any survived medical costs need to be projected.
Months three through six: Depositions. We depose the individual members — the ones who threw the punches, the ones who organized the ritual, the ones who failed to call 911. Under oath, in front of a court reporter, with the group chats already produced and the contradictions exposed, the story comes apart. We depose the national fraternity’s risk-management director about the policies it had and the steps it took — or did not take — to enforce them. We depose university officials about what they knew and when.
Months six through twelve: Mediation and trial preparation. If the case does not settle — and many hazing cases do settle once the full defendant stack and coverage tower are exposed — we prepare for trial in the 19th JDC. We build the narrative: a 20-year-old who wanted to work at NASA, who played in the Human Jukebox, who was smart and sweet and God-fearing, and who died because a tradition was more important to the people around him than his life.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do and What Never to Do
If you are reading this in the first days after a hazing death — whether this case or another — here is what matters right now, in this order.
Do seek medical and psychological care first. If anyone was injured and survived, their medical treatment is the priority. For families, grief counseling and psychological support are not luxuries — they are part of surviving this. The case can wait a few hours while you breathe.
Do not sign anything. No release, no waiver, no settlement agreement, no “acknowledgment of facts,” no document the fraternity, the university, or any insurance company puts in front of you. If someone asks you to sign something, say you need to have your attorney review it first. Then call us.
Do not give a recorded statement. To anyone. Not the fraternity’s insurer, not the university’s lawyer, not a “neutral investigator,” not a journalist if you are not ready. Everything you say can and will be used to minimize the case.
Do not post on social media. Do not write about the incident, about the fraternity, about what happened, about your grief. The defense will monitor your social media and will use anything you post — even a photo of you smiling at a memorial, even a sentence that seems innocuous — to argue you are “not really suffering” or that you have already moved on.
Do not delete anything. Do not delete your own texts, emails, or social-media messages. Do not ask others to delete theirs. Destruction of evidence by the plaintiff’s side is as damaging as destruction by the defendants. Preserve everything — every text your child sent you, every photograph, every document.
Do call us. 1-888-ATTY-911. We answer 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with live staff — not an answering service. The consultation is free, confidential, and there is no obligation. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right firm for your case, and if we are not, we will help you find one that is.
Why Our Firm: The People Who Build These Cases
We are not a billboard firm. We are a trial firm that takes a limited number of catastrophic cases and builds them to the ceiling of their value. We do not volume-process claims. We do not refer you to an associate and disappear. The attorneys who work your case are the attorneys whose names are on the door.
Ralph Manginello is our managing partner. He has been licensed since November 6, 1998 — 27+ years — and is admitted to the State Bar of Texas (Bar #24007597) and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, including the Bankruptcy Court. He earned his J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston in 1998 and his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in Journalism and Public Relations. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer — which means he knows how to find facts, how to verify them, and how to tell a story that a jury can feel in their bones. He is lead counsel in the active $10 million hazing lawsuit — Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston — filed in Harris County, Texas, in November 2025. That case involves a fraternity, a university, and the same kind of institutional failures that let a young person die in the name of tradition. He knows this field. He lives in it.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney. He has been licensed since December 6, 2012 — 13+ years — and is admitted to the State Bar of Texas (Bar #24084332) and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He earned his J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston in May 2012 and his B.B.A. in International Business from Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio in 2005. Before joining this firm, he practiced at a national insurance-defense firm — the kind of firm that carriers hire to defend hazing claims. He knows how the other side values claims, how they set reserves in the first 48 hours, how they pick their IME doctors, how they use surveillance, and how they engineer delay. He knows because he was there. And he is fluent in Spanish — he conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. If your family prays in Spanish, we can speak with you in the language you think in.
We serve families in Louisiana — in Baton Rouge, at Southern University, at LSU, at every campus where a hazing culture has taken a life. We are based in Houston, with offices on West Loop South and on Dunlavy Street, and we take Louisiana cases working with local counsel and appearing pro hac vice where required. We do not claim an office in Louisiana. We do not claim a Louisiana bar admission. What we claim is the experience, the trial record, and the insider knowledge to build the case the right way. You can read more about our hazing litigation practice and about Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña on our site. Our wrongful-death practice page has more on how we build these cases.
Our fee is contingency: 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free. The call is free. The number is 1-888-ATTY-911. Hablamos Español.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a hazing wrongful-death lawsuit in Louisiana?
Louisiana’s prescriptive period — the deadline to file — is one year from the date of the incident under Civil Code Article 3492. This is one of the shortest wrongful-death deadlines in the country. For a hazing death that occurred in February 2025, the filing window is already narrowing. Do not wait. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 today.
Can I sue the national fraternity even if the hazing was “unsanctioned”?
Yes. The national fraternity’s argument that an event was “unsanctioned” is an admission of failed supervision, not a defense. The national organization writes the policies, trains the members, and monitors the chapters. When a local chapter conducts a ritual the national office’s rules prohibit, the question is whether the national office did enough to prevent it — and discovery will target its incident reports, risk-management audits, and prior complaints about this chapter.
