Hazing Wrongful Death in Wilberforce, Greene County, Ohio — What Ohio Law Lets Your Family Do
Your daughter texted her friends that she was scared. She went anyway, because that is what an 18-year-old does when she wants to belong. The people who were supposed to watch over her — the resident assistants, the residence life staff, the campus safety officers at Wilberforce University — were either in the room or should have known what was happening inside it. They watched her drink an entire bottle of liquor as the price of admission to a social club. They watched her vomit. They watched her lose the ability to stand. A photograph of her unconscious on a bed circulated at 10:30 at night. And instead of calling 911, instead of driving her the twenty-five minutes to Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, they carried her back to her dorm room and left her there. She died early the next morning.
That is what happened. The question now is what Ohio law lets your family do about it. The answer is more than most people realize — and the university and its insurers already know it.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We handle wrongful death cases arising from hazing, and we are currently litigating a $10 million hazing wrongful death lawsuit that shares painful parallels with what happened at Wilberforce. We are writing this page so that a family in Greene County, Ohio — sitting at a kitchen table at 2 a.m. trying to understand what happened to their daughter — can read exactly what the law allows, what the evidence looks like, what the university and its insurers are already doing, and what the first steps are. This is legal information, not legal advice. Calling us is free and confidential. And we do not get paid unless we win your case.
Can Your Family Sue the University After a Hazing Death in Ohio?
Yes. Ohio law gives your family multiple legal paths to hold the university, its staff, and every student who participated or failed to act accountable for a hazing death. The lawsuit filed in Greene County Common Pleas Court in Xenia already lays out the core theories: claims under Ohio’s civil anti-hazing law, negligence claims, and claims for failures in the supervision of campus housing. Each of these is a separate legal weapon, and together they create a web of liability that can reach from the 18-year-old who handed your daughter the bottle all the way up to the institution that staffed the dorm, wrote the policies, and sent the resident assistants home without the training or the authority to stop what was happening.
The question is never just “can we sue.” The question is who can be reached, what each one owes, and how the evidence ties each defendant to the specific failure that killed your child. That is what this page is built to answer — fully, honestly, and in the language of a family that needs to understand what they are walking into.
Ohio’s Civil Anti-Hazing Law: The Statute That Lets Your Family Hold Them Accountable
Ohio has a civil anti-hazing statute that allows a person injured by hazing — or the estate of a person killed by hazing — to bring a civil action for damages. This is not a general negligence claim. It is a specific statutory remedy created by the legislature to address the exact harm your family is living through. The statute recognizes that hazing is a recognized danger on college campuses and that institutions and individuals who permit it should answer in civil court.
The civil anti-hazing law is powerful because it can reach beyond the individual students who poured the liquor. It can reach the organization that designed the ritual — here, the group called “the Turtles” or “Turtle Club” — and it can reach the institution that allowed that organization to operate inside its dormitories, in its housing, under the supervision of its staff. The statute exists because the legislature understood that hazing deaths are not accidents. They are the product of a culture, a ritual, and an institutional failure to stop what everyone involved could see happening.
The lawsuit says students trying to cross were required to drink an entire bottle of liquor while answering questions or riddles, and that they were not even allowed to gain membership into the Turtles if they stopped drinking, if they vomited, or if they were incapable of drinking.
That description is the hazing statute’s core: a ritual designed to push a person past the limits of safety as a condition of belonging. The sole admission criterion was the ability to consume a dangerous quantity of alcohol. That is not a social club. That is a bottle of poison with a membership card taped to it.
The civil anti-hazing claim is separate from and in addition to the negligence claims. It carries its own legal weight, its own elements, and — critically — its own potential for punitive damages when the conduct is shown to be reckless or intentional. A hazing ritual that requires drinking a bottle of liquor, in a dorm room, with resident assistants present, on a dry campus, is not negligence. It is a conscious choice. Ohio law recognizes the difference.
The Wrongful Death Clock: How Long You Have and Who Can File
Ohio’s wrongful death statute of limitations gives the family two years from the date of death to file a wrongful death action. Savanna Jones died early on April 30. The two-year clock runs from that date. If the lawsuit is not filed within that window, the case is over — no matter how strong the evidence, no matter how egregious the conduct, no matter how many people watched and did nothing.
