Bloomington, Monroe County, Indiana Fraternity Hazing Lawyer — Phi Kappa Psi IU Hospitalization Claims
If your son or daughter is in a hospital bed tonight because of what happened at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on the night of October 15 or the early morning of October 16, you are reading this page for one reason, and it is the most urgent reason there is: the evidence of what was done to your child is being erased right now, while you sit here. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Tonight, while you read this, members of that chapter are deleting GroupMe threads, clearing Snapchat conversations, and coordinating what to say to the Indiana University Police Department. Every message that proves this hazing was planned, every photo from inside that house, every text that shows who was in charge and who was forcing what — all of it can be gone before the sun comes up. And once those messages are deleted from a phone, they do not come back.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are currently litigating a $10 million hazing lawsuit against a national fraternity and a major university, and we know precisely how these cases are built, what the fraternity’s lawyers will try to do to your family, and what has to be frozen before it disappears. The call is free. The number is 1-888-ATTY-911. We answer 24 hours a day — a live person, not an answering service.
This page is the full picture of what happened at Phi Kappa Psi, what Indiana law says about it, who can be held responsible, what the evidence clock looks like, what the fraternity’s insurance company will try, and what you need to do in the first 72 hours. Read it, and then call. Every hour that passes is an hour the other side is using to make proof disappear.
What Happened at Phi Kappa Psi — The Incident We Know About
On the night of October 15 and into the early morning of October 16, 2025, a hazing incident occurred at the Indiana University chapter of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity in Bloomington. At least two students were hospitalized with injuries serious enough to require emergency medical treatment. The Indiana University Police Department has launched a criminal investigation and issued a Crime Notice confirming the hospitalizations and the timeline — late night October 15, early morning October 16. The specific details of the hazing have not been publicly disclosed, which is standard in an active criminal investigation, but the fact that at least two students required emergency hospitalization tells you this was not a minor initiation exercise gone slightly wrong. Nobody goes to the emergency room from a welcome ceremony.
On October 21, 2025, the university’s Office of Student Life placed Phi Kappa Psi on cease and desist, suspending all organization activities until further notice. The chapter is on the public list of organizations on disciplinary status. It joins Beta Sigma Psi and the Palestine Solidarity Committee on that list — three organizations, all frozen, all under investigation.
But here is the fact that changes everything about this case: this is not the first time.
The 2015 Suspension — Why the National Organization Knew
Phi Kappa Psi was previously placed on cease and desist during the fall semester of 2015 following multiple reports of hazing and drug use at the Indiana University chapter. The fraternity house was vacated. No meetings were permitted. The chapter was not allowed to operate again until the fall semester of 2017 — a full two-year shutdown.
That history is the single most powerful fact in your case, and here is why: it means the national organization knew. Phi Kappa Psi is not a loose collection of independent clubs. It is a national fraternity with a central administrative structure, a national executive council, risk-management policies, and an insurance program. When a chapter is shut down for two years for hazing and drug use, the national organization receives notice, conducts reviews, imposes sanctions, and — in theory — implements safeguards to make sure it does not happen again.
It happened again. The same chapter, the same campus, the same kind of harm, eight years after the national organization supposedly fixed the problem. That gap between what the national organization promised in 2015 and what it delivered in 2025 is the heart of a negligent-supervision claim. The national fraternity took this chapter off suspension, let it reoccupy its house, let it resume recruiting new members, and then failed to monitor whether the culture that produced the 2015 hazing had actually been changed. Discovery in this case will demand every audit, every review, every compliance report, and every risk-management assessment the national organization generated for this chapter between 2017 and October 15, 2025. If those records are thin, generic, or missing — and in our experience, they often are — that absence is the case.
The Evidence Clock — What Is Being Destroyed Right Now
In a hazing case, the evidence dies faster than in any other case type we handle. That is not a figure of speech. Here is every record that matters and how fast it can legally disappear.
