Hazing Death at Wilberforce University: What the Law Says and What Your Family Can Do
If your family is reading this, your child is gone. A young person who went to Wilberforce University to build a future died because someone decided that belonging was worth a bottle, a dare, and a night that ended in an emergency room — or worse, in a room where nobody called for help in time. We are sorry you are here. We are also ready to tell you, plainly, what happens next — because the university, the fraternity, and their insurers are already working, and the evidence that could prove what really happened is already starting to disappear.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm. Our trial team takes hazing death cases in Ohio and across the country. Right now, we are lead counsel in an active $10 million hazing lawsuit against a university and a fraternity — a case that is teaching us, in real time, exactly how these institutions defend themselves and exactly how to break through that defense. That experience is what we bring to a family in Ohio who has lost someone to hazing. The call is free. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win. 1-888-ATTY-911.
Can You Sue a University for a Hazing Death?
Yes. A university can be held legally responsible for a hazing death when it knew or should have known that hazing was happening on its campus — in its fraternities, its organizations, its dormitories — and failed to stop it. That responsibility does not require the university to have known about the specific night your child died. It requires the university to have been aware, or should have been aware, that hazing was a pattern in the organization, and to have done nothing meaningful about it. A policy on paper is not a defense. An anti-hazing brochure handed out at orientation is not a defense. What matters is what the university actually did — and in most of these cases, the answer is: not enough, not soon enough, and not with any real consequences until someone was already dead.
The lawsuit against Wilberforce University is exactly this kind of claim. The university is an institution that owed your child a duty of care — a duty to supervise the organizations it charters, to investigate the warnings it receives, and to protect the students it recruited and enrolled. When a fraternity or student organization under the university’s umbrella forces a young person to consume dangerous amounts of alcohol, and that young person dies, the university is not a bystander. It is an institution that failed at one of its most basic jobs: keeping the people in its care alive. The wrongful death claim is the legal vehicle that holds the university — and every other responsible party — accountable for that failure.
Ohio’s Anti-Hazing Law and the Wrongful Death Deadline
Ohio has lived through this before. In 2021, Stone Foltz, a student at Bowling Green State University, died after a hazing event involving forced alcohol consumption. Ohio’s response was Collin’s Law — legislation that strengthened the state’s criminal hazing statute, expanded the definition of hazing to include coerced consumption of alcohol and drugs, and elevated certain hazing offenses from misdemeanors to felonies. Collin’s Law is the criminal side. The civil side — the wrongful death lawsuit your family can bring — runs on a different clock and a different set of rules, but the criminal statute matters because a violation of the anti-hazing law is powerful evidence of negligence in a civil case.
Under Ohio law, a wrongful death action must be filed within two years of the date of death. The action is brought by the personal representative of the decedent’s estate, for the benefit of the surviving spouse, children, and parents. Ohio follows a modified comparative negligence rule: if the deceased is found to be 51% or more at fault, the family’s recovery is barred entirely; if the deceased is 50% or less at fault, recovery is reduced by that percentage but not eliminated.
That two-year deadline is unforgiving. It runs from the day your child died — not from the day you learned hazing was the cause, not from the day the university finished its “internal investigation,” not from the day the police closed their file. Two years. And within that two-year window, the evidence that proves your case is dying on a much shorter clock — text messages get deleted, group chats get scrubbed, security footage overwrites itself, and witnesses graduate, scatter, and start forgetting. The deadline is real. The evidence clock is faster.
Ohio’s comparative fault rule is the defense’s main weapon in these cases. Expect the university’s lawyers and the fraternity’s lawyers to argue that your child “chose” to drink, “volunteered” for the organization, “could have walked away.” That argument ignores everything about how hazing actually works — the power dynamics, the social pressure, the isolation, the fact that a pledge who refuses is humiliated, ostracized, and blacklisted. “Voluntary” is a word the defense uses to describe something that was never a real choice. We know how to answer that argument, and we will come back to it.
Ohio does not impose a statutory cap on wrongful death damages. What a jury awards — for the lost future earnings of a young person who had a whole career ahead, for the conscious pain and suffering your child experienced before death, for the loss of companionship and guidance the family will live with forever, for the punitive damages that punish an institution that knew and did nothing — is not limited by an arbitrary ceiling. That matters. In states with caps, the worst conduct can be under-compensated. In Ohio, the full measure of the loss can reach the jury.