Two years sounds like a long time. It is not. The university’s insurer opened a file the day your daughter died. The risk management office began collecting statements from resident assistants and students within days. The defense has been building its case since the morning of April 30. Every day that passes without a preservation letter on file is a day the university’s counsel can collect, review, and — within the bounds of what is legally permissible — allow records to cycle out of retention. The two-year clock is the outer limit. The evidence clock is far shorter.
Under Ohio’s wrongful death statute, the action is brought by the personal representative of the decedent’s estate — the one person Ohio law authorizes to file the case on behalf of the family. The court appoints the personal representative, and the damages recovered are distributed to the statutory beneficiaries: the surviving spouse, children, and parents. For a family that has lost an 18-year-old daughter, the parents are the primary beneficiaries. The compensation they can recover includes the loss of their daughter’s future financial support, the loss of her companionship and society, the mental anguish of losing a child, and — through the estate — the conscious pain and suffering their daughter experienced before death.
There is also a separate survival action — a claim that belongs to the estate for the harm the decedent suffered between injury and death. In a hazing alcohol-poisoning case, the survival action captures the terror, the physical suffering, and the conscious awareness of what was happening to her in the hours between the first drink and the moment she lost consciousness. She texted that she was scared. She knew. The survival claim is for what she lived through before she died.
Who Is Responsible: The Defendant Structure in a University Hazing Death
A hazing death is never one person’s failure. It is a stack of failures, each layered on the next, and the lawsuit in Greene County Common Pleas Court already names the core of that stack: Wilberforce University, the director of housing and residence life, a student, and unidentified defendants whose names will emerge through discovery.
Wilberforce University is the institutional defendant. The university created the housing system, assigned resident assistants to Henderson Hall, promulgated the dry-campus policy, and put its staff in the position to monitor what happened inside its dormitories. When the RAs in that building — university-paid, university-trained, university-assigned — were present while a student drank a bottle of liquor and did nothing, the university’s own agents failed. The university cannot distance itself from its RAs by calling them “students.” It hired them, trained them (or failed to train them), and gave them responsibility for the safety of everyone on their floor. Their inaction is the university’s inaction.
The university also permitted an unofficial social organization — “the Turtles” — to operate inside its housing, conduct initiation rituals in its dorm rooms, and enforce a membership requirement that consisted entirely of consuming a lethal quantity of alcohol. Whether the university officially recognized the Turtles is beside the point. The ritual happened in a university dorm room, on university property, with university staff present, in violation of university policy. The duty to supervise does not depend on whether the group operating in your housing has a charter.
The director of housing and residence life is named individually. This is the person responsible for the residence life program — for the training, the supervision, the policies, and the staffing that put RAs in Henderson Hall and sent them out on rounds. If the RAs were not trained to recognize hazing, not trained to respond to alcohol emergencies, not trained to call 911 when a student is unconscious, that training failure traces back to this person. If the residence life program had no protocol for monitoring unofficial group activities in the dorms, that policy failure traces back to this person. Naming the housing director individually is not a formality. It is a recognition that institutional failures have human authors.
The named student is the individual who participated in the hazing — the one whose conduct the family and their counsel have already identified. This student faces direct liability for participating in the ritual, for handing Savanna the bottle, for watching her deteriorate, and for failing to seek medical help. More students will be identified through discovery. The “unidentified defendants” in the complaint are placeholders for every person who was in that room, who watched, who participated, who took the photograph, who circulated it, and who chose to carry an unconscious woman back to her dorm room instead of driving her to a hospital.
The Turtles organization itself — if it has any assets, any structure, any members who collected dues or organized the ritual — is a potential defendant. In many hazing cases, the organization is the entity that designed the ritual, enforced the rules, and created the culture that made a bottle of liquor the price of belonging. Even an unofficial group can be sued if it operated with enough structure to be identifiable.
The defendant map in this case is not a single target. It is a web, and the purpose of the lawsuit is to trace every strand — from the student who poured the drink to the housing director who failed to train the RA to the university that created the system that failed your daughter.
The Evidence Clock: What Records Exist and How Fast They Disappear
The evidence in a hazing death case is time-sensitive in a way that most families do not understand until it is too late. The university’s insurer and its counsel already know this. The family needs to know it too.
Student phone records and text messages. Savanna texted friends that she was going to “cross turtles” and that she was “lowkey scared.” That text is evidence — of her state of mind, of her knowledge of what was coming, and of the fact that the ritual was known enough among her friends that she could name it in a text. Every other student who was in that room has a phone with texts, group chats, photos, and social media posts from that night. Those phones are the single richest source of evidence in this case. But there is no federal law forcing students to preserve their text messages, and group chats can be deleted in seconds. A preservation letter — sent to every identifiable student in that room — is the first step. If the letter goes out and the messages disappear anyway, a court can tell the jury to assume the worst about what those messages contained.