Member group chats (GroupMe, Snapchat, iMessage, Discord). This is the single most important evidence in a hazing case, and it is the most fragile. GroupMe threads, Snapchat conversations, and group text chains are where the hazing was planned, discussed, and joked about. They show who organized it, who participated, who raised concerns, and who was in charge. But these messages live on individual members’ phones, and any member can delete an entire thread with a few taps — remotely, tonight, without anyone’s permission. There is no federal regulation forcing a fraternity to preserve student group chats. Once deleted, they are gone. This is why a preservation demand — a formal legal letter ordering the chapter, its officers, and the national organization to freeze all electronic communications — has to go out the day you call us, not the week after. If that letter is on file and the messages disappear anyway, the law lets a jury assume the deleted evidence was as damning as you say it was. That is called an adverse-inference instruction, and it can win a case that might otherwise have been unwinnable.
Security camera footage from the fraternity house and surrounding area. The Greek Row area in Bloomington is a mix of university-owned and private property, which creates overlapping jurisdiction between IUPD and the Bloomington Police Department. Many fraternity houses have exterior security cameras, and neighboring properties, campus buildings, and city-owned infrastructure may have surveillance that captured who entered and exited the house, in what condition, and at what time. But security camera systems typically overwrite on a rolling cycle — commonly 30 days, sometimes less. The footage from the night of October 15 is already aging. Every day that passes without a preservation demand is a day closer to that footage recording over itself.
IUPD investigative reports. The Indiana University Police Department has launched a criminal investigation, which means officers are collecting witness statements, physical evidence, and possibly search warrants for phones and devices. These reports are powerful, but they are controlled by the police, not by you. A preservation letter to IUPD requesting that all investigative materials be maintained is a separate step from the civil preservation demand to the fraternity.
Fraternity national audit and disciplinary records. The national organization’s files on this chapter — the post-2015 compliance reviews, the risk-management audits, the incident reports, the disciplinary correspondence — are the records that prove the national fraternity knew the chapter remained a risk. These records are in the national organization’s possession and will not be destroyed quickly, but they must be formally demanded in discovery before the fraternity’s lawyers have time to review, redact, or “organize” them.
Medical records from IU Health Bloomington Hospital. The proximity of IU Health Bloomington Hospital to the IU campus means that the injured students were likely taken there quickly, and the emergency department’s records — the admission notes, the blood work, the toxicology screen, the physical examination findings, the imaging — were created within hours of the hazing. These records are the medical proof of what happened to your child’s body. They are protected by HIPAA and must be formally requested through proper medical-records channels. Do not assume the hospital will hold onto them indefinitely — request them early, request them complete, and request the raw imaging files, not just the radiologist’s summary.
The pattern is clear: the fastest-dying evidence — the group chats — is the evidence that proves intent and planning. The slowest-dying evidence — the national organization’s audit files — is the evidence that proves negligent supervision. Both are essential. The preservation letter that freezes the fast-dying evidence has to go out now. The discovery demand for the slow-dying evidence follows once a case is filed.
Indiana’s Anti-Hazing Law — What It Means for Your Case
Indiana treats hazing as a crime. The state’s anti-hazing statute makes it a criminal act to force or coerce another person into conduct that creates a substantial risk of bodily injury as part of an initiation or membership ritual. The statute escalates the charge when the hazing results in serious bodily injury — which is exactly what happened here, given that at least two students were hospitalized.
Hazing is illegal at the state level and prohibited at IU. The university conducts its own investigations and disciplinary actions, which are handled by the Office of Student Conduct and the Office of the Dean of Students.
That distinction — between the criminal investigation by IUPD and the university’s internal disciplinary process — matters enormously for your family. The criminal investigation can produce charges against individual perpetrators. The university’s disciplinary process can produce sanctions against the chapter and its members. But neither of those processes is designed to compensate your child for what was done to them. The criminal court does not pay medical bills. The Dean of Students does not fund a life-care plan. Only a civil lawsuit against the fraternity, its national organization, and the responsible individuals can do that.
