The Stop Campus Hazing Act Changes Everything — What It Means for Your Family
If you are reading this page, you are likely a parent, a sibling, or a survivor yourself — sitting in a hospital waiting room, standing in a kitchen at 2 a.m. with a death notification still glowing on your phone, or staring at a ceiling wondering whether what happened to your child was a crime disguised as tradition. You already know the answer. What you need now is someone to tell you, in plain language, what the law actually says, what the university and the fraternity are already doing to protect themselves, and what the first moves are that will make or break your case. That is exactly what this page is built to do.
The Stop Campus Hazing Act — the first-ever federal anti-hazing legislation — was signed into law after years of advocacy by families who buried their children and then discovered that the university their child trusted had known about the danger all along. The law amends the Clery Act, the same federal statute that requires colleges to disclose campus crime statistics, to force universities to report hazing incidents in their Annual Security Reports. That single change does something no state law has been able to do on its own: it creates a federal paper trail of institutional knowledge that can be used to prove a university knew its campus was dangerous and chose to do nothing about it.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Ralph Manginello, our Managing Partner, is lead counsel in an active hazing lawsuit against Pi Kappa Phi and the University of Houston, filed in Harris County in November 2025, seeking more than $10 million in damages. We are not writing about hazing law from a textbook. We are in the middle of it. And everything we have learned — about the defendant structures, the evidence that vanishes, the defenses the other side runs, and the medicine of what alcohol-fueled hazing does to a human body — is on this page, because your family needs it now, not after the evidence is gone.
What the Stop Campus Hazing Act Actually Does — and What It Does Not Do
The Stop Campus Hazing Act does not create a private right of action. It does not let you sue a university directly under the federal statute. What it does is arguably more powerful: it amends the Clery Act to require every institution of higher education that participates in federal financial aid programs to collect and disclose hazing incidents in their Annual Security Reports, the same documents that already track crimes like robbery, sexual assault, and hate crimes on campus.
The federal legislation amends the Clery Act to require higher education campuses to disclose hazing crime statistics in its Annual Security Report (ASR).
That reporting requirement creates something that did not exist before: a documented, federal record of what a university knew about hazing on its campus, year after year. When a university’s ASR shows a pattern of hazing incidents involving the same fraternity, the same dormitory, the same Greek-life corridor — and that university did nothing to suspend the chapter, increase oversight, or warn incoming students — that record becomes the backbone of a negligent-supervision claim. The “hands-off” defense, the one where the university says “we told fraternities to follow the rules and washed our hands of the rest,” is directly undercut by a federal document showing the university itself tracked the problem and chose not to act.
The Department of Education conducts audits of Clery Act compliance, and those audits are the primary federal oversight mechanism. A university that fails to report hazing incidents — or that deliberately underreports them to protect its enrollment numbers and brand — exposes itself to federal penalties and, more importantly for your family, to civil litigation that can use the reporting failure as evidence of institutional negligence.
What the Act does not do is solve the problem alone. It is a transparency tool, not a remedy. The actual accountability — the lawsuit, the damages, the discovery of internal emails and disciplinary records — is still your family’s fight, and it is still a fight against a well-funded institution whose primary instinct is to protect its reputation first and your child second.
How the Clery Act Created the Duty — and How Hazing Reporting Changes It
The Clery Act, codified at 20 U.S.C. § 1092(f), has been the foundation of campus crime reporting since 1990. It requires institutions to publish an Annual Security Report containing statistics of specific crimes reported on campus, on public property adjacent to campus, and on certain non-campus property — including fraternity and sorority houses that are owned or controlled by student organizations recognized by the university. This geographic framework, known as “Clery Geography,” is critical in hazing cases because it defines which incidents the university is required to report.
The high-risk zones for hazing — fraternity rows, off-campus houses where Greek organizations operate, the basements and back rooms where pledges are taken for “initiation” — are often located in the areas where university oversight has been traditionally weakest. Many major universities are situated in college towns where campus police and local law enforcement may have conflicting reporting protocols, meaning that a hazing incident reported to city police may never make it into the university’s own statistics. The Stop Campus Hazing Act forces those two streams into one document.
Here is why this matters for your case: when a university’s prior ASRs show zero hazing incidents despite a long history of known hazing at a specific fraternity — and your family’s discovery produces internal emails from the Dean of Students discussing “rumored hazing” at that same fraternity that was never officially reported — the gap between what the university knew and what it disclosed is itself the evidence of negligence. The federal reporting requirement did not create the danger. It created the measuring stick.