The photograph of Savanna unconscious. A photo circulated around 10:30 p.m. showing her lying on a bed, apparently unconscious. That photograph is timestamped evidence of her condition at a specific moment — and it is proof that multiple people knew she was in distress and chose not to call for help. The photo exists on multiple phones. It may have been posted to social media and then deleted. The preservation letter has to reach every phone that received it.
Dorm security footage and key-card access logs. Henderson Hall has entry systems — key-card readers, security cameras, or both. The access logs show who entered the building, which room, and when. The footage may show students carrying Savanna through the hallway. These records are held by the university or its security vendor, and they are on a retention schedule that the university controls. Campus security DVR systems commonly overwrite on a rolling cycle that can be as short as 30 days. If no one demands the footage be saved, it records over itself. The preservation letter to the university must specifically name Henderson Hall security footage, key-card access logs, and any dorm-entry records from the night of April 29 through the early morning of April 30.
Resident assistant logs and reports. RAs typically keep logs of their rounds, incident reports, and communications with residence life staff. If the RAs on duty that night documented the gathering — or, more tellingly, if their logs show a gap where the Henderson Hall rounds should have been — those records are evidence. RA logs are maintained by the residence life program and are subject to the university’s own retention policies. They can be “lost,” “archived,” or “can’t be located” if no one demands them in writing early enough.
Campus safety dispatch records. If anyone called campus safety that night — or if campus safety should have been notified and was not — the dispatch records, radio traffic, and incident reports are evidence. These records are held by the campus safety office and are on their own retention schedule.
University policy documents. The dry-campus policy, the anti-hazing policy, the RA training manual, the residence life protocols, the emergency response procedures — all of these are documents the university created and is obligated to produce in discovery. But the versions that existed on the night of April 29 are the ones that matter, and universities sometimes update policies after a tragedy. The preservation letter must demand the versions in effect on that date.
The autopsy and toxicology report. The Greene County Coroner’s Office will have conducted an autopsy and toxicology analysis. The toxicology report will show Savanna’s blood alcohol concentration at the time of death — a number that will tell the medical story of how much she was given and how her body responded. The autopsy will identify the mechanism of death: respiratory depression from acute alcohol toxicity, aspiration of vomit, or another consequence of the poisoning. These records are held by the coroner and are obtainable, but the family should request them through counsel, not directly.
The liquor bottle. If the physical bottle or bottles from the ritual still exist — in the dorm room, in a trash can, in a student’s possession — they are physical evidence. Bottles can bear fingerprints. They can confirm the brand, the size, and the alcohol content. If the university or its staff cleaned the room after the death, that is spoliation. The preservation letter must demand that the room be left untouched.
The evidence clock in this case is measured in days and weeks, not months and years. The two-year statute of limitations is the outer boundary. The evidence preservation window is measured in the time it takes a DVR to overwrite, a student to delete a group chat, and a university to update a policy. The day you call a lawyer is the day the preservation letter goes out. That letter is what stops the clock.
The Medicine: How a Bottle of Liquor Kills — and Why the Delay Was the Difference
Acute alcohol poisoning is a central nervous system depressant overdose. The ethanol in the bottle suppresses the brainstem’s respiratory drive centers — the automatic system that tells the body to breathe. As blood alcohol concentration climbs, the respiratory rate slows. At a high enough level, breathing stops. The heart may continue for a short time, but without oxygen, brain damage begins within minutes and death follows.
An entire bottle of liquor — a standard 750-milliliter bottle of 80-proof spirits — contains roughly 17 to 18 standard drinks’ worth of pure ethanol. For an 18-year-old woman of average weight, consuming that volume in the compressed timeframe of an initiation ritual can produce a blood alcohol concentration well above 0.40 percent. At 0.30 percent, most people are unconscious. At 0.40 percent, the respiratory drive is failing. Above 0.50 percent, death is expected without medical intervention. The numbers are not abstractions. They are the pharmacology of what was done to her.