Negligence per se. When a person or organization violates a criminal statute designed to protect a class of people, and a person in that protected class is injured as a result, the violation of the statute can be treated as evidence of negligence — or, in some circumstances, as negligence per se. The Indiana hazing statute was written to protect students from exactly what happened on October 15. The chapter violated it. That violation is not just a criminal matter — it is the foundation of the civil claim.
Comparative fault — and why it is weak in a hazing case. Indiana follows a modified comparative fault system with a 51% bar, meaning a plaintiff cannot recover if they are more than 50% at fault. The fraternity’s lawyers will try to use this rule against your child. They will argue that your son or daughter “voluntarily” participated in the hazing — that they chose to be there, chose to drink, chose to endure whatever was done to them. This argument is fundamentally dishonest, and here is why: hazing exploits a power imbalance that makes true consent impossible. A pledge who is told to consume alcohol, perform physical tasks, or submit to humiliation is not making a free choice — they are responding to the threat of social exclusion, the loss of a membership they have invested in, and the implicit or explicit threats of the group. The law recognizes this. “Assumption of risk” is a weak defense in hazing cases precisely because the power dynamic between active members and pledges undermines any claim that the pledge freely accepted the risk. A pledge cannot legally consent to being hospitalized.
The statute of limitations. Indiana’s personal-injury statute of limitations runs for two years from the date of the incident. That means a lawsuit arising from the October 15-16 hazing must be filed by October 16, 2027, or the claim is lost forever. Two years sounds like a long time when your child is still in the hospital, but it is not. Medical treatment takes months. Expert evaluations take months. Discovery — the process of demanding and reviewing the fraternity’s records, taking depositions, and building the proof — takes months. A case that is not filed early is a case that is rushed at the end. The preservation letter goes out the day you call; the lawsuit follows when the medical picture is clear and the evidence is locked down.
Punitive damages. Indiana allows punitive damages — money designed not to compensate but to punish — but caps them at the greater of $50,000 or three times the compensatory damages award. Importantly, 75% of any punitive award goes to the state’s Violent Crime Victims Compensation Fund, not to the plaintiff. That means the plaintiff keeps 25% of the punitive award. Even with that structure, punitive damages matter in this case because of the chapter’s history: a prior two-year suspension for hazing and drug use, followed by the same conduct resuming eight years later. That pattern — knowing the danger, being told to fix it, and letting it happen again — is exactly the kind of willful disregard that punitive damages exist to address. The cap limits the number, but the claim’s existence changes how the fraternity’s insurance company evaluates the case from the very first conversation.
No cap on compensatory damages. Indiana does not cap economic or non-economic compensatory damages in general personal-injury cases. That means the full cost of your child’s medical care, lost wages, lost earning capacity, pain, suffering, and mental anguish is recoverable without a statutory ceiling. The only practical limit is what the evidence supports and what a jury in Monroe County is willing to award.
Who Can Be Held Responsible — The Defendant Map
A hazing case is almost never one defendant. It is a stack of entities, each with a different role, each with a different insurance policy, and each trying to point at the others. Here is the map.
The local chapter of Phi Kappa Psi. The chapter itself — the organization of students at IU — is directly liable for the acts of its members and officers during the ritual that caused the injuries. The chapter is the entity that planned the hazing, executed it, and produced the harm. But the chapter is likely a thin entity with few assets of its own. The real money sits above it.
The national Phi Kappa Psi organization. The national fraternity is the deep pocket, and it is the defendant that matters most. The national organization licenses the chapter, sets the risk-management policies, collects dues, provides insurance, and is responsible for monitoring its chapters — especially a chapter it already shut down once for the same conduct. The negligent-supervision claim against the national organization is built on the gap between what it knew in 2015, what it promised to do about it, and what actually happened on October 15, 2025. The national organization’s insurance — typically a commercial general liability policy with a substantial umbrella layer — is the primary source of recovery for a catastrophically injured student.