Who Can Be Held Liable — the Defendant Structure in a Hazing Case
A hazing case is never one defendant. It is a stack of institutions, each with its own insurance, each with its own lawyers, and each pointing at the others. Understanding this stack is the first thing we do when a family calls, because naming the wrong entity — or missing the one with the real money — can quietly kill a case before it starts.
The University or Board of Regents
The university is the defendant most families think of first, and for good reason. The university recruited your child, accepted tuition, recognized the fraternity as a student organization, and held itself out as the guardian of campus safety. The theories of liability against the university include negligent supervision — the failure to monitor and intervene in known high-risk student organization activities despite having the authority to do so — and the in loco parentis / special relationship doctrine, which argues that the university has a heightened duty of care to protect students from foreseeable harm within the campus environment.
If the university is a state-funded institution, sovereign immunity may apply, and with it comes damage caps and notice-of-claim requirements that can significantly compress the litigation timeline. If it is a private institution, charitable immunity doctrines in some states may limit recovery. Both defenses are surmountable, but they require early identification and a strategy built around them from day one.
The National Fraternity or Sorority Organization
The national organization that chartered the local chapter is a critical defendant because it usually has far deeper pockets than the local chapter or the individual students. The national fraternity collects dues, sets policies, publishes risk-management handbooks, and sends representatives to inspect chapters. Its liability runs through vicarious liability for the actions of local chapters and through direct negligence in failing to enforce its own health and safety policies. When a national fraternity’s own risk-management manual prohibits the exact hazing activity that killed your child — and its national representative inspected the chapter six months before and filed a report saying everything was fine — that gap is the case.
Local Chapter Officers and Members
The students who organized and participated in the hazing are individually liable. In many states, hazing is a crime as well as a civil wrong, and state anti-hazing statutes often explicitly provide that the consent of the victim is not a defense. This is the single most important legal point for a hazing family to understand: your child’s “agreement” to drink, to be blindfolded, to endure whatever ritual was imposed — none of it was legally valid consent, because the power dynamics of hazing make true consent impossible. The fraternity member who handed your child the bottle and said “drink or you’re not one of us” was not asking. He was demanding, and the law recognizes the difference.
Property Owners and Landlords
If the hazing occurred at a fraternity house, an off-campus rental, or a venue leased to the organization, the property owner may face premises liability for allowing known dangerous activities and underage drinking on the property. A landlord who knew the fraternity was using the property for initiation rituals and did nothing — or who looked the other way because the rent was paid on time — is a separate defendant with separate insurance.
The Medicine of Hazing — What Coerced Alcohol Consumption Does to the Human Body
The most frequent type of hazing incident involves copious alcohol consumption under peer pressure or forced ingestion. The National Study on Student Hazing found that nearly 55% of college students involved in clubs, teams, and organizations report experiencing hazing. Today’s hazing is less about physical violence and more about drinking — often in environments with little to no adult supervision, led by individuals who are themselves drinking heavily and pushing that same behavior onto new pledges.
Here is what actually happens inside the body during an alcohol-fueled hazing event, and why the defense’s “he chose to drink” argument is a medical lie as well as a legal one.
The Mechanism: From Coerced Consumption to Catastrophic Injury
Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant. When a pledge is forced or pressured to consume large quantities of liquor in a short window — a practice fraternities call “line shots,” “family drinks,” or “the gauntlet” — blood alcohol concentration rises faster than the liver can metabolize it. At a BAC of 0.25 to 0.35, the drinker experiences confusion, stupor, and loss of motor function. At 0.35 to 0.40, the depressant effect reaches the brainstem, where the body’s most basic survival functions are controlled: breathing, heart rate, the gag reflex that prevents choking on vomit.
When breathing slows or stops, the brain is deprived of oxygen. This is hypoxia, and it begins damaging the brain within minutes. The hippocampus — the brain’s memory center — and the basal ganglia, which control movement, are among the first regions to suffer irreversible injury. A pledge who is left unconscious on a couch while fraternity members continue the party in the next room is not “sleeping it off.” He is dying, cell by cell, in a process that takes between four and ten minutes of oxygen deprivation to become permanent.
If someone survives, the damage can be profound: hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, a brain injury caused by oxygen starvation that leaves survivors with cognitive deficits, memory loss, personality changes, seizures, and permanent disability. A “normal” CT scan does not rule out this injury — the microscopic tearing of nerve fibers that characterizes diffuse axonal injury is invisible on standard imaging, and the deficits may only become apparent across the dinner table when a parent notices their child cannot remember a conversation from that morning.