Will the fraternity’s insurance cover a hazing death?
The fraternity’s Commercial General Liability policy likely carries between $1 million and $5 million in coverage, but it almost certainly includes a hazing exclusion. The insurance carrier will try to deny coverage. However, the duty to defend often survives the exclusion, and the “assault and battery” endorsement becomes the critical pivot point. This is one of the most important legal fights in the case, and it is exactly the kind of fight Lupe Peña — our former insurance-defense attorney — knows from the inside.
Does it matter that my loved one “consented” to the hazing?
No. Louisiana’s hazing statute and public policy reject consent as a defense. The statute exists because the legislature recognized that “consent” in a hazing context is coerced by power imbalance, social pressure, and the threat of exclusion. A pledge who submits to being punched in the chest is not freely consenting — he is enduring. We will argue this to the court and to the jury.
Can I sue Southern University for my child’s hazing death?
Yes, but with limitations. As a public university, Southern University is subject to Louisiana’s governmental claims framework, which caps non-economic damages against public entities at $500,000. The university can be named as a defendant for negligent supervision of campus organizations and failure to implement sufficient safeguards. But the cap means the university is one defendant in a larger case — the real financial recovery lives in the private fraternity’s coverage tower and in the individual perpetrators’ liability.
What is commotio cordis, and how do you prove it in court?
Commotio cordis is sudden cardiac arrest caused by a blunt, non-penetrating blow to the chest delivered during a narrow window of the heart’s electrical cycle — specifically, the repolarization phase on the upstroke of the T wave. The heart is structurally normal. The damage is electrical, not physical. We prove it with the coroner’s autopsy findings, a forensic pathologist’s independent review, and a biomechanical engineer’s calculation of the force delivered by the boxing-glove strikes and its transmission through the chest wall to the heart.
What if the people who were there won’t talk?
They will talk — under oath, in depositions, with a court reporter and the group chats already produced. The power of discovery in a hazing case is that the digital evidence — the GroupMe threads, the texts, the Snapchat messages — often contradicts what the individual members will say under oath. The contradiction between “I didn’t know it was dangerous” and the group chat where they discussed the ritual is the case. We do not need them to volunteer the truth. We need them on the record.
How much is a hazing wrongful-death case worth in Baton Rouge?
Based on our forensic analysis, the estimated case value range is $2,500,000 to $8,500,000. The economic floor is driven by the victim’s high earning capacity as a future mechanical engineer with NASA aspirations — 40+ years of professional earnings in a high-tier field. The non-economic damages — the family’s grief, the loss of the relationship, the survival action for the victim’s terror and pain — are uncapped as to the private defendants. The jury “anger value” of chest boxing and failure to call 911 is substantial in East Baton Rouge Parish, which has historically returned significant awards in cases involving the loss of promising young lives. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Is there a criminal case happening at the same time?
There may be. The East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney’s office handles criminal prosecution of hazing-related charges, and individual members have already entered not-guilty pleas in connection with this case. The criminal and civil cases run on parallel tracks. We coordinate with the criminal prosecution to ensure that our civil discovery does not interfere with the criminal case — while still moving the civil case forward within the one-year prescriptive period. The criminal case can actually strengthen the civil case: criminal convictions establish facts that are difficult for the civil defendants to contest.
Do I have to come to your office in Houston to meet you?
No. We come to you. We travel to Baton Rouge, to your home, to wherever you are. The first consultation can be by phone — 1-888-ATTY-911 — and it is free, confidential, and comes with no obligation. If we take the case, we handle the travel. You focus on your family. We focus on the fight.
What if I cannot afford a lawyer?
You can afford us. We work on contingency. We front the costs of the case — the experts, the filing fees, the depositions, the travel — and we are paid only from the recovery, if there is one. 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. If we do not win, you owe us nothing. That is the promise. That is how we make sure every family — not just the ones who can write a retainer check — has access to the same quality of representation.
The Closing: What This Case Is Really About
Urania Wilson told Louisiana lawmakers that her son was “a God-fearing child” who was “just a sweet young man.” She said he was smart, that his life was cut short, and that it should not have been. She said she did not want to see another mother or family go through what she went through.
We cannot bring Caleb back. No verdict, no settlement, no act of Congress can do that. But we can do what the law is designed to do: hold the people and organizations responsible accountable in the only language they understand — money, public exposure, and the forced acknowledgment that what they did was not tradition, was not brotherhood, and was not harmless. It was dangerous. It was illegal. And it was preventable.
The clock is running. Louisiana gives you one year. The evidence is dying. The fraternity’s insurance company has already begun its playbook. And you are reading this at the hour when the house is quiet and the decision is yours.
Call us. 1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win. Hablamos Español. We answer 24/7 — not an answering service, a live person.
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.