What Happened at Bowling Green Was Not an Accident — It Was a System That Killed
If you are reading this page, someone you love is gone — or lying in a hospital bed — and a fraternity is the reason. You may have gotten the call at 2 a.m. A roommate found your child unresponsive. A hospital social worker told you to come. You drove through the dark not knowing if you were driving toward a recovery or a funeral. And somewhere in the hours that followed, you started hearing words like “hazing” and “blood alcohol level” and “he was dropped off at his apartment” — and none of it made sense, because your child went to college to learn, not to be poisoned by people who called themselves his brothers.
We are Attorney911. We are a trial firm that takes fraternity hazing and wrongful death cases. Ralph Manginello, our managing partner, is right now the lead counsel in an active ten-million-dollar hazing lawsuit against a national fraternity and a major university — we are currently litigating that case, and we understand this fight from the inside out. What happened to your family is not unique in the way the fraternity will try to tell you it was — a one-time mistake, a rogue chapter, an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern that has killed students at universities across this country for decades, and the system that produced it is designed to protect itself, not your child. That system is what we dismantle.
What follows is everything you need to know about the law that applies to your situation, the evidence that is disappearing while you read this, the defenses the fraternity is already preparing, and the steps that matter most in the hours and days ahead. You do not have to absorb all of it tonight. But you need to know the clock is already running.
The Mechanism of Death in a Fraternity Hazing Incident
When a young man is forced to consume an entire bottle of high-proof liquor in a short period, the alcohol does not simply make him drunk. It overwhelms the body’s central nervous system in a way that is measurable, predictable, and well-documented in emergency medicine. A blood alcohol concentration of .35 — more than four times the legal driving limit of .08 — does not mean someone is “very drunk.” It means the brainstem, the part of the brain that controls breathing and the gag reflex, is shutting down. The person stops breathing effectively. If they vomit — and the body tries to vomit at high concentrations precisely because it is being poisoned — the gag reflex that would normally protect the airway is suppressed. The person aspirates. The lungs fill. The heart slows and stops. This is not a sudden, unpredictable event. It is a dose-response curve that toxicologists and emergency physicians have mapped for decades, and every fraternity member who handed a pledge a bottle and said “finish it” was pulling the trigger on a mechanism they either understood or should have.
When the mechanism is a drug like nitrous oxide — inhaled from pressurized canisters called whippets — the physics of death are different but equally predictable. Nitrous oxide displaces oxygen in the lungs. The brain, starved of oxygen, loses function in seconds. The person may feel a brief euphoria — a thirty-second high — and then, if the concentration is high enough or the oxygen displacement is severe enough, they collapse. A 911 caller may say “he passed out from drinking too much,” as one fraternity brother did in the Ohio University case, but the coroner’s report tells the truth the fraternity tried to hide: the cause of death was asphyxiation from an inhalant the fraternity itself provided.
The fraternity will call these things accidents. They are not. They are the foreseeable consequences of a practice — coercing a vulnerable person to consume a dangerous substance — that the fraternity industry has known about for decades and has failed to stop. The law now recognizes this. Ohio’s legislature recognized it. And a civil jury can be made to recognize it too.
Collin’s Law: Ohio’s Anti-Hazing Statute and What It Means for Your Case
In 2018, a student at Ohio University died after inhaling nitrous oxide provided by his fraternity. The legislation that followed — Collin’s Law — was first introduced in 2019 and did not pass. In 2021, a student at Bowling Green State University died after being coerced into consuming a lethal amount of alcohol at a Pi Kappa Alpha event. The law was reintroduced three days after his death and passed later that year. Ohio’s legislature named the law after the first young man and passed it because of the second, and the text of the statute is now the legal foundation for every hazing case in this state.
The law does several things that matter directly to your case. It defines hazing explicitly to include the coercion of individuals to consume alcohol or drugs of abuse. It creates the offense of being an accessory to hazing — meaning a fraternity member who watches, facilitates, or fails to intervene can be criminally liable, not just the person who handed over the bottle. It requires every university and institution of higher education in Ohio to enact clearly defined anti-hazing policies. And it enhances penalties for anyone who has knowledge of hazing practices and fails to report them to law enforcement, with consequences ranging from a fourth-degree misdemeanor to a fifth-degree felony.