The vomiting that the lawsuit describes is the body’s last attempt to save itself — the stomach rejecting the poison. But vomiting while unconscious or semi-conscious creates a second lethal risk: aspiration. Vomit entering the airway can block the trachea and kill by asphyxiation, or it can enter the lungs and cause aspiration pneumonitis, a chemical injury to the lung tissue that can be fatal within hours. The person who is vomiting and cannot stand is a person whose airway is already in danger.
The photograph at 10:30 p.m. — Savanna unconscious on a bed — is a timestamped medical emergency. At that moment, she needed three things: airway protection, intravenous fluids, and continuous monitoring of her breathing and heart rate. Those three things are available at any emergency room. Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, a Level I trauma center, is roughly 25 to 30 minutes from Wilberforce by car. If someone had put her in a vehicle at 10:30 p.m. and driven her there, she would likely have been intubated, placed on a ventilator to breathe for her, given IV fluids to support her blood pressure, and monitored until her blood alcohol concentration fell below the lethal range. She would likely have survived.
The body metabolizes ethanol at roughly 0.015 to 0.020 percent per hour. From a peak of 0.40 or 0.50 percent, the body needs 20 to 30 hours to clear the alcohol. During that entire window, the person is at risk of respiratory arrest, aspiration, and cardiac arrhythmia. The standard of care is medical monitoring throughout that period. Taking her back to her dorm room and leaving her there was not a treatment plan. It was abandonment in a place where no one was watching her airway.
The defense will argue that the alcohol itself caused the death — not the delay. The medicine answers that argument directly: acute alcohol poisoning is treatable. The treatment is supportive and straightforward. The cause of death was not the alcohol alone. The cause of death was the alcohol combined with the failure to provide the medical care that would have kept her alive while her body metabolized it. The gap between 10:30 p.m. — when the photograph proved she was unconscious — and the time of death is the gap in which she should have been in an emergency room. That gap is the case.
What a Hazing Wrongful Death Case Is Worth
No honest lawyer can tell you what your case is worth without seeing the evidence, the medical records, the university’s policies, and the full scope of who knew what and when. But the categories of compensation that Ohio law allows in a hazing wrongful death case are specific, and a family deserves to know what they are before they walk into a consultation.
Economic damages are the objectively calculable losses. For a family that has lost an 18-year-old daughter, these include funeral and burial costs, any medical expenses incurred before death, and — the largest component — the loss of her future earning capacity. She was a college freshman. She had 40 to 45 working years ahead of her. A forensic economist projects what she would have earned over that lifetime based on her age, education, and the statistical earnings of a person with her profile, then reduces that figure to present value. The result is a number that reflects not what she was earning — she was 18, she had not started — but what she would have earned. That number alone can reach into the millions.
Non-economic damages are the human losses. The loss of your daughter’s companionship, love, guidance, and society. The mental anguish of her parents. The loss of the life she would have lived — the career, the marriage, the children she would have had, the holidays and birthdays and ordinary mornings that your family will never have with her again. These are the damages no receipt can measure, and they are the damages the defense will fight hardest to minimize. Ohio’s approach to non-economic damages in wrongful death cases is governed by statute, and the specific rules around caps and exceptions are something we examine carefully in every case to ensure the full measure is pursued.
Punitive damages are the punishment. Ohio allows punitive damages when the defendant’s conduct was reckless, intentional, or performed with a conscious disregard for the safety of others. A hazing ritual that requires drinking a bottle of liquor — with resident assistants present, on a dry campus, with a photograph of the victim unconscious circulating among the group — is not a negligent oversight. It is a conscious choice. The students who designed and enforced the ritual chose it. The RAs who watched and did nothing chose it. The people who carried an unconscious woman back to her dorm room instead of driving her to a hospital chose it. Punitive damages exist to punish that kind of choice and to send a message that deters the next group, the next university, the next ritual. Ohio has rules governing the amount and availability of punitive damages, and we evaluate them in every case.
The total value of a case like this is built from all three categories, and it is built by experts — a forensic economist for the earning-capacity loss, a life-care planner if there were pre-death medical needs, and the evidence of recklessness for the punitive component. The defense’s first offer will be a fraction of the full value. Understanding what the full value is — before the first offer arrives — is the single most important thing a family can do to protect themselves from a lowball settlement.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. But the firm has recovered millions for clients in wrongful death and catastrophic injury cases, and we bring that experience to every case we evaluate.
The Defense Playbook: What They’ll Argue and How We Counter Each Move
The university’s insurer and its defense lawyers have a playbook for hazing death cases. It is not improvised. It is a set of moves developed over years of defending institutions against the families of students they failed. Every move has a counter, and the counter is built from the evidence, the law, and the specific facts of what happened at Wilberforce.