The chapter housing corporation. Many fraternity chapters operate through a separate housing corporation or house board that owns or leases the physical house. That entity has premises-liability exposure: it controlled the property where the hazing occurred, it permitted dangerous and illegal activities on the property, and it failed to protect students from foreseeable harm. The housing corporation may carry its own liability coverage, separate from the national organization’s policy.
The individual perpetrators. The students who organized and carried out the hazing are individually liable for intentional torts — assault, battery, and false imprisonment. But individual college students rarely have meaningful assets or insurance. They are named as defendants for accountability and to prevent them from escaping consequence, but they are not the source of the recovery. The value of naming them is that their depositions, under oath, are where the full story of what happened that night comes out.
The corporate-structure reality. Fraternities are deliberately layered. The national organization, the local chapter, the housing corporation, and the alumni board are often separate legal entities, each with its own insurance, each contractually structured to distance itself from the others. When something goes wrong, every layer points at the next. The first job in building the case is identifying every entity in the stack, determining which ones carry insurance, and naming all of them in the lawsuit. Missing a defendant — particularly the one that holds the insurance — can mean the difference between a recovery that funds your child’s future care and a judgment against an empty shell.
“He Volunteered for This” — The Defense You Will Hear
The fraternity’s lawyers will arrive with a script. It is the same script used in every hazing case in the country, and you should hear it now so you are ready.
They will say your child volunteered to pledge. They will say participation was optional. They will say the activities were tradition, not hazing, and that everyone went through it. They will say your child could have walked out at any time. They will say the injuries were the result of your child’s own choices, not anyone else’s conduct.
Every one of those arguments is built on a false premise: that a college student seeking acceptance in a social organization that holds the keys to their social life, their housing, and their identity on campus is making free, informed choices about what to endure. That is not how hazing works. Hazing works by creating a power imbalance in which refusal means exile, humiliation, or retaliation. A 19-year-old pledge surrounded by older, larger, socially dominant members is not in a position to freely consent to forced consumption, physical abuse, or sleep deprivation. The law recognizes this power dynamic. Indiana’s criminal hazing statute exists precisely because the legislature understood that “they chose to do it” is not a defense when the choice is coerced by the structure of the relationship.
The fraternity will also argue that the university’s cease-and-desist order and the IUPD investigation are proof that the system worked — that the danger was caught and addressed. That argument is a distraction. A cease-and-desist order after two students are hospitalized is not the system working. It is the system failing. The question is not whether the university responded after the harm. The question is whether the fraternity and its national organization prevented the harm before it reached your child.
The Injuries Hazing Causes — Medicine and Long-Term Effects
Hazing injuries are not uniform. The specific mechanism of harm depends on what was done, but the medical categories that appear in hospitalized hazing victims fall into several patterns, each with its own diagnostic profile and its own long-term trajectory.
Alcohol poisoning and forced consumption. Forced or coerced alcohol consumption is one of the most common mechanisms in hazing hospitalizations. The body can only metabolize alcohol at a fixed rate; when consumption exceeds that rate, blood alcohol concentration climbs until it suppresses the central nervous system, slows breathing, and can cause aspiration, hypothermia, and death. A blood alcohol level above 0.30% is life-threatening; above 0.40%, it is frequently fatal. The emergency-department toxicology screen from the night of October 15 will show exactly how high the blood alcohol level was. If your child was forced or pressured to drink to that level, the medical record is the proof — and the long-term consequences can include liver damage, cognitive impairment from oxygen deprivation, and brain injury from the neurotoxic effects of acute alcohol poisoning.
Traumatic brain injury from physical assault or falls. If the hazing involved blows to the body or head, or if your child fell while intoxicated or exhausted, a traumatic brain injury may have occurred. A TBI does not require a loss of consciousness. It does not require a visible wound. It does not require a positive CT scan — in fact, in a so-called “mild” brain injury, the CT comes back normal about 90% of the time, because the damage is microscopic tearing of nerve fibers that a standard scan was never designed to see. The symptoms show up at the dinner table: headaches that will not stop, words that will not come, a short fuse, a student who cannot concentrate on the coursework they handled easily before. These injuries are proven with neuropsychological testing, advanced imaging, and the testimony of people who knew your child before October 15 and can see the difference now.