Who Is Responsible: The Defendant Stack in a Hazing Death Case
A hazing death is almost never one defendant’s fault. It is a stack of failures, each layer enabling the next, and a serious case names every layer. Here is who we look at when a student dies from alcohol poisoning during hazing:
The University. Wilberforce University chartered the organization. It allowed the fraternity to operate on its campus, recruit its students, and hold events in its spaces. It had a duty to supervise, monitor, investigate warnings, and act on what it knew. When a university says “we didn’t know this was happening,” the next question is: why not? Universities receive hazing complaints, conduct reviews, and incident reports. They know which organizations have histories. They know which pledging seasons are dangerous. If the university had prior warnings — from a concerned parent, a former member, a campus security report, a disciplinary file — and did not act, that prior notice is the spine of the case.
The Local Chapter. The fraternity or sorority chapter at Wilberforce — the local students who conducted the initiation, who handed your child the alcohol, who watched them deteriorate, and who failed to call 911 — is directly responsible. These are the individuals whose choices killed your child: the member who poured the drink, the one who enforced the “tradition,” the one who said “he’ll sleep it off,” the one who told everyone to clean up before anyone called for help. Each of them can be named. Each of them carries liability. Each of them has a homeowners insurance policy that may respond — or may not, depending on the policy’s exclusions.
The National Organization. The national fraternity or sorority that the local chapter belongs to sets the policies, collects the dues, and controls the brand. National organizations often disclaim responsibility for local chapters — “they’re independent affiliates” — while simultaneously collecting per-member dues, conducting chapter reviews, and publishing anti-hazing policies that they do not enforce. That gap between what the national says and what the local does is where liability lives. A national organization that knew its chapters were hazing — because it had settled prior claims, expelled prior members, or received prior incident reports — and failed to enforce its own rules is a defendant with deep pockets and a hard case to answer.
Individual Members. The students who participated in the hazing — who planned it, who executed it, who watched it, who covered it up — are individually liable. Some of them may face criminal charges under Ohio’s anti-hazing law. Their civil liability is separate from any criminal prosecution. A student who handed your child a bottle of vodka and said “drink or you’re out” is a defendant. A student who saw your child unconscious and told the others not to call 911 is a defendant. A student who deleted group chat messages after the death is a defendant — and the deletion is itself evidence of consciousness of guilt.
The Property Owner. If the hazing occurred at a fraternity house, that house may be owned by a separate entity — a housing corporation, an alumni trust, or a nonprofit — distinct from the active chapter. That property owner had a duty to maintain the premises safely and may carry its own insurance. Identifying the property ownership is a records search that can uncover a defendant nobody mentioned at first.
The Medicine of Alcohol Poisoning: How Hazing Kills
Alcohol poisoning is not a hangover. It is acute ethanol toxicity — a progressive central nervous system shutdown that kills by stopping the brain’s most automatic function: telling the lungs to breathe. Here is what happens inside the body, and why “let him sleep it off” is the most dangerous sentence in the English language.
Ethanol is a central nervous system depressant. At low doses, it impairs judgment and coordination — the effects most people recognize. At higher doses, it suppresses the brainstem’s respiratory center, the part of the brain that automatically controls breathing. As blood alcohol concentration rises, breathing slows. As breathing slows, oxygen levels drop. As oxygen drops, the heart — already struggling under the metabolic chaos of severe intoxication — begins to fail. The cascade is: respiratory depression, hypoxia, cardiac arrest, death.
The blood alcohol concentration that kills varies by tolerance, body weight, and drinking speed — but lethal levels are generally above 0.30 to 0.40 grams per deciliter. In hazing cases, we have seen BAC levels far higher, achieved through forced rapid consumption of hard liquor in a short window — sometimes an hour or less. The body metabolizes alcohol at roughly 0.015 to 0.020 BAC per hour. That means a BAC of 0.40 — already potentially lethal — takes more than twenty hours to fully clear. But the damage is done in the first few hours, while the BAC is climbing and the brainstem is shutting down.
The cruelest fact: alcohol continues to absorb from the stomach and intestines even after the person stops drinking. A student who is forced to consume a large quantity of liquor, then “passes out,” may still have alcohol entering their bloodstream for thirty to one hundred twenty minutes after the last drink. Their BAC is still climbing while they are unconscious. Everyone in the room thinks the danger is over. The danger is just beginning.