Play 1: “She chose to participate.” The defense will argue that your daughter voluntarily agreed to the ritual, that she was an adult, and that her own choices led to her death. This is the comparative fault argument, and in Ohio, if the plaintiff is 51 percent or more at fault, recovery is barred. The counter is the reality of hazing: an 18-year-old freshman, away from home for the first time, seeking belonging in a new community, is not making a free and informed choice when the price of that belonging is a bottle of liquor. The power dynamics of hazing — the desire to belong, the fear of exclusion, the pressure of the group — are precisely what Ohio’s anti-hazing statute was written to address. The law recognizes that “she agreed to it” is not a defense to hazing. She texted that she was scared. That is not the text of someone making a free and informed choice. That is the text of someone who knew the danger and went anyway because the alternative was exclusion.
Play 2: “The Turtles is not a university-recognized organization, so we had no duty to supervise it.” The university will try to distance itself from the group by arguing it was unofficial, unrecognized, and therefore outside the university’s responsibility. The counter is simple: the ritual happened in a university dorm room, on university property, with university-paid resident assistants present, in violation of university policy. The duty to supervise university housing does not depend on whether the group operating in that housing has a charter. The university owns the building. The university staffed the building. The university wrote the rules for the building. The university’s duty was triggered the moment students gathered in a Henderson Hall room with a bottle of liquor and an 18-year-old who was being pressured to drink it.
Play 3: “The students who failed to call 911 are the ones at fault, not the university.” This is the intervening cause argument — the university will try to shift blame to the individual students and away from the institution. The counter is that the resident assistants are university agents. They were present. They did nothing. Their failure to call 911 is the university’s failure, not an intervening act by third parties. The university cannot staff a dorm with its own employees, watch those employees fail to respond to a medical emergency, and then blame “the students” for the outcome. The RAs were the students who were supposed to act. They were the university’s designated responders. Their inaction is the university’s inaction.
Play 4: “We had policies against this — a dry campus, anti-hazing rules.” The university will point to its written policies as proof that it took the danger seriously. The counter is that a policy that is never enforced is not a safety measure — it is a liability shield. A dry-campus policy that does not result in RAs intervening when 10 students gather in a dorm room with a bottle of liquor is a policy that exists on paper and nowhere else. The university’s own staff was present while the policy was violated. The policy is not a defense. It is evidence that the university knew the danger existed and chose not to address it.
Play 5: “We cannot control what students do in their private rooms.” The university will argue that it cannot monitor every room at every moment. The counter is that it does not need to monitor every room — it needs to respond when its own staff members are present and observe a dangerous situation. The RAs were there. They saw the gathering. They saw the alcohol. They saw Savanna deteriorate. The university does not need to be omniscient. It needs its own employees to act when they are standing in the room where the danger is happening.
Play 6: The quick settlement offer. Within weeks or months, the university’s insurer may offer the family a settlement — a check that looks substantial but is a fraction of what the case is worth, accompanied by a release that forecloses any further claims. The offer will arrive before the family has had time to grieve, before the evidence has been preserved, and before the full scope of the university’s failures has been documented. The counter is to never sign anything before the evidence is locked down, the full defendant map is identified, and the case has been valued by a lawyer who has seen the medical records, the university’s policies, and the toxicology report. A settlement signed in grief is a settlement the defense counts on you to accept.
How a Hazing Wrongful Death Case Is Built: The Proof Story
Building a hazing wrongful death case is a chronological process that begins the day the family calls and does not end until a jury in the Greene County Common Pleas Court in Xenia — twelve people from the communities surrounding Wilberforce, from Beavercreek and Fairborn and Bellbrook and Xenia itself — hears the full story and decides what accountability looks like.
Week one. The preservation letter goes out — to the university, to the director of housing and residence life, to every identifiable student who was in that room, to the campus safety office, and to any third-party security vendor. The letter demands that they freeze every record: Henderson Hall security footage, key-card access logs, RA logs and incident reports, campus safety dispatch records, the university’s dry-campus and anti-hazing policies as they existed on April 29, the RA training manual, the residence life protocols, and any communications — texts, emails, group chats — related to the Turtles or the crossing ritual. The letter also demands that the dorm room where the ritual occurred be preserved untouched.