Rhabdomyolysis from forced physical exertion. When a person is forced to perform extreme physical exercise — calisthenics, holds, carries, “workouts” — beyond what their muscles can tolerate, the muscle cells rupture and release a protein called myoglobin into the bloodstream. Myoglobin clogs and damages the kidneys. The condition is called rhabdomyolysis, and it can cause acute kidney failure requiring dialysis. The blood test that proves it is creatine kinase (CK), which spikes in the hours and days after the injury. A CK level above five times the normal limit confirms the diagnosis. If your child’s hospital workup included serial CK draws, that is what they were looking for — and if the fraternity’s lawyers try to minimize the injury, the CK trend is the objective, unfudgeable proof of how hard the body was pushed.
Psychological trauma — PTSD and the invisible injury. The psychological harm of hazing is real, diagnosable, and long-lasting. Post-traumatic stress disorder is diagnosed through a formal eight-part clinical checklist, not a lawyer’s opinion. A survivor who was degraded, physically endangered, stripped of autonomy, and made to fear for their safety can meet every diagnostic criterion: the intrusive memories, the avoidance of anything associated with the fraternity, the negative changes in mood and cognition, the hyperarousal, the sleep disruption, the symptoms lasting more than a month and impairing the ability to function. This is not a soft injury. It is a medical condition with a diagnostic code, validated assessment instruments, and a treatment cost that stretches across years. The defense will try to call it exaggerated. The medicine and the treating clinician’s records answer that.
The long-term cost trajectory. The damages in a hazing case are not just the emergency-room bill. They include follow-up medical care, specialist visits, imaging, rehabilitation, counseling, psychiatric treatment, medication, lost academic time, lost tuition, and — if the injury is permanent — lost earning capacity across an entire career. A life-care planner builds the cost stream year by year. A forensic economist reduces it to present value. The number that results is what the demand is built on — not a guess, not a round figure, but a documented projection of what this injury will cost your child across the decades of a life now altered.
What Your Case Is Worth — Damages in Indiana
Every case is different, and the value of this case depends on the severity of the injuries, the completeness of the evidence, and the strength of the link between the fraternity’s conduct and the harm. But the framework is clear.
Economic damages include every dollar the injury has cost and will cost: emergency department bills, hospital admission costs, specialist consultations, imaging and laboratory work, rehabilitation, mental-health treatment, medication, lost tuition for the semester affected, lost wages if the student was employed, and — if the injury affects future earning capacity — the present-value calculation of the income your child will not earn across a career that now looks different than it did before October 15.
Non-economic damages include physical pain, mental anguish, emotional distress, the loss of the collegiate experience your child came to Indiana University to have, the loss of social relationships destroyed by the hazing and its aftermath, and the impact on the family — the sleepless nights, the fear, the drive to Bloomington, the meetings with doctors, the life rerouted.
Punitive damages are available because the chapter’s 2015 history makes this a repeat offense. Indiana caps punitive damages at the greater of $50,000 or three times the compensatory award, with 75% of any punitive recovery going to the state’s Violent Crime Victims Compensation Fund. Even with that structure, the punitive claim changes how the national fraternity’s insurance carrier evaluates the case — because a jury that hears about the 2015 suspension, the two-year shutdown, and the resumption of the same conduct will be angry, and an angry jury is a jury that awards more.