“That bill explains clearly what hazing is, and expressly includes in the criminal definition of ‘hazing’ coercion of individuals to consume alcohol or a drug of abuse. It also adds the offense of being an accessory to hazing and requires all universities and places of higher education to enact clearly defined, anti-hazing policies. Furthermore, it enhances penalties for those who have knowledge of hazing practices and do not report them to law enforcement, ranging from 4th degree misdemeanors to 5th degree felonies.”
This is the Ohio Revised Code’s hazing statute — the criminal provision that also establishes the standard of care for civil actions. When a fraternity violates this statute, it has breached a duty that Ohio law specifically created to protect students like your child. That breach is not just a crime — it is the foundation of a civil wrongful death claim. The criminal case may punish the individuals. The civil case holds the institution accountable and forces the system that allowed this to change. Both can run at the same time, and the criminal statute’s definition of hazing gives your civil case a standard of care that the fraternity cannot escape.
Since Collin’s Law was enacted, Ohio’s 68 colleges and universities have reported 147 hazing incidents between 2018 and 2025. That number matters because it proves the problem is systemic, not isolated — and because every one of those reported incidents is a piece of evidence that the Greek system knew the danger existed and, in too many cases, did not stop it.
Who Can Be Held Accountable: The Defendant Stack in an Ohio Hazing Wrongful Death Case
A fraternity hazing death is never the fault of one person, and the legal case should never target one person. The harm flows from a system with multiple layers, and each layer has its own duty, its own failure, and its own insurance. Understanding this stack is the difference between a case that recovers what your family lost and one that recovers a fraction of it.
The National Fraternity Organization. Pi Kappa Alpha International, Sigma Pi Fraternity International, and every other national fraternity that charters local chapters is a corporate entity with its own bylaws, its own insurance, and its own duty to supervise the chapters it creates. The national fraternity sets the policies that prohibit hazing, collects dues from the local chapter, and exercises authority over chapter operations. When the local chapter hazes a pledge to death, the national organization is the deepest pocket in the case — and its liability runs through two theories: vicarious liability for the actions of the chapter it chartered and controlled, and direct negligence for its own failure to enforce the anti-hazing policies it wrote. National fraternities typically carry liability insurance towers that run from ten million to twenty million dollars or more, because their own risk managers know exactly how dangerous their chapters are. That insurance is the money that funds your recovery.
The University. Bowling Green State University, Ohio University, and every public university in Ohio has a duty to protect its students from foreseeable harm — and hazing at fraternities on or near campus is as foreseeable as any danger a university faces. The university’s exposure runs through negligent supervision: did it know or should it have known about hazing at this chapter? Did it have prior reports, prior disciplinary actions, or prior warnings that the fraternity was a danger? Did it enforce its own anti-hazing policies, or did it look the other way? Claims against a public university in Ohio go through the Ohio Court of Claims, which involves specific procedural hurdles and a non-jury trial for the state-entity portion of the claim — a procedural landscape that demands an attorney who understands it, not one who learns it on your family’s case. After the deaths that drove Collin’s Law into existence, the Inter University Council — comprising the 14 largest public universities in Ohio — adopted a zero-tolerance policy on hazing. Whether the university your child attended actually followed that policy is a question discovery answers.
The Individual Fraternity Members. The students who planned the event, who purchased the alcohol, who handed your child the bottle, who watched him deteriorate, and who dropped him off at his apartment instead of calling 911 — each of them is individually liable. Eight members of the fraternity in the BGSU case were found guilty. Six served jail time, collectively sentenced to 165 days. Those criminal outcomes are evidence in your civil case — not because criminal guilt automatically equals civil liability, but because the factual record the criminal case built (who did what, who said what, who was in the room) is the same factual record your civil case needs. Individual fraternity members typically have limited personal assets, but their families’ homeowners’ or umbrella policies may provide coverage, and their testimony is the key that unlocks the national fraternity’s liability.
The Local Chapter Housing Corporation. Many fraternity houses are owned or managed by a separate legal entity — a housing corporation or alumni association — that is distinct from the undergraduate chapter and distinct from the national organization. If the hazing event occurred on property the housing corporation owned or managed, that entity faces premises liability for allowing dangerous and illegal activities on the premises it controlled. This is another defendant with its own insurance, and naming it is how a case avoids leaving money on the table.
The point is this: a fraternity hazing death has a defendant stack, not a single defendant. The national organization has the largest insurance tower. The university has its own exposure. The individuals have the testimony. The housing corporation has the property. A case that names only one of these is a case that has left most of its value in the hands of the people who killed your child.