The Trauma Component
Hazing is not limited to alcohol. Pledges are pressured into dangerous stunts — jumping into lakes, pools, or off rooftops while intoxicated. The combination of impaired motor skills, poor judgment, and hazardous environments produces falls, drownings, and impact injuries that compound the chemical damage. A pledge who survives alcohol poisoning and then falls from a second-story balcony during a hazing ritual is suffering two separate mechanisms of harm, both foreseeable, both preventable, and both the legal responsibility of the people and institutions that created the environment.
For families dealing with a hazing-related brain injury, the proof problem is the same one that haunts every invisible-injury case: the defense will point to a clean scan and say “there is nothing wrong with him.” The answer is the same: the injury is in the wiring, not the structure, and it is proven with neuropsychological testing, advanced imaging, and the testimony of people who knew the person before.
The Evidence Clock — What Exists, Who Holds It, and How Fast It Disappears
The single greatest enemy of a hazing case is time — not the statute of limitations, which may give you years, but the evidence-destruction cycle, which can give you days. Every record that matters in a hazing case is held by someone whose interests are not aligned with yours, and every one of those records has an expiration date.
Annual Security Reports (ASR). The university publishes these yearly, and the Stop Campus Hazing Act now requires hazing incidents to be included. But yearly updates can obscure historical data — a university that reports three hazing incidents this year may have had fifteen last year, and the prior report may be archived, revised, or quietly difficult to locate. Pull every ASR the university has published for the past five years immediately, and compare them against the university’s internal disciplinary records.
University Disciplinary Records. The Dean of Students office maintains files on fraternity conduct violations, prior hazing complaints, and disciplinary actions taken (or not taken) against the chapter involved. These records are often subject to FERPA-related delay or destruction policies, and the university will fight production on privacy grounds. A litigation-hold letter must go out the day you call us, because the university’s own records-retention schedule may permit destruction of disciplinary files within months of an incident.
GroupMe, Social Media, and Digital Communications. This is the fastest-dying evidence in the entire case. Fraternity members communicate through GroupMe threads, Snapchat, Instagram direct messages, and text groups — all of which contain the planning, the coercion, and the “instructions” given to pledges. Students delete digital footprints after an incident with remarkable speed, and platforms like Snapchat are designed to destroy evidence automatically. The preservation demand must name every platform, every device, and every account associated with the chapter and its members. If we wait a week, the messages are gone.
Toxicology and Medical Records. Hospital blood alcohol levels, urine toxicology, and the medical examiner’s findings in a death case establish the BAC, the timeline of physical distress, and the mechanism of harm. These are preserved by the hospital or medical examiner and are generally stable, but they must be subpoenaed before the facility’s own retention schedule permits destruction.
The Crime Scene. The fraternity house, the basement, the room where the hazing occurred — these scenes are altered within hours. Cleanup begins immediately. The liquor bottles, the “pledge materials,” the furniture arrangement designed to intimidate — all of it is moved, washed, or discarded. If your child died or was injured in a specific location, that location must be photographed and documented by an investigator before the fraternity has a chance to sanitize it.
The preservation letter is not a formality. It is the first shot in the case. It goes to the university, the national fraternity, the local chapter, the property owner, and every individual we can identify — and it demands, in writing, that they freeze every record, every message, every video, and every physical item connected to the incident. The day you call is the day that letter goes out.
The Insurance-Adjuster Playbook — What the Other Side Will Try
Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before he came to our side of the table. He sat in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims. He knows the plays because he used to run them. Here are the ones you will see in a hazing case, and here is how we counter each.
Play 1: “He Chose to Drink”
This is the defense the university and the fraternity have been rehearsing since the night it happened. They will argue your child voluntarily consumed the alcohol, that nobody forced the bottle into his mouth, that he could have walked out at any time. This is the “personal responsibility” defense, and it is built on a lie about how hazing works.
Our counter: The psychological pressure of hazing is not a choice — it is a system. Pledges are groomed over weeks, isolated from their support networks, subjected to sleep deprivation and hierarchy, and told that their entire social identity depends on completing the ritual. We retain Human Factors experts who testify on the psychology of Greek-life coercion and its effect on decision-making. And we point to the state anti-hazing statute, which in many jurisdictions explicitly provides that consent is not a defense. The law already knows that “he chose to drink” is not an answer.
Play 2: “The University Did Not Know”
The university will claim it had no notice of hazing at the involved fraternity. It will point to its ASR, its conduct records, its Greek-life policies. It will say it did everything a reasonable university could do.