The gag reflex — the body’s last defense against aspirating vomit — is suppressed by alcohol. A person who is unconscious from alcohol poisoning can silently inhale their own vomit and asphyxiate. This is one of the most common mechanisms of death in alcohol poisoning, and it happens while other people in the room are telling each other not to worry.
The other lethal mechanisms stack: hypothermia, because alcohol dilates blood vessels and the body loses heat faster; hypoglycemia, because alcohol impairs the liver’s ability to produce glucose, leading to dangerous low blood sugar that can cause seizures; and dehydration and electrolyte imbalance, which can trigger cardiac arrhythmia. A young person dying of alcohol poisoning is not dying of one thing. They are dying of several things at once, and each one is treatable — if someone calls 911 in time.
The proof problem the defense exploits: the defense will argue your child “voluntarily” consumed the alcohol, had “tolerance,” and “should have known their limits.” The answer is in the mechanism. No one voluntarily drinks to a lethal BAC. The level of consumption that produces a BAC of 0.30 or higher is not a social event — it is a forced event, driven by social pressure, power dynamics, and the threat of exclusion. And the people who were in that room — the ones who poured the drinks, enforced the “tradition,” and failed to call for help — they knew. They knew because they were watching it happen, and they did nothing until it was too late.
The medical records are the proof. The BAC level, drawn at the hospital or by the medical examiner, tells the story of how much alcohol was in your child’s blood and how fast it got there. The toxicology screen shows whether anything else was in their system. The autopsy report names the mechanism of death — acute ethanol toxicity, aspiration, respiratory depression, cardiac arrest — and the contributing factors. The treatment timeline, if your child reached the hospital, shows when help was finally called and how much time was lost. Every one of these records must be preserved and obtained.
The Evidence Clock: What Exists, Who Holds It, and How Fast It Disappears
In a hazing death case, the evidence that proves what happened lives on a clock — and the clock is shorter than most families realize. The university’s lawyers, the fraternity’s national organization, and the individual members are already moving. Some of them are already deleting things. Here is what exists, who has it, and how fast it can legally die.
Group Chats and Text Messages. The planning, the coercion, and the cover-up all live in text messages and group chats — WhatsApp, GroupMe, iMessage, Discord, Signal. The members who organized the hazing discussed it in writing. After your child died, they discussed that too — who should delete what, what story to tell, how to coordinate. These messages are held on individual members’ phones and on the platforms’ servers. How fast they die: immediately, if the members choose to delete them — and they are already choosing. A preservation letter to the platform providers and a demand for the individual members’ devices must go out within days, not weeks. If the messages are gone by the time a lawyer is hired, that absence is itself evidence — but the messages are better.
Social Media Posts and Stories. Hazing events are sometimes documented in photos, videos, and social media stories — Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok. These disappear by design — Snapchat stories vanish in 24 hours; Instagram stories in 24 hours. If any of the members posted anything from the night your child died, that post may already be gone. But the metadata, the timestamp, and the platform’s archived copy may still exist for a limited window. A preservation demand to the platforms — not just the users — is the counter.
Security Camera Footage. If the hazing occurred in a fraternity house, a campus building, or a venue with security cameras, the footage may show who arrived, who was present, when people left, and whether your child was carried, stumbling, or unconscious. Security footage is routinely overwritten on a rolling loop — commonly 30 days, sometimes shorter. The university, the fraternity house, and any third-party venue must be ordered to preserve the footage in writing within days of the death.
University Disciplinary and Incident Records. The university keeps records — incident reports, disciplinary files, hazing complaints, counseling center reports, campus security logs. If prior complaints about this organization existed, those records are the proof that the university knew. These records are held by the university and are subject to internal retention policies. Some are protected by privacy law (FERPA), but a wrongful death litigation hold and discovery demand can reach them. The university will resist producing them. That resistance is part of the fight.
Witness Statements. Other pledges who were there that night, members who participated, students who lived in the house — they all know what happened. Their memories are sharpest in the first days and weeks after the death. They are also under enormous social pressure — from the fraternity, from the university, from each other — to stay quiet, to “protect the brotherhood,” to say nothing that could get anyone in trouble. Witness statements must be taken early, before loyalty and fear silence the truth.
The Victim’s Phone and Digital Accounts. Your child’s phone, laptop, social media accounts, and email contain the story of their pledging experience — messages with the fraternity, photos from events, communications with other pledges, and possibly the moments leading up to the night they died. Secure these devices immediately. Do not allow anyone — the university, the fraternity, the police — to take the phone without a proper legal framework in place. The phone is evidence.