Based on cases of this type — hospitalization of at least two victims, a repeat-offender chapter with a documented prior suspension, and a national organization that failed to prevent the recurrence — the case value range in our assessment runs from a floor of approximately $250,000 to a ceiling that can reach $3,500,000 or more. The floor is set by the hospitalization alone: emergency care, follow-up, pain and suffering, and the emotional impact of being hazed to the point of requiring medical treatment. The ceiling is driven by the severity of the permanent injuries, the strength of the evidence, and the punitive posture created by the chapter’s recidivism. If injuries include permanent cognitive impairment from alcohol poisoning, a traumatic brain injury, or kidney damage from rhabdomyolysis, and if the evidence of the national organization’s failure to supervise is strong, the value moves toward the high end during settlement negotiations with the national fraternity’s umbrella carrier.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The figures above are an assessment framework, not a promise.
The Fraternity’s Playbook — What Their Lawyers Will Try
The national fraternity’s insurance company and its defense lawyers have a playbook. We know it because Lupe Peña, our associate attorney, spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims from people exactly like your family. He sat in those meetings. He knows the plays. Now he uses that knowledge for the injured. Here is what to expect.
Play 1: The fast, small settlement with a release attached. Within days or weeks of the incident, a representative of the fraternity’s insurance carrier or its claims administrator may contact your family offering a settlement — a check that looks generous in the moment, accompanied by a release that, once signed, extinguishes your right to sue forever. The check will be designed to arrive before the medical bills are fully quantified, before the long-term prognosis is known, and before any lawyer has looked at the evidence. The counter: do not sign anything, do not accept any payment, and do not have any conversation with anyone representing the fraternity or its insurer without your own counsel present. A release signed in a hospital waiting room is exactly what the insurance company is counting on.
Play 2: The recorded statement from the victim. An adjuster or investigator may ask to “just talk to” your child — to hear their side, to get a statement on the record. The conversation will be recorded. The questions will be designed to elicit answers that minimize the fraternity’s role and emphasize your child’s “voluntary” participation: “You chose to pledge, right?” “Nobody forced you to be there?” “You could have left at any time?” Every one of those questions is engineered to build a comparative-fault defense. The counter: no recorded statement, no conversation, no interview without counsel. Your child has no obligation to help the fraternity’s insurance company build a case against them.
Play 3: The “it was the individual members, not the organization” argument. The national fraternity will try to distance itself from the chapter and from the individual perpetrators. It will argue that the hazing was an unsanctioned, rogue act by a few members — not something the organization planned, authorized, or condoned. This argument is designed to shrink the defendant pool to the individual students, who have no money, and away from the national organization, which does. The counter: the 2015 suspension. The national organization already knew this chapter had a hazing culture. It shut the chapter down for two years. It let it reopen. It failed to monitor whether the culture had changed. That is not a rogue act by a few members — that is a supervisory failure by the entity responsible for the chapter’s conduct. The national organization is in this case, and the evidence of its prior knowledge is what keeps it there.
Play 4: The “assumption of risk” defense. As discussed above, the fraternity will argue that your child assumed the risk of hazing by choosing to pledge. The counter is the power imbalance: a pledge cannot freely consent to being hazed, and Indiana’s criminal statute — which makes hazing illegal — establishes that the conduct was wrongful regardless of whether the pledge “agreed” to it. You cannot assume the risk of someone else’s crime against you.
Play 5: The social-media mining. The fraternity’s investigators will scour your child’s social media for anything that can be used to minimize the injury: a photo of them smiling after the incident, a post about going out with friends, anything that suggests they are “fine.” The counter: your child should not post anything about the incident, the fraternity, the hazing, or their medical condition on any social media platform. Set accounts to private. Do not accept new friend requests. Do not discuss the case with anyone outside your family and your legal counsel. Assume that everything posted will be Exhibit A in the defense’s motion to reduce damages.
The First 72 Hours — What to Do and What Not to Do
Do this now:
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Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free. We answer 24 hours a day. The first conversation is about two things: what happened and what to preserve. Within hours of that call, a preservation demand goes out to the chapter, the national organization, the housing corporation, and any third-party platforms — demanding that all group chats, all security footage, all incident reports, all disciplinary records, and all internal communications be frozen immediately.