Our counter: Discovery. The internal emails between the Dean of Students and the Greek Life director, the incident reports that were filed and never acted on, the prior complaints from students who transferred out because they were hazed, the parent phone calls that were logged and ignored — all of this is discoverable, and the Stop Campus Hazing Act’s reporting requirement makes the gap between what the university reported and what it actually knew into evidence of negligence.
Play 3: The Quick Settlement Check
Within days of the incident, someone will contact the family. It may be the fraternity’s insurance adjuster, the university’s risk-management office, or a “concerned representative” offering help. The offer will come with a release attached, and it will arrive before the medical results are final, before the toxicology is back, before you know whether your child’s brain injury is permanent.
Our counter: Do not sign anything. Do not give a recorded statement. Do not accept a check. The first offer in a hazing case is always a fraction of the case’s actual value, and the release is designed to extinguish every claim your family has — including claims you do not yet know exist. Every conversation with the other side goes through us, and every document they want you to sign goes through us first.
Play 4: “We’re Just a Fraternal Organization — Not Responsible for Individual Members”
The national fraternity will argue that the local chapter is an independent entity, that the individual members acted outside the scope of any authorization, and that the national organization cannot be held responsible for what a few “rogue” students did at one chapter.
Our counter: The national fraternity chartered the chapter, collected dues, set the risk-management policies, and sent inspectors. When its own manuals prohibit the exact conduct that occurred — and its inspection reports said the chapter was compliant — the national organization’s failure to enforce its own safety standards is direct negligence, not vicarious liability alone.
Case Value — What a Hazing Case Is Worth
Hazing-related wrongful death settlements and verdicts involving major universities and national fraternities frequently reach mid-to-high seven figures. Cases involving catastrophic brain injury or permanent disability can exceed $10 million due to lifetime care costs. Based on our analysis of comparable cases and the specific factors present in hazing litigation, we assess the case-value range as follows:
Low end: approximately $1,500,000. This represents a case with a single institutional defendant, clear but not extensive prior-notice evidence, and a survivor with recoverable injuries — alcohol poisoning requiring intensive care, followed by a period of rehabilitation and return to function.
High end: approximately $15,000,000. This represents a wrongful death or catastrophic brain injury case with multiple defendants — university, national fraternity, local chapter, property owner — where the university had documented prior notice of hazing at the same fraternity, the national organization had inspection reports showing awareness, and the conduct involved aggravated factors such as concealment of the injured student, delay in seeking medical care, or a pattern of prior incidents that were never reported.
The damages in a hazing case are built from multiple categories:
Economic damages include medical expenses for intensive care (alcohol poisoning, trauma surgery, ventilator support), rehabilitation costs, and in wrongful death cases, the loss of lifetime earning capacity. A life-care planner builds the cost stream year by year — every surgery, therapy session, medication, and caregiver hour — and a forensic economist reduces it to present value.
Non-economic damages cover the conscious pain and suffering of the injured person before death or recovery — the terror of the hazing event itself, the physical agony of alcohol poisoning, the knowledge that the people who were supposed to be “brothers” were standing in the next room while he stopped breathing. In a wrongful death case, the family’s loss of companionship, guidance, and the life their child would have lived is a separate, recoverable category.
Punitive damages are highly relevant in hazing cases where the university or national fraternity purposefully concealed prior hazing violations to protect their brand or enrollment numbers. The argument is straightforward: an institution that knew students were being hospitalized or killed by hazing at its fraternity and chose to protect its reputation rather than its students has acted with a conscious indifference that warrants punishment beyond compensation.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
How the Case Is Built — From Preservation to Verdict
Here is how a hazing case is actually won, step by step, by the people who are building one right now.
Week one: The preservation letter goes out to every defendant and every third party we can identify — the university, the national fraternity, the local chapter, the property owner, the social-media platforms, the phone carriers. The letter demands that they freeze every record: the ASRs, the disciplinary files, the GroupMe threads, the Snapchat histories, the security-camera footage, the incident reports, the internal emails. The same week, we send a spoliation letter to the fraternity house itself, ordering that the premises not be altered, cleaned, or modified.
Weeks two through four: We pull the public records — the university’s prior ASRs, the FMCSA or Department of Education audit files, the fraternity’s national risk-management reports, the local police reports, and any prior civil litigation against the same chapter or national organization. We engage a forensic toxicologist to reconstruct the BAC timeline from the hospital records and the medical examiner’s findings. We retain a Human Factors expert to begin building the psychological-pressure analysis.