Medical and Autopsy Records. The hospital records, the emergency response records, and the autopsy report are the medical spine of the case. These are held by the hospital, the county coroner or medical examiner, and the emergency response agencies. They must be requested formally and completely — not just the final report, but the intake notes, the treatment timeline, the lab values, the toxicology, and the attending physician’s observations.
What This Case Is Worth: Damages, Insurance, and Coverage
A hazing death case is worth what a jury would award for the loss of a young person’s entire life — and that number, in Ohio, is not capped. Here is how the value is built.
Economic Damages. The lost future earnings of a college student are the foundation. A young person enrolled at Wilberforce University had a career ahead — decades of earning capacity, professional development, and financial contribution to their family. A forensic economist projects that lifetime earning stream, adjusted for education, career trajectory, and work-life expectancy, and reduces it to present value. For a college student with a professional career ahead, this number alone can reach into the millions. The medical expenses from the final hospitalization and the funeral costs are also recoverable.
Non-Economic Damages. The conscious pain and suffering your child experienced before death — the fear, the physical distress, the moment of realizing something was wrong and help was not coming — is compensable. The loss of companionship, guidance, and society for the parents and family is compensable. The loss of the prospect of life itself — the decades your child will not live, the milestones they will not reach, the family they will not have — is compensable. These are the damages that no receipt can measure and that a jury must weigh with its conscience.
Punitive Damages. When the conduct was egregious — and hazing that kills a student is, by definition, egregious — Ohio allows punitive damages. These are not tied to the family’s loss; they are tied to the defendant’s conduct. A university that ignored warnings. A fraternity that enforced a deadly “tradition.” Members who watched a young person die and told each other not to call 911. That is the conduct that punitive damages exist to punish. The availability and amount of punitive damages in Ohio are governed by state law principles that cap the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages in many cases — but the conduct in a hazing death case is precisely the kind that puts the maximum on the table.
The Insurance Reality. The university carries general liability insurance — typically a layered tower with substantial limits. But the policy may contain exclusions for hazing, assault, intentional acts, or bodily injury arising from the furnishing of alcohol. The fraternity’s national organization may carry insurance, but coverage for hazing is heavily contested. Individual members may have homeowners coverage, but intentional-act exclusions and social-host liability statutes complicate the analysis. The coverage fight in a hazing death case is its own battle — and the defendants’ insurers will fight it hard. The coverage tower is not the case’s value; it is the case’s recovery ceiling. The first job is establishing the value; the second job is finding the money to pay it.
The firm has recovered more than $50 million across its practice — a figure that includes a $5 million-plus brain injury settlement, a $3.8 million-plus amputation settlement, a $2.5 million-plus truck crash recovery, and a $2 million-plus maritime back-injury settlement. The active hazing case we lead counsel on seeks $10 million. These figures are the firm’s record, not a promise about your case — but they tell you the scale at which this firm operates. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
The Defense Playbook: What the University and Fraternity Will Try
The defendants in a hazing death case do not sit still. They have lawyers, insurers, and crisis-communication teams who have handled this before — because hazing deaths happen at universities across the country, and the defense playbook is well-rehearsed. Here are the plays they will run, and how we answer each one.
Play 1: “The student voluntarily consumed the alcohol.” This is the defense’s first and favorite move. It is designed to trigger Ohio’s comparative fault rule — if the jury agrees your child was 51% at fault, the family’s recovery is barred. The counter: hazing is inherently coercive. The power dynamics of pledging — the social cost of refusal, the threat of exclusion, the organized pressure of a group that controls whether you “make it” — make “voluntary” a fiction. A pledge who is told to drink or leave, drink or be humiliated, drink or never be a member is not making a free choice. The university’s own anti-hazing policy, which prohibits forced consumption of alcohol, concedes that the conduct is not voluntary — because if it were voluntary, it would not be hazing.
Play 2: “The university had policies against hazing and educated students about the dangers.” A policy on paper is not a defense. A brochure is not a defense. An orientation session is not a defense. What matters is enforcement. Did the university investigate prior complaints? Did it suspend chapters that were reported? Did it conduct surprise inspections during pledging season? Did it follow up on warnings from parents, students, or alumni? If the answer is no — and in most hazing death cases, it is — then the policy was a document, not a practice. The gap between what the university said and what it did is the case.