The “He Chose to Drink” Defense — and Why It Fails
Here is the defense you will hear, in some form, from the fraternity’s lawyers within weeks of your child’s death: he was a legal adult. He chose to pledge. He chose to attend the event. He chose to drink. No one held him down and poured alcohol down his throat. This was a social event that went wrong, not a crime, and the fraternity is not responsible for the choices an adult made.
This argument is the oldest and most dangerous playbook in the hazing defense manual, and it is built on a fundamental misrepresentation of what hazing is. Hazing is not a social event. It is a system of psychological conditioning in which a person seeking acceptance is subjected to escalating pressure — pressure designed to make refusal feel impossible — until compliance appears voluntary to an outside observer who does not understand the dynamic.
Think about what a pledge is. He is an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old who has joined an organization that controls his social standing, his housing, his friendships, and his identity on campus. He has been told, explicitly or implicitly, that the fraternity is his path to belonging. He has spent weeks in a pledging process that, by design, strips away his sense of individual judgment and replaces it with group loyalty. By the night of the event that kills him, he has been conditioned — over weeks, through repeated exercises of submission — to do what his pledge brothers do and what the active members tell him to do. When an active member hands him a bottle and says “finish it,” the question is not whether he can physically refuse. The question is whether a person in his psychological position can refuse, and the answer — which every psychologist who studies hazing will tell you — is no. The power imbalance is so severe that what looks like a choice is an illusion.
Ohio’s law recognizes this. The statute defines hazing as including coercion to consume alcohol. The word “coercion” is the legal answer to the “he chose to drink” defense, because coercion means the apparent voluntariness was manufactured by a power dynamic that the law refuses to treat as genuine consent. And Ohio follows a modified comparative negligence rule — the 51 percent bar — meaning even if a jury found your child partially responsible for his own intoxication (which in a hazing context it should not), his recovery would be reduced, not eliminated, unless his share of fault exceeded 50 percent. But the coercion element is specifically designed to negate the voluntariness of the act. When a jury understands the pledge dynamic, it does not assign the victim a percentage of fault. It assigns the fault to the people who built and ran the system that killed him.
This is the strategy we call the Power Imbalance, and it is the spine of every hazing case we build. The jury must see your child not as a willing participant but as a victim of a conditioning process in which consent was an illusion. We use expert testimony from psychologists and Greek-life researchers who can explain the pledge dynamic from the inside — how it works, why it works, and why a young person subjected to it cannot simply “say no.” The defense will try to keep this testimony out. The defense will try to frame the event as a party. Our job is to make sure the jury sees it for what it was: a ritual of submission that the fraternity designed, the national organization tolerated, and the university failed to stop.
Evidence That Is Disappearing Right Now
In a hazing death case, the proof that matters most is also the proof that dies fastest. Every hour you wait, evidence the fraternity’s lawyers are already reviewing is being legally destroyed.
GroupMe, iMessage, and SnapChat communications. Before the event, fraternity members planned it in group chats. They discussed the alcohol. They discussed the “tradition.” They may have joked about what would happen. These messages are the single most powerful proof that the event was premeditated coercion, not a spontaneous party. But SnapChat messages auto-delete by design. GroupMe data can be manually wiped. iMessage threads can be deleted in seconds. If a preservation letter does not go out immediately — meaning within days, not weeks — the group chats that prove the plan can vanish as though they never existed. This is the most urgent preservation need in the entire case.
Security camera and surveillance footage. The fraternity house likely had cameras. The apartment complex where your child was dropped off may have had cameras. That footage would show the state he was in when he arrived — whether he was carried, dragged, or stumbling; whether anyone checked on him; how long he was alone before a roommate found him. Most security systems overwrite their storage on a rolling cycle of seven to thirty days. After that, the footage is gone permanently. A preservation demand letter freezes that clock, but only if it arrives before the overwrite happens.
University disciplinary records. If the fraternity chapter had prior incidents — prior reports of hazing, prior disciplinary actions, prior warnings from the university — those records prove notice. They prove the university and the national fraternity knew this chapter was dangerous and did not do enough. These records are protected by FERPA and require a subpoena or careful navigation of the federal education privacy framework to obtain. They take time to get, and the process starts with a records demand.