Weeks two through four. The court appoints a personal representative — the one person Ohio law authorizes to bring the wrongful death action on behalf of the family. We handle that appointment. The complaint is filed in Greene County Common Pleas Court if it has not been filed already. Discovery begins: interrogatories, requests for production of documents, and requests for admissions directed at the university and the named student defendant.
Months one through three. The records arrive. The university produces its policies, its RA training materials, its incident reports, and its security footage — or it explains why the footage is “no longer available,” which is itself evidence. The toxicology report and autopsy findings come from the Greene County Coroner’s Office. The medical picture is assembled: the blood alcohol concentration at death, the mechanism of death, the timeline of deterioration, and the medical consensus that emergency care would have saved her life.
Months three through six. Depositions begin. The resident assistants who were present that night are questioned under oath. What did you see? When did you see it? What were you trained to do? Why did you not call 911? Who told you not to? The students who were in the room are questioned. Who organized the ritual? Who brought the liquor? Who took the photograph? Who circulated it? Who decided to carry her back to her dorm room instead of driving her to a hospital? The housing director is questioned. What training did the RAs receive? What protocols existed for hazing? What protocols existed for alcohol emergencies? What was the supervision plan for Henderson Hall that night?
Months six through twelve. Experts are retained. A forensic toxicologist explains the pharmacology of acute alcohol poisoning and the medical standard of care for a person at Savanna’s blood alcohol level. A forensic economist projects the lifetime earning capacity of an 18-year-old college freshman. A student-affairs expert explains the standard of care for university residence life programs and the foreseeability of hazing on a college campus. If the defense challenges causation, a pathologist connects the delay in seeking care to the mechanism of death.
Month twelve and beyond. The case moves toward trial or settlement. Mediation may occur. The defense may make a serious settlement offer once the evidence is assembled and the full scope of the university’s failures is documented. If the offer is inadequate, the case goes to trial — to a jury of people from Greene County who will hear what happened in Henderson Hall and decide what it is worth.
This is not a fast process. But the family does not go through it alone, and the work that happens in the first weeks — the preservation letter, the records demands, the toxicology report — is the work that decides whether the case is built on solid ground or on evidence that was allowed to disappear.
The First 72 Hours: What Your Family Should Do Now
If your daughter died days or weeks ago, the evidence in her case is dying right now. The security footage in Henderson Hall is on a retention clock. The students’ text messages and group chats can be deleted at any moment. The university’s policies and training manuals can be updated. The physical room where the ritual occurred can be cleaned. The first 72 hours — or whatever time has not yet passed — are the most important window in the entire case.
Do not sign anything from the university or its insurer. If the university’s risk management office, its general counsel, or its insurance company has sent you any document — a release, a settlement offer, a waiver, a “goodwill gesture” with strings attached — do not sign it. Do not return it. Do not acknowledge it. Bring it to a lawyer. Every document the university sends you in the days after your daughter’s death is designed to protect the university, not your family.
Do not give a recorded statement to anyone. The university’s insurer may call. A “claims adjuster” may ask to “just get your side of the story” on a recording. That recording is not for your benefit. It is built to be quoted against you — to lock you into a version of events before you know the full story, to get you to say something that can be twisted into “she knew the risks” or “the family isn’t blaming the university.” Do not talk to the insurance company. Do not talk to the university’s lawyer. Talk to your own lawyer first.
Do not post on social media. Do not write about the case, the university, the students, or the ritual on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, or any other platform. Everything you post is evidence — not just for your case, but for the defense. A grieving mother’s angry post can be taken out of context and shown to a jury as “the family was always hostile to the university.” Protect yourself by saying nothing publicly until your lawyer tells you it is safe to do so.
Preserve everything you have. Your daughter’s phone. Her text messages. Her social media accounts. Her belongings from the dorm room. Any communications you received from the university, from her friends, from anyone. Do not delete anything. Do not return her belongings to the university. If the university asks for her phone, her laptop, or her dorm room key, do not hand them over without speaking to a lawyer first.
Request the autopsy and toxicology report. The Greene County Coroner’s Office will have conducted an autopsy. The toxicology report will show the blood alcohol concentration at death. These records are obtainable through counsel, and they are the medical foundation of the case.
Call a lawyer. Not next month. Not after the funeral. Not after the university responds to your questions. Now. The preservation letter is the single most important document in the case, and it cannot go out until someone is retained to send it. Every day that passes without that letter is a day the university’s counsel is ahead of you — collecting statements, reviewing footage, and building the defense while the evidence that would defeat it is quietly disappearing.