Play 3: “The local chapter acted independently; the national organization is not responsible.” The national fraternity collects dues, conducts chapter reviews, sets pledging standards, and controls the brand. It knows — because it has seen it before, at other chapters, in other states, in prior lawsuits — that forced alcohol consumption is a hazing mechanism. A national organization that publishes anti-hazing policies it does not enforce, and that continues to charter chapters it does not supervise, is not a bystander. It is an enabler. The discovery target is the national’s own incident history — prior complaints, prior settlements, prior expulsions — and its failure to act on what it already knew.
Play 4: The fast settlement offer. Within weeks of the death, someone from the university’s insurer or the fraternity’s insurer may contact the family with a settlement offer. It will sound generous. It will come with a release — a document that, once signed, extinguishes the family’s right to sue anyone for anything related to the death. The offer will arrive before the family has a lawyer, before the medical records are complete, before the investigation is done. It is designed to close the case cheaply and quietly. The counter: do not sign anything. Do not accept anything. Do not talk to the insurer. Call a lawyer first. The first offer is always a fraction of the case’s real value — because the insurer’s job is to pay as little as possible, as fast as possible, before the family understands what they have lost.
Play 5: “The fraternity has already been suspended / the members have been expelled.” Suspension and expulsion are public-relations responses, not legal accountability. A suspended fraternity can be reinstated. An expelled member can transfer to another school. Neither addresses the family’s loss or the institutional failures that caused it. The counter: disciplinary action by the university is evidence — it is an admission that the conduct occurred and was serious enough to warrant punishment. But it is not a substitute for the civil justice system. The family’s claim is independent of whatever the university does internally.
How a Hazing Death Case Is Built: The Proof Story
Here is how a case like this is actually assembled — the chronological walk from the day a family calls to the day a number is put in front of a jury.
The first week: the preservation letters go out. One to the university, demanding it freeze all records — disciplinary files, incident reports, prior hazing complaints, security footage, email communications, organizational rosters, pledging materials. One to the fraternity’s national organization, demanding the same. One to each individual member who can be identified, demanding they preserve their phones, their messages, their social media accounts. One to any third-party venue or property owner. These letters are not polite requests — they are legal demands that create a duty to preserve, and if the recipients delete evidence after receiving them, that destruction is itself a basis for sanctions and an adverse-inference instruction at trial.
The first month: the records demands. The medical records, the autopsy report, the toxicology results, the emergency response records. The university’s public records — whatever can be obtained without a lawsuit. The police investigation file, if one exists. The coroner’s report. These documents begin to build the timeline — when the hazing started, when the alcohol was consumed, when your child became distressed, when (or whether) anyone called for help, when the hospital received them, and when they died.
The first ninety days: the lawsuit is filed. The personal representative of the estate is appointed — we handle that appointment. The complaint is drafted naming every defendant in the stack: the university, the local chapter, the national organization, the individual members, the property owner. The statute of limitations is two years in Ohio, but we do not wait — because the evidence is dying and the defense is building its narrative. Filing early locks in the court’s power to compel discovery.
The discovery phase: the subpoenas and depositions. The university produces its disciplinary records — or fights to keep them sealed. The fraternity’s national organization produces its incident history — or claims it has none. The individual members sit for depositions, under oath, and answer for what they did, what they saw, and what they failed to do. The group chats, if they survived, come out in discovery — and they are the single most powerful evidence in the case, because they show the planning, the coercion, and the cover-up in the defendants’ own words.
The expert phase: the medical experts, the toxicologist, the forensic economist. The medical expert testifies to the mechanism of death — the respiratory depression, the aspiration, the cascade that killed your child. The toxicologist explains the BAC level and what it means — how much alcohol was consumed, how fast, and why the level was lethal. The forensic economist projects the lifetime earnings your child would have produced and reduces them to present value. The life-care planner, if your child survived for any period before death, documents the medical costs of that final hospitalization.
The resolution: the case resolves — by settlement or by verdict. Most cases settle, because the evidence, once it comes out in discovery, is too damaging for the defendants to risk a jury. Some go to verdict, because the defendants refuse to accept responsibility and the family refuses to settle for less than the full measure of what was lost. Either way, the number at the end is built from all of it — the frozen evidence, the compelled records, the sworn testimony, the expert analysis, and the story of a young person who went to college and died because an institution and an organization failed at their most basic duty.