Toxicology and autopsy reports. The medical examiner’s office preserves these, and they are the most stable evidence in the case — they do not disappear on a timer. The toxicology report establishes the exact blood alcohol level or substance concentration at the time of death. The autopsy report establishes the cause and manner of death. These are the medical foundation of the wrongful death claim, and they are already being preserved by the county.
The pattern is clear: the fastest-dying evidence is the most important evidence. The messages that prove the plan, the video that shows the state of the victim, and the university records that prove notice — these are the records that win a hazing case, and they are the records that the fraternity’s systems will legally erase if no one tells them to stop. That is why the preservation letter goes out the day you call us — not the week, not the month. The day.
The Insurance Reality: Where the Money Actually Is
Understanding the insurance tower in a fraternity hazing case is how a family avoids being told “there is no money” when there is actually millions of dollars available.
The individual fraternity members — the students who handed your child the bottle — typically have no significant assets. Some may be covered under their parents’ homeowners’ or umbrella insurance policies, but those policies frequently contain exclusions for intentional acts or acts involving the unlawful furnishing of alcohol to a minor, and the insurance company will fight hard to deny coverage. The individual members are important for their testimony, not for their bank accounts.
The local chapter may carry its own liability insurance, but local chapters are often thinly capitalized — a small-budget student organization with a modest policy. This is the layer the fraternity’s lawyers will point to first, hoping you accept a fraction of the case’s value and go away.
The real money sits with the national fraternity organization. National fraternities are large, sophisticated corporate entities that carry liability insurance towers — typically stacking primary, excess, and umbrella layers — that can reach ten to twenty million dollars or more. Their own risk managers set these limits because they know their chapters haze and they know the verdicts that follow. This is the coverage that funds a full recovery. Reaching it requires pleading the national organization’s direct negligence — its failure to train chapter officers, its failure to enforce its own anti-hazing policies, its failure to supervise the chapter it chartered — not just vicarious liability for the local chapter’s acts.
The university’s insurance, if the university is a public institution in Ohio, runs through the state’s risk management framework and the Court of Claims process. The exposure there is real but governed by different rules and ceilings than a private-defendant claim.
A hazing wrongful death case can range in value from approximately two and a half million dollars on the low end to fifteen million or more on the high end, depending on the defendant’s coverage tower, the strength of the evidence, and the severity of the institution’s failure. These cases settle for significant amounts because the alternative — a public trial where a jury hears how a national fraternity chartered a chapter, failed to supervise it, and let a student die — is an existential threat to the fraternity’s ability to recruit, to maintain its charter, and in some cases to exist. The optics of a hazing trial are catastrophic for the defendant, and that leverage is what drives the case toward a resolution that actually accounts for what your family lost.
The Playbook: What the Fraternity’s Lawyers Will Do — and How We Counter Each Move
The fraternity’s legal defense does not begin in the courtroom. It begins within hours of your child’s death, and by the time you are reading this page, it may already be running. Here are the moves you should expect, and the counters to each one.
Play 1: The recorded statement request. Within days, someone representing the fraternity’s insurance company or the university’s risk management office will contact your family. They will be warm, sympathetic, and professional. They will ask you to “just tell us what happened” — on a recording. Everything you say will be transcribed and used to build the defense. If you describe your child as someone who “liked to party” or “was a heavy drinker,” that statement will be the centerpiece of the comparative-negligence defense. The counter: do not give a recorded statement to anyone — not the fraternity’s insurer, not the university’s lawyer, not the individual members’ parents — until you have spoken with an attorney. A recorded statement given in grief is a weapon the defense will use against you for the entire case.
Play 2: The early settlement offer. A check may arrive fast — sometimes within weeks — with a release attached that, if signed, extinguishes every claim your family has against every defendant, including the national fraternity, before the full extent of the harm or the full value of the case is known. The amount will look substantial in the context of a family that is reeling from medical bills and funeral costs. It will be a fraction of what the case is worth. The counter: no settlement offer should be evaluated without a full understanding of the insurance tower, the evidence, the liability of every defendant in the stack, and the lifetime economic impact of the loss. A quick check is designed to buy the fraternity’s peace, not yours.
Play 3: The “consent” narrative. The fraternity’s lawyers will build a story in which your child was a willing participant in a social tradition. They will emphasize that no one forced him to pledge, no one physically restrained him, and no one forced the bottle into his mouth. They will frame the event as a party that went wrong, not a hazing ritual. The counter: the coercion element of Ohio’s hazing statute, the expert testimony on the pledge dynamic, the group-chat evidence that shows the event was planned and traditional, and the testimony of other pledges who will describe the same conditioning process your child went through. Consent manufactured by a power imbalance is not consent, and the law says so.