The call is free. The consultation is free. 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. But the call has to happen. The evidence clock will not wait.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue a university if my child died from hazing in Ohio?
Yes. Ohio’s civil anti-hazing law provides a statutory remedy that allows the estate of a person killed by hazing to bring a civil action for damages. In addition, Ohio’s wrongful death statute allows the family to recover for the loss of their loved one’s life, and general negligence law allows claims against the university for failing to supervise its housing, failing to train its resident assistants, and failing to enforce its own policies. The lawsuit filed in Greene County Common Pleas Court already includes all of these theories. A university is not immune from liability when its own staff — resident assistants, residence life personnel — are present during a hazing ritual and fail to intervene. The university created the housing system, staffed it, and wrote the policies. When that system fails and a student dies, the university answers for it.
How long do I have to file a wrongful 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. If the death occurred on April 30, the two-year clock runs from that date. Missing that deadline means the case is over — the court will not hear it, no matter how strong the evidence. But the evidence preservation window is far shorter than two years. Security footage, text messages, RA logs, and dorm access records can disappear within weeks. The two-year deadline is the outer limit. The evidence clock is the real urgency.
What is Ohio’s civil anti-hazing law?
Ohio has a civil anti-hazing statute that allows a person injured by hazing — or the estate of a person killed by hazing — to recover damages in a civil action. The statute recognizes hazing as a specific, actionable harm, separate from general negligence. It can reach the individuals who participated in the hazing, the organization that designed or sponsored the ritual, and potentially the institution that permitted the hazing to occur on its property and under its supervision. Ohio also has a criminal anti-hazing statute, which may lead to criminal charges against the students who participated. The criminal case and the civil case are separate — a criminal prosecution does not compensate the family, and the family does not need to wait for the criminal case to resolve before filing a civil action.
Who can be held responsible for a hazing death?
Multiple parties can bear responsibility. The students who designed and participated in the ritual face direct liability. The resident assistants who were present and failed to intervene face liability as agents of the university. The director of housing and residence life faces liability for training and supervision failures. The university itself faces institutional liability for the failures of its housing system, its policies, and its staff. The organization — here, the Turtles — faces liability if it operated with enough structure to be identifiable as an entity. And unidentified defendants — other students who were present, who took the photograph, who circulated it, who carried Savanna back to her dorm room instead of calling 911 — will be identified through discovery and added to the case.
What if my daughter chose to participate in the hazing?
This is the defense’s first argument, and it is the one Ohio’s anti-hazing statute was specifically written to defeat. Hazing is not a voluntary activity in the legal sense. An 18-year-old freshman, seeking belonging in a new community, is operating under coercion — the coercion of group pressure, the fear of exclusion, the desire to be accepted. The law recognizes that “she agreed to it” is not a defense to hazing. Ohio follows a modified comparative negligence rule, which means that if the plaintiff is found to be 51 percent or more at fault, recovery is barred. But in a hazing context, the comparative fault argument is weak. The ritual was designed by others. The liquor was provided by others. The membership was conditioned on completing the ritual. And she texted that she was scared — proof that she was not a willing participant but a young woman who felt she had no safe way to say no.
Can resident assistants be held liable for failing to stop hazing?
Yes. Resident assistants are university employees — paid, trained, and assigned to monitor the dormitories. When an RA is present during a hazing ritual and does nothing — does not stop the gathering, does not call campus safety, does not call 911, does not seek medical help for a student who is visibly in distress — that RA’s inaction is the university’s inaction. The university cannot staff a dorm with its own employees, watch those employees fail to respond to a medical emergency, and then claim it had no responsibility. The RAs are the university’s eyes and ears in the residence halls. When they see a student drinking a bottle of liquor as part of an initiation ritual and they walk away, the university walked away.
What evidence needs to be preserved in a hazing death case?
The evidence in a hazing death case is broad and perishable. It includes: student phone records, text messages, and group chats from the night of the ritual; the photograph of Savanna unconscious that circulated at 10:30 p.m.; Henderson Hall security footage and key-card access logs; resident assistant logs, incident reports, and communications with residence life staff; campus safety dispatch records and radio traffic; the university’s dry-campus policy, anti-hazing policy, RA training manual, and residence life protocols as they existed on the date of the hazing; the autopsy and toxicology report from the Greene County Coroner’s Office; the physical liquor bottle or bottles from the ritual; and any social media posts, direct messages, or photographs related to the Turtles or the crossing ritual. A preservation letter — sent to the university, to every identifiable student, and to any third-party vendor — is the tool that freezes these records before they disappear. If records are destroyed after a preservation letter is received, a court can instruct the jury to assume the worst about what those records contained.