The First 72 Hours for a Grieving Family
If your child has just died — if you are reading this in the first days after the death — here is what to do, in order, and what not to do.
Do secure your child’s phone and digital accounts. Your child’s phone, laptop, social media accounts, and email contain the story of their pledging experience. If the university, the fraternity, or the police have the phone, get it back or make sure it is preserved. Do not allow anyone to “look through it” or “return it to the fraternity.” It is evidence.
Do not sign anything. If the university, the fraternity, their insurer, or anyone else offers you a document — a release, a settlement, a waiver, an acknowledgment — do not sign it. If they offer you money, do not take it. If they ask you to “just tell us what happened,” do not give a recorded statement. Everything you say in the first 72 hours will be used against your family’s case. Silence is protection until you have a lawyer.
Do demand preservation of evidence — in writing. Send a letter, an email, or a text — anything in writing — to the university, the fraternity, and anyone you can identify who was present, telling them to preserve all records, messages, videos, photos, and documents related to your child and the organization. This creates a legal duty to preserve. If they delete anything after receiving that message, the destruction is evidence of consciousness of guilt.
Do obtain the autopsy report and medical records. Request the autopsy report from the county coroner or medical examiner. Request the hospital records from the emergency department or ICU where your child was treated. Request the emergency response records from the ambulance service or fire department. These documents tell the medical truth of how your child died, and they take time to obtain — so start now.
Do identify witnesses. If you know the names of other pledges, fraternity members, or students who were present, write them down. If your child mentioned names in texts or calls before the night they died, preserve those messages. Witnesses scatter — they graduate, they transfer, they stop answering. Identifying them early, while you have the information, is critical.
Do not talk to the university’s investigator or the fraternity’s national representative alone. The university may assign an investigator to “look into what happened.” The fraternity’s national organization may send a representative. These people are not neutral. They work for the institutions that are potentially liable for your child’s death. Anything you say to them can and will be used to defend the case. If they contact you, refer them to your lawyer.
Do call a lawyer who knows hazing cases. Not every wrongful death lawyer understands hazing — the organizational dynamics, the evidence patterns, the defense playbook, the coverage fights. A hazing death case is different from a car crash or a medical malpractice case. It requires a firm that has litigated against universities and fraternities, that knows where the evidence hides, and that understands the medicine of alcohol poisoning. The call is free. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue a university for a hazing death?
Yes. A university can be held liable for a hazing death when it knew or should have known that hazing was occurring in organizations it chartered and supervised, and failed to take meaningful action to stop it. The claim is based on the university’s duty of care to its students — a duty that includes monitoring the organizations it allows on campus, investigating warnings it receives, and acting before someone is killed. A policy on paper is not a defense. The question is what the university actually did.
How long do I have to file a hazing death lawsuit in Ohio?
Ohio’s wrongful death statute of limitations gives the family two years from the date of death to file the action. That deadline is strict — it does not extend because the university is still “investigating” or because the family is still grieving. Within that two-year window, the evidence that proves the case is disappearing on a much shorter clock — days to weeks for some digital evidence, months for university records. The day you call a lawyer is the day the clock starts working for you instead of against you.
What if the university says my child “voluntarily” drank the alcohol?
This is the defense’s standard argument, and it is designed to trigger Ohio’s comparative fault rule. The answer: hazing is inherently coercive. The power dynamics of pledging — the threat of exclusion, humiliation, and social ostracism — make “voluntary” a fiction. If the consumption was coerced, pressured, or part of an organized initiation ritual, it was not voluntary. The university’s own anti-hazing policy recognizes this — it prohibits forced consumption of alcohol precisely because the conduct is not voluntary. A student who is told “drink or you’re out” is not making a free choice.
How much is a hazing death case worth?
The value of a hazing death case is built from several components: the lost lifetime earnings of a young person with a full career ahead; the conscious pain and suffering experienced before death; the loss of companionship and guidance for the family; and, in cases of egregious conduct, punitive damages. Ohio does not cap wrongful death damages. The firm has recovered more than $50 million across its practice and currently leads an active $10 million hazing lawsuit. The value of your case depends on its specific facts — the age and earning potential of your child, the severity of the defendant’s conduct, the strength of the evidence, and the jurisdiction. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Who can be sued in a hazing death case?