Play 4: The university’s “no duty” argument. The university will argue it had no duty to supervise off-campus fraternity activities, no actual knowledge of this specific hazing event, and no control over the fraternity’s internal operations. The counter: prior reports of hazing at the same chapter, the university’s own anti-hazing policies, the Clery Act’s reporting requirements, and the post–Collin’s Law zero-tolerance framework the IUC adopted — all of which establish that the university knew fraternities were dangerous and had a duty to act on that knowledge.
Play 5: The delay tactic aimed at the statute of limitations. Ohio’s wrongful death statute of limitations runs from the date of death. The defense will stall, delay, and offer to “investigate” — hoping the deadline passes while your family is still grieving and has not retained counsel. The counter: the deadline is real, it is unforgiving, and the only protection against it is filing the case before it expires. A preservation letter and a timely complaint are the answers to delay.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do and What Not to Do
If your child has died or been seriously injured in a hazing incident, the first 72 hours are when evidence is either preserved or lost forever. Here is the roadmap, hour by hour.
Do not speak to the fraternity’s insurance company, the university’s risk management office, or any attorney representing the fraternity or its members. Every conversation you have with them will be used to build the defense. You are not obligated to speak to any of them. Your only obligation right now is to your child and to the truth of what happened.
Do not sign anything. A release, a waiver, a settlement agreement, an authorization for the release of records — any document the fraternity or the university puts in front of you is designed to limit their liability. Do not sign it. If someone has already given you a document, put it in a folder and bring it to an attorney.
Do not post on social media. The defense will monitor your family’s social media accounts for anything that can be used to minimize the harm — a photo of you smiling at a memorial, a post about “moving forward,” any statement that can be taken out of context. Grief does not look the same on every face, and the defense knows how to weaponize a photograph. Set your accounts to private and post nothing about the case.
Do preserve everything you have. Your child’s phone. Your child’s laptop. Text messages, emails, photographs, social media accounts. The roommate’s account of finding your child unresponsive. The hospital records. The funeral home records. Every piece of paper, every photograph, every digital file. Put it in one place and do not delete anything.
Do contact an attorney immediately. The preservation letter — the document that legally orders the fraternity, the university, the housing corporation, and every relevant third party to freeze and preserve all evidence — is the single most important document in the first 72 hours. It is the difference between a case built on proof and a case built on memory. We send that letter the day you call us. You can reach us through our contact page or at 1-888-ATTY-911.
Do request the autopsy and toxicology reports. If an autopsy was performed, the medical examiner’s report is the medical foundation of your case. Request it in writing from the county coroner’s office. If no autopsy was performed — and in some jurisdictions this happens when the death is attributed to “natural causes” or “accidental overdose” without further investigation — demand one. The cause of death determination is the starting point for every liability theory.
The Medicine: What a .35 BAC Actually Does to a Human Body
A blood alcohol concentration of .35 is not a number on a chart. It is a medical emergency that, without intervention, progresses to death in a predictable sequence. Understanding this sequence is how a jury understands that what happened was not a “drinking game that went too far” but a physiological process the fraternity set in motion and then abandoned.
At a BAC of .20 to .30, confusion sets in. The person may have difficulty standing, slurred speech, and impaired judgment. At .30 to .40, the central nervous system is profoundly depressed. Stupor is common. The person may be conscious but unable to respond meaningfully. The gag reflex — the body’s last defense against aspiration — begins to fail. At .35, the person is in the danger zone where the brainstem’s control of breathing and heart rate is compromised. Respiratory depression means the breathing slows, becomes shallow, and may stop. The oxygen level in the blood drops. The heart, starved of oxygen, develops an irregular rhythm and may arrest.
If the person vomits — and the body’s reflex to expel poison means vomiting is common at these levels — the suppressed gag reflex means the vomitus enters the lungs instead of being expelled. This is aspiration. The lungs fill with acidic stomach contents. Pneumonitis develops. If the person is lying on their back, which is exactly how a dropped-off pledge would be left on a bed or a couch, the airway is not protected. The person asphyxiates on their own vomit while unconscious.