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Get the medical records started. Request the complete emergency-department records from IU Health Bloomington Hospital — the admission notes, the triage assessment, the toxicology screen, the imaging, the laboratory work, the discharge summary. Do not accept a summary; request the full record, including the raw imaging files. Your child may need to sign a HIPAA authorization for the records to be released to you or to us.
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Photograph everything. If your child has visible injuries — bruising, lacerations, anything — photograph it immediately, with a time stamp. Photograph the condition of their clothing if it was returned from the fraternity house. Photograph anything that was brought home from the hospital.
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Preserve your child’s phone. Do not delete anything. Do not let your child delete anything — not text messages, not photos, not social media posts, not group chats. The phone is evidence. If your child is in a GroupMe or group chat with fraternity members, those messages are the single most important piece of evidence in the case. Put the phone in airplane mode if necessary to prevent remote deletion of messages by other participants.
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Write down the timeline. While events are fresh, have your child write down — or record a voice memo of — everything they remember: who was present, what was said, what was done to them, what they were told to do, who was in charge, what time things happened, and what they observed happening to other students. This does not have to be a polished statement. It has to be contemporaneous and honest.
Do NOT do this:
- Do not sign any document from the fraternity, the university, or any insurance representative without having it reviewed by counsel.
- Do not give a recorded statement to anyone — not the fraternity’s insurer, not a “claims administrator,” not an “investigator” who says they just want to help.
- Do not let your child discuss the incident with fraternity members. They may try to “bridge” the situation — to apologize, to explain, to ask your child to keep it quiet. Every one of those conversations is an attempt to shape the narrative and, in some cases, to intimidate the witness.
- Do not post about the incident on social media. Not your child, not you, not anyone in the family.
- Do not assume the university’s disciplinary process will protect your rights. The Office of Student Conduct and the Dean of Students are running an internal process that can sanction the chapter and its members, but that process does not produce compensation and does not protect your civil claim. They are separate tracks, and only the civil track pays.
Why This Firm — Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
Ralph Manginello has spent 27 years in courtrooms, including federal court. He built this firm in 2001, and he built it to take cases that require a fight — cases against institutions, corporations, and insurance companies that have more money and more lawyers than the people they hurt. Ralph was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which means he learned to find the story in the documents, to ask the question nobody else asked, and to refuse to accept the official version. He is the managing partner of this firm, and his name is on every case we take.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney and our insider advantage. Lupe spent years at a national insurance-defense firm — the same kind of firm the national fraternity will hire to defend this case. He sat in the rooms where adjusters set claim reserves in the first 48 hours, where recorded-statement scripts were designed to minimize liability, where settlement offers were calibrated to arrive before the medical results did. He knows how the other side values a claim, how they decide what to fight and what to pay, and where their pressure points are. Now he uses that knowledge for injured families. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. If your family prays in Spanish, we serve you in Spanish.
We work on contingency. That means we do not get paid unless we win your case. Our fee is 33.33% if the case settles before trial and 40% if it goes to trial. You pay nothing out of pocket. The consultation is free. The preservation letter is sent at no cost to you. The investigation is funded by us. We do not send a bill until there is a recovery.
We have recovered millions for injured clients, including a $5 million brain-injury settlement and a $10 million hazing lawsuit currently in active litigation. Our hazing practice is built on the knowledge that hazing is not a prank that went too far — it is an organizational failure that starts at the local chapter and ends at the national executive council.
If we are not the right fit for your family, we will tell you. But if your child was hospitalized by a fraternity that had already been shut down once for the same thing, we want to talk to you. Call 1-888-ATTY-911.
Hablamos Español.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue the national fraternity, not just the local chapter?
Yes — and in most serious hazing cases, the national organization is the primary defendant. The local chapter likely has few assets. The national fraternity licenses the chapter, sets its risk-management policies, collects dues, provides insurance, and is responsible for monitoring its chapters. When a chapter has already been shut down once for hazing — as this one was in 2015 — the national organization’s failure to prevent a recurrence is a direct negligent-supervision claim. The national organization’s insurance policy is typically the primary source of recovery for a catastrophically injured student.