The defendant stack includes the university, the local fraternity or sorority chapter, the national fraternity or sorority organization, individual members who participated in or facilitated the hazing, and any property owner where the hazing occurred. Each layer of the stack has a different theory of liability and a different insurance picture. Naming all the responsible parties is the difference between a full recovery and a partial one — because if one defendant is judgment-proof, the others must carry the loss.
What evidence disappears fastest in a hazing case?
Group chats and text messages can be deleted in seconds. Social media stories vanish in 24 hours by design. Security camera footage overwrites itself in approximately 30 days. Witnesses’ memories fade and their willingness to talk erodes as social pressure builds. The university’s “internal investigation” can result in records being sealed or destroyed. The single most time-critical step is sending preservation letters — in writing, to every person and institution that holds evidence — within days of the death. Once the letters are on file, destruction of evidence becomes a legal problem for the defendants, not just a practical loss for the family.
What is Collin’s Law and how does it affect this case?
Collin’s Law is Ohio’s anti-hazing statute, strengthened in 2021 after the death of Stone Foltz at Bowling Green State University. It expanded the definition of hazing to include coerced consumption of alcohol and drugs, elevated certain hazing offenses from misdemeanors to felonies, and increased reporting requirements. The criminal statute matters for a civil case because a violation of the anti-hazing law is powerful evidence of negligence — if the conduct violated a criminal statute designed to protect students, the civil duty was breached. The criminal prosecution, if one occurs, is separate from the civil wrongful death case, but the two run in parallel.
The university says it had anti-hazing policies — does that protect them?
No. A policy on paper is not a defense to a wrongful death claim. The question is not whether the university had a policy — virtually every university does. The question is whether the university enforced it. Did it investigate complaints? Did it suspend chapters? Did it monitor pledging activities? Did it follow up on warnings? If the university had a policy and did not enforce it, the policy is evidence of the university’s knowledge — it knew hazing was dangerous enough to prohibit — and its failure — it did nothing meaningful to stop it. The gap between the written policy and the actual practice is where liability lives.
The fraternity is already suspended — does that help or hurt the case?
Suspension helps. It is an admission — by the university or the national organization — that the conduct occurred and was serious enough to warrant discipline. It corroborates the family’s claim. But suspension is not a substitute for civil accountability. A suspended fraternity can be reinstated. An expelled member can transfer. The family’s loss is not addressed by internal discipline. The civil case is the mechanism that forces the institutions to pay — in dollars, publicly, and with consequences — for the death they allowed to happen.
How much does it cost to hire a hazing death lawyer?
Nothing upfront. We work on 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. If we take your case, we advance the costs of investigation, expert witnesses, and litigation, and those costs are recovered from the recovery. No family grieving a hazing death should have to choose between justice and their bank account.
Why This Firm: The People Who Take Hazing Cases
Ralph Manginello is the managing partner of Attorney911 and has spent 27-plus years in courtrooms, including federal court. He is a journalist who became a trial lawyer — the instinct to find the story, chase the facts, and tell them to a jury is in his bones. He is lead counsel in the active $10 million hazing lawsuit against a university and a fraternity — a case that is teaching this firm, in real time, exactly how these institutions defend themselves and exactly how to break through that defense. He does not lose cases because he outworks the other side, and in a hazing death case, the other side is a university with a legal department and a fraternity with a national organization behind it. That is who Ralph is built to fight.
Lupe Peña is an associate attorney at the firm and a former insurance-defense lawyer. He spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decide how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like yours. He knows how the insurer sets a low reserve in the first 48 hours, how the recorded-statement call is engineered to get you to say something that hurts your case, and how the quick settlement check arrives with a release printed on the back before the autopsy is complete. He sat in those rooms. Now he sits on your side of the table. And he conducts full client consultations in Spanish, without an interpreter, because every family deserves to understand their case in the language they pray in.
Together, this is a trial team that knows hazing cases from the law, the medicine, the evidence, and the defense playbook — and that knows how to value a claim because one of its own used to be the person on the other side deciding what it was worth. That combination is the advantage a grieving family needs when the institution that failed their child is already building its defense.
We take Ohio hazing death cases and work with local counsel where the case requires it. We do not claim an office in Ohio or an Ohio bar admission — we are honest about how we operate, and we operate by putting the strongest possible team on the case regardless of geography. If your family has lost someone to hazing at Wilberforce University or anywhere in Ohio, call us. 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case. Hablamos Español.
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.