This is what the fraternity members did when they “dropped him off at his apartment.” They placed a person in a medically dangerous state — a state they had created — in a bed, alone, without medical attention, without anyone monitoring his airway, and without calling 911. Every minute he lay there unresponsive was a minute the window for life-saving intervention was closing. By the time a roommate found him, the damage was irreversible.
The defense may argue that the fraternity members were also intoxicated and did not understand the danger. This is not a defense — it is an admission. The fraternity organized an event at which its own members consumed enough alcohol to impair their judgment and then put a pledge in a position where his survival depended on their impaired judgment. The foreseeability of the harm is built into the structure of the event itself.
Damages: What Your Family’s Case Is Worth
The value of a hazing wrongful death case is not a single number pulled from a chart. It is built from multiple categories of loss, each documented and each provable, that together account for everything your family lost and everything the defendants took.
Economic damages are the objectively calculable losses. When a college student dies, the largest economic loss is lost lifetime earning capacity. A young person who was on track to graduate from a university and enter the workforce has been deprived of decades of income, benefits, retirement contributions, and household services. A forensic economist builds this number using worklife-expectancy tables, projected career earnings based on education and field, and the present-value calculation that reduces future earnings to a lump-sum figure. This number can be substantial — a college graduate’s lifetime earnings, reduced to present value, commonly reaches into the millions. Ohio law places no cap on economic damages, which means the full, documented economic loss is recoverable.
Non-economic damages are the human losses that no receipt can measure: the conscious pain and suffering your child experienced between the injury and death — the hours he lay unresponsive, the vomiting, the suffocation, the fear; the loss of society, companionship, guidance, and love that your family will live without for the rest of your lives; the mental anguish of a parent who received a phone call no parent should ever receive. Ohio law generally caps non-economic damages at $250,000 or three times the economic damages, up to a maximum of $500,000 — but this cap does not apply when the injury is a “catastrophic” loss, which includes death. In a wrongful death case, the non-economic damages ceiling is not the same as in an ordinary injury case, and the full scope of the family’s loss can be presented to a jury.
Punitive damages are the damages designed to punish the defendant for conduct that demonstrates a conscious disregard for human safety. In a hazing case, the argument for punitive damages is built on foreseeability: the fraternity knew hazing was dangerous (its own policies prohibit it), the national organization knew its chapters engaged in hazing (decades of deaths across the country prove it), and the university knew fraternities were a risk (its own anti-hazing policies prove it). When a defendant continues a practice it knows can kill, and someone dies, the conscious-disregard standard for punitive damages is met. Punitive damages are the mechanism by which a jury tells the fraternity that the cost of killing a student must be high enough to change the calculus of every chapter in the country.
The total case value in a fraternity hazing wrongful death case, given the insurance towers national fraternities carry and the catastrophic optics of a public trial, commonly ranges from two and a half million to fifteen million dollars or more. The specific value depends on the coverage available, the strength of the evidence, the clarity of the liability chain, and the defendant’s calculation of what a trial would cost them in reputation and recruitment. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes — but the structural leverage in these cases, when the defendant stack is correctly identified and the evidence is preserved, is real.
Why This Firm
Ralph Manginello has spent 27 years in courtrooms, including federal court. Before he was a lawyer, he was a journalist — which means he was trained to find the story the institution is hiding and to tell it in a way a jury cannot turn away from. He is the managing partner of this firm, and he is right now the lead counsel in an active hazing lawsuit — a case against a national fraternity and a major university, filed in November 2025, seeking more than ten million dollars on behalf of a student harmed by a Greek organization’s culture of coercion. That case is not theoretical. It is live. It means Ralph is in the trenches of this exact fight right now — deposing fraternity officers, demanding national-organization records, fighting the insurance companies that stand behind the Greek system, and building the proof story that makes a jury see hazing for what it is. You can read more about Ralph’s background and practice here.
Lupe Peña spent years on the other side. He was an insurance-defense attorney at a national defense firm — the kind of firm the fraternity will hire to fight your family. He sat in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims like yours. He knows how the reserve is set in the first 48 hours, before the real injuries are understood. He knows how the recorded-statement call is engineered to get you to say “he was fine” or “he had been drinking before.” He knows how the claim is fed into valuation software that discounts pain it cannot see and how the quick settlement check arrives with a release attached before the medical results do. Now he sits on your side of the table, and he uses that inside knowledge for the people the insurance company used to pay him to fight against. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. Learn more about Lupe here.