My son or daughter “volunteered” to pledge. Does that hurt the case?
No. The “they chose to be there” argument is the defense’s favorite line, and it is built on a false premise. Hazing exploits a power imbalance that makes true consent impossible. A pledge who is told to consume alcohol, submit to physical abuse, or endure humiliation is not making a free choice — they are responding to the threat of social exclusion and the loss of a membership they have invested in. Indiana’s criminal hazing statute exists because the legislature understood that coercion through social pressure is still coercion. You cannot legally consent to being the victim of a crime.
How long do I have to file a lawsuit?
Indiana’s personal-injury statute of limitations is two years from the date of the incident. For the October 15-16, 2025 hazing, that means a lawsuit must be filed by approximately October 16, 2027. But the deadline is not the only clock that matters. The evidence — group chats, security footage, witness memory — is dying every day. The preservation letter goes out the day you call us, not the week before the deadline.
The university already placed the fraternity on cease and desist. Isn’t that enough?
No. A cease-and-desist order is an internal university sanction that suspends the chapter’s activities. It does not compensate your child for medical bills, pain, suffering, lost tuition, or long-term injury. The university’s Office of Student Conduct runs a disciplinary process that can sanction the chapter and its members, but that process does not produce a financial recovery and does not protect your civil claim. They are separate tracks. Only a civil lawsuit against the fraternity and its national organization can produce compensation.
What if the fraternity says it was just “tradition” and not hazing?
“Tradition” is not a legal defense. Indiana’s hazing statute defines the conduct by what it does — creates a substantial risk of bodily injury as part of an initiation ritual — not by what the participants call it. If the activity hospitalized two students, it was not a tradition. It was a crime and a civil wrong, regardless of how many years the chapter has been doing it or what name they gave it.
Will my child have to talk to the fraternity’s insurance company?
No. Your child has no obligation to speak with the fraternity’s insurance company, its claims administrator, or its investigators. Any conversation they request is designed to build a defense against your child, not to help them. Do not allow any recorded statement, any interview, or any “casual conversation” without your own counsel present. The insurance adjuster is not your friend.
What is the case worth?
Case value depends on the severity of the injuries, the completeness of the evidence, and the strength of the link between the fraternity’s conduct and the harm. In our assessment, based on the hospitalization of at least two victims and the chapter’s repeat-offender history, the case value range runs from approximately $250,000 to $3,500,000 or more. The floor is set by the hospitalization and its immediate aftermath. The ceiling is driven by permanent injury, the strength of the evidence, and the punitive posture created by the 2015 suspension. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
IUPD is already investigating criminally. Do I still need a civil lawyer?
Yes. The criminal investigation by the Indiana University Police Department can produce charges against individual perpetrators, but it does not compensate your child. The criminal court does not pay medical bills or fund a life-care plan. A civil lawsuit is a separate process, in a separate court, with a separate burden of proof, designed to produce a financial recovery for your child’s injuries. The two processes can run in parallel, but only the civil case pays. And the evidence the criminal investigation is collecting — witness statements, phone records, physical evidence — can be relevant to the civil case, but only if your civil lawyer is positioned to access it through proper channels.
How much does it cost to hire your firm?
Nothing out of pocket. We work on contingency. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case. Our fee is 33.33% if the case resolves before trial and 40% if it goes to trial. The preservation letter, the investigation, the expert consultations — all funded by us. You pay nothing until there is a recovery. Contact us to start that conversation. Call 1-888-ATTY-911. We answer 24 hours a day.
Hablamos Español. We serve your family fully in Spanish — consultations, case updates, and every conversation, in the language you pray in.
This page is legal information, not legal advice. Every case is different. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. Contacting the firm is free and confidential. If your child was injured in the Phi Kappa Psi hazing incident at Indiana University, call 1-888-ATTY-911 now — before the evidence disappears.