Months one through three: We file the lawsuit. The complaint names every defendant in the stack — the university, the national fraternity, the local chapter, the property owner, and where appropriate, individual officers. The discovery requests go out, demanding the internal emails, the disciplinary history, the prior complaints, the inspection reports, the insurance policies. We depose the Dean of Students, the Greek Life director, the chapter president, the risk-management chair, the national fraternity’s representative who inspected the chapter, and every member who was present the night your child was hurt.
The trial: At trial, the primary strategy is to dismantle the “personal responsibility” defense by using the Stop Campus Hazing Act’s reporting framework to show the university knew the environment was systemic and coercive. Human Factors experts testify on the psychological pressure of Greek-life grooming. The toxicology timeline proves the physical distress. The internal emails — the ones where the Dean of Students discussed “rumored hazing” at the fraternity and did nothing — are displayed on the screen. And the jury is asked a simple question: when a university takes your tuition money and holds itself out as your child’s guardian, what does it owe in return?
The First 72 Hours — What Your Family Must Do Right Now
Hour 1 through 24: Medical first. If your child is in the hospital, your first job is to be with them and to make sure the medical record is being built correctly. Ask the treating physician to document the mechanism of injury — the alcohol consumption, the hazing context, the timeline. If your child has died, the medical examiner’s report will include toxicology, and that report is the foundation of the entire case. Do not let anyone — the hospital, the university, the fraternity — characterize the incident as an “accident” or “alcohol-related event” without the hazing context being documented.
Hour 24 through 48: Evidence preservation. This is where we come in. The preservation letters go out immediately — to the university, the national fraternity, the local chapter, the property owner, and every individual we can identify. The demand names every category of evidence: the ASRs, the disciplinary records, the GroupMe and social-media archives, the security footage, the incident reports, the internal communications. If the fraternity house is the scene, we send an investigator to photograph and document it before it is cleaned.
Hour 48 through 72: Do not sign, do not record, do not post. Someone will call — a “concerned representative,” a risk-management officer, an insurance adjuster, a university administrator. They will sound compassionate. They will offer help. They will ask you to “just tell us what happened” on a recording. They may bring a check and a release. None of this is your friend. Every word you say to them will be transcribed, taken out of context, and used against your family. Every document they want you to sign is designed to close the case before it opens. Your conversations about the case go to us and to no one else. Your social media goes dark — no posts, no tributes that can be mined for “the family has moved on” arguments, no photos that can be twisted.
When to call: Now. Not after the funeral. Not after the semester ends. Not after the university completes its “internal investigation” — which is a public-relations exercise designed to produce a report that protects the institution, not the truth. The day you learn what happened to your child is the day the clock starts working for you instead of against you.
State Anti-Hazing Laws — The Consent Defense Is Dead in Most States
While the Stop Campus Hazing Act is federal, individual state anti-hazing laws provide the criminal and civil teeth that the federal statute lacks. Many states have named their anti-hazing statutes after the students who died — Florida’s Andrew’s Law, Pennsylvania’s Timothy J. Piazza Antihazing Act — and a critical provision in many of these statutes is the explicit elimination of the consent defense.
This means the fraternity cannot argue “he agreed to it.” The law has already answered: agreement under coercion is not consent. A pledge who is told to drink or leave the fraternity, who is surrounded by older members in a basement at midnight, who has been groomed for weeks to believe that this ritual is the price of belonging — that pledge has not consented. He has been subjected to a power structure that makes refusal socially and psychologically impossible, and the law recognizes that structure for what it is.
Many states also follow comparative negligence rules, where the university will attempt to shift fault to the student’s “voluntary” consumption. The counter is the same: in states with anti-hazing statutes that preclude the consent defense, the student’s participation is not a defense to the hazing, and the comparative-fault argument fails because the underlying conduct — hazing — is itself the wrongful act that the law prohibits.
If your child’s university is in a state with sovereign immunity or charitable immunity, there may be damage caps and notice-of-claim requirements that significantly impact the litigation timeline. Some states require a formal notice of claim to be filed within months of the incident — far shorter than the ordinary statute of limitations — and missing that notice deadline can extinguish the claim entirely. The statute of limitations for personal injury and wrongful death varies by state, typically ranging from one to three years, and the specific deadline depends on where the university is located and the type of claim being filed. You need an attorney in the jurisdiction where the incident occurred to confirm the exact deadline — and you need that attorney now, not later.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue the university if my child was hazed at a fraternity?
Yes — and the Stop Campus Hazing Act makes it easier than it has ever been. The