Our firm operates on contingency. That means we do not get paid unless we win your case. The fee is 33.33 percent before trial and 40 percent if the case goes to trial. Your consultation is free. We have a 24/7 live staff — not an answering service, actual people who can take your call at any hour. And we have been doing this since 2001, with more than fifty million dollars recovered for the families we have represented. Our wrongful death practice page has more information about how we build these cases.
The Statute of Limitations: Ohio’s Deadline for Wrongful Death
Ohio’s wrongful death statute of limitations gives the personal representative of the deceased person’s estate two years from the date of death to file the wrongful death action. That deadline is absolute. If the case is not filed within two years of the date your child died, the claim is extinguished — no matter how strong the evidence, no matter how clear the liability, no matter how much the fraternity deserves to be held accountable.
The two-year clock is one of the reasons the fraternity’s lawyers may delay, offer to “investigate,” and encourage your family to take time to grieve before talking to an attorney. Every month that passes is a month closer to the deadline, and every month closer to the deadline is a month the evidence has been dying. The statute of limitations is not a courtesy — it is a wall, and the defense is counting on you to walk into it.
There is a separate procedural consideration if your claim includes the university as a defendant. Claims against public universities in Ohio may involve the Court of Claims process, which has its own procedural requirements and timelines. Those requirements must be navigated carefully and early, because a procedural misstep on a government-entity claim can be as fatal as missing the statute of limitations itself.
The Legacy: How Litigation Forces Institutional Change
The families who have lost children to fraternity hazing and chosen to fight did not just recover money. They changed the law. Collin’s Law exists because two families refused to accept that their sons’ deaths were accidents. The iamstonefoltz Foundation exists because a family turned their grief into education for other parents and students. The Inter University Council adopted a zero-tolerance hazing policy because the alternative — doing nothing after two students died at two universities in the same state — was no longer politically or morally survivable.
Litigation is the tool that forces the institutional change legislation started. Collin’s Law raised the criminal stakes for hazers. A civil verdict that holds a national fraternity accountable for millions of dollars raises the financial stakes — and for a fraternity, the financial stakes are the ones that change behavior. When the cost of allowing a chapter to haze exceeds the cost of shutting that chapter down, the national organization starts shutting chapters down. That is how systems change. Not because the institution chose to. Because a jury made it impossible not to.
Your family’s case is part of that legacy. The fraternity that killed your child is counting on you being too broken to fight. The law gives you two years. The evidence gives you days. And the system that allowed this — the national fraternity that chartered the chapter, the university that looked the other way, the members who watched your child die and did nothing — all of them are counting on the clock and the grief doing their work for them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue a fraternity for my child’s death?
Yes. A national fraternity organization can be held liable for the hazing death of a pledge at a chapter it chartered, supervised, and collected dues from. The legal theories include vicarious liability for the chapter’s actions and direct negligence for the national organization’s failure to enforce its own anti-hazing policies. The national fraternity typically carries the largest insurance tower in the case — often ten to twenty million dollars or more — because its own risk managers understand the danger its chapters pose. An experienced hazing wrongful death attorney can identify the correct defendants and build the liability chain.
Can I sue the university for allowing hazing?
Yes, if the university knew or should have known about hazing at the fraternity and failed to take adequate steps to stop it. Ohio’s public universities have a duty to protect students from foreseeable harm, and hazing at fraternities is one of the most foreseeable dangers on a college campus. Claims against Ohio public universities go through the Ohio Court of Claims, which involves specific procedural requirements. Prior reports of hazing at the same chapter, the university’s own anti-hazing policies, and the zero-tolerance framework adopted by the Inter University Council all contribute to establishing the university’s notice of the danger.
How long do I have to file a hazing wrongful death case in Ohio?
Ohio’s wrongful death statute of limitations requires the personal representative of the deceased’s estate to file the action within two years of the date of death. This deadline is absolute — if the case is not filed within two years, the claim is lost forever, regardless of how strong the evidence is. The two-year clock is one reason it is critical to contact an attorney early, while evidence is still being preserved and the deadline is still far enough away to build the case properly.
What if the fraternity says my child chose to drink?
This is the standard defense in every hazing case, and it fails when the jury understands the pledge dynamic. Ohio’s hazing statute specifically defines coercion to consume alcohol as hazing — meaning the law recognizes that what looks like a voluntary choice was produced by a power imbalance that strips the pledge of genuine agency. Expert testimony on the psychology of hazing, the group-chat evidence that shows the event was planned, and the testimony of other pledges who experienced the same conditioning process all work together to show the jury that your child was a victim of a system, not a willing participant in a party.