What is a hazing wrongful death case worth?
No lawyer can give you a specific number without seeing the evidence, the medical records, and the full scope of the university’s failures. But the categories of compensation are clear: economic damages (funeral costs, loss of future earning capacity for an 18-year-old with a full lifetime of work ahead of her), non-economic damages (the family’s loss of companionship, love, and society; the mental anguish of losing a child), and potentially punitive damages (if the conduct was reckless or intentional, which a hazing ritual with RAs present on a dry campus strongly supports). The total value is built by experts — a forensic economist for the earning-capacity loss, a toxicologist for the medical causation, and a student-affairs expert for the standard of care. The defense’s first offer will be a fraction of the full value. Understanding the full value before that offer arrives is the family’s best protection.
Will the university try to settle or take the case to trial?
Most wrongful death cases settle before trial, and universities are particularly motivated to avoid the public exposure of a trial. But a fair settlement only happens when the defense knows the plaintiff is prepared to go to trial — when the evidence is preserved, the experts are retained, the depositions have been taken, and the full scope of the university’s failures is documented in the record. A settlement that happens before the evidence is assembled is a settlement that undervalues the case. The family should never accept a settlement offer before the preservation letter has gone out, the toxicology report has been obtained, the university’s policies have been produced, and the resident assistants have been deposed. The strength of the case drives the settlement. The settlement does not drive itself.
How do contingency fees work in a wrongful death case?
We work on contingency. That means the family pays nothing up front. We front the costs of the case — the filing fees, the expert fees, the deposition costs, the records fees — and we are paid only if we win. Our fee is 33.33 percent of the recovery if the case settles before trial, and 40 percent if the case goes to trial. If we do not win, the family owes us nothing. This is not a generosity. It is the structure that allows a grieving family to take on a university and its insurance company without needing to write a check for legal fees while they are still paying for a funeral. The contingency fee is the mechanism that makes justice accessible to people who could never afford an hourly attorney at the rates the university’s defense firm charges.
Why Our Firm Handles Hazing Wrongful Death Cases
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are a trial firm that takes wrongful death cases in Ohio, working with local counsel and pro hac vice admission where required. We do not maintain an office in Ohio, and we do not claim a bar admission we do not hold. What we bring is 27-plus years of trial experience, a hazing litigation practice that is currently fighting a $10 million wrongful death case against a university and a fraternity, and the specific knowledge of how hazing cases are built, how universities defend them, and how the evidence is preserved before it disappears.
Ralph Manginello is the managing partner. He has spent 27-plus years in courtrooms, including federal court. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer — he knows how to find the story the evidence tells, and he knows how to tell it to a jury. He is the lead counsel in the active $10 million Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi / University of Houston hazing lawsuit, filed in Harris County, Texas, in November 2025. That case — against a university and a fraternity for a hazing death — is the closest analogue to what happened at Wilberforce. We know this fight because we are in it right now.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney. Before he joined this firm, he 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 the families we now represent. He knows how the insurer sets its reserve in the first 48 hours. He knows how the recorded-statement call is engineered. He knows how the quick settlement check with the release printed on the back is designed to arrive before the family has had time to grieve. He uses that knowledge for injured families now. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter.
Hablamos Español. If your family prays in Spanish, we will speak to you in Spanish — every conversation, every update, every legal explanation, in the language that is yours.
We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free. The call is confidential. And the preservation letter — the single most important document in the first weeks of a hazing death case — goes out the day you call us, not the day you sign a fee agreement. We move first because the evidence will not wait.
If your family is reading this at 2 a.m. in Greene County, Ohio, trying to understand what happened to your daughter at Wilberforce University — we are here. The number is 1-888-ATTY-911. We answer 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with live staff — not an answering service. You will speak to a person, not a machine. And the conversation costs you nothing, whether or not you decide to hire us.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. But the work we do — the preservation letter, the records demand, the toxicology review, the deposition of every resident assistant who was in that room — is the work that turns a grieving family’s questions into a case a jury in Xenia can answer. The evidence is dying. The clock is running. Call us.