How much is a fraternity hazing wrongful death case worth?
The value depends on the specific facts: the insurance tower available, the strength of the evidence, the severity of the institutional failure, and the economic loss. National fraternities typically carry liability coverage of ten to twenty million dollars or more. Economic damages include lost lifetime earning capacity (uncapped in Ohio), which for a college student can reach into the millions. Non-economic damages include conscious pain and suffering and the family’s loss of companionship. Punitive damages may be available when the defendant’s conduct demonstrates a conscious disregard for human safety. Case values commonly range from two and a half million to fifteen million dollars or more, though every case is unique. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What evidence disappears the fastest in a hazing case?
The three fastest-dying categories are: (1) digital communications — SnapChat messages auto-delete by design, and GroupMe and iMessage threads can be wiped manually within seconds; (2) surveillance footage — most security systems overwrite their storage on a seven-to-thirty-day rolling cycle; and (3) university disciplinary records, which require subpoena or FERPA navigation to obtain and may be subject to internal retention schedules. A preservation letter sent immediately freezes these records and creates legal consequences if they are destroyed after the letter is received.
What is Collin’s Law and how does it affect my case?
Collin’s Law (Senate Bill 126) is Ohio’s anti-hazing statute, named after an Ohio University student who died in 2018 and passed in 2021 after a Bowling Green State University student’s death renewed the legislative push. The law defines hazing to include coercion to consume alcohol or drugs, creates the offense of being an accessory to hazing, requires all Ohio universities to enact anti-hazing policies, and enhances criminal penalties for failing to report hazing. The criminal statute also establishes the standard of care for civil actions — meaning a violation of the statute is evidence of the negligence that supports your wrongful death claim.
Should I talk to the fraternity’s insurance company if they call me?
No. The fraternity’s insurance company and its lawyers are building a defense from the moment your child is injured. Every conversation you have with them will be documented and used to minimize the fraternity’s liability. They may call you while you are grieving, sound sympathetic, and ask you to “just tell us what happened” on a recording. Do not give a recorded statement, do not sign anything, and do not accept any settlement offer without first speaking with an attorney who understands hazing litigation. The first call you should make is to a lawyer — not to the fraternity’s insurer.
Can criminal convictions of fraternity members help my civil case?
Criminal convictions of individual fraternity members establish facts that can be powerful evidence in your civil case. Eight members of the fraternity in the BGSU case were found guilty, and six served jail time. The criminal case’s factual record — who did what, who was present, what was said — is the same factual record your civil case needs. However, criminal and civil cases are separate proceedings with different standards of proof and different defendants. The criminal case punishes individuals; the civil case holds the institution — the national fraternity, the university, the housing corporation — financially accountable. Both can proceed at the same time, and the criminal record can support the civil claim.
How do I afford a lawyer for a hazing wrongful death case?
Our firm operates on contingency. We do not charge a fee for the consultation, and we do not get paid unless we win your case. The fee is 33.33 percent of the recovery before trial and 40 percent if the case goes to trial. This means there is no upfront cost to your family, and the firm absorbs the risk of the litigation. You can call us at 1-888-ATTY-911 for a free consultation at any time, day or night. We have a 24/7 live staff — not an answering service.
What should I do right now, today, to protect my family’s case?
Four things: (1) Do not speak to the fraternity’s insurance company, the university’s risk management office, or any attorney representing the fraternity. (2) Do not sign any document — no release, no waiver, no settlement, no records authorization. (3) Preserve everything — your child’s phone, laptop, messages, photographs, and all physical and digital evidence. (4) Call an attorney immediately so a preservation letter can go out before the group-chat messages, the surveillance footage, and the other time-sensitive evidence disappear. The preservation letter is the most important document in the first 72 hours, and we send it the day you call.
Contact Us
If your child has been killed or seriously injured in a fraternity hazing incident at Bowling Green State University, Ohio University, or any college or university in Ohio, call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free. We work on contingency — no fee unless we win. We have a 24/7 live staff, not an answering service, and we can take your call at any hour. Hablamos Español — we serve your family fully in Spanish, without an interpreter.
The evidence is disappearing while you read this. The statute of limitations is running. The fraternity’s lawyers are already working. The day you call is the day the clock starts working for your family instead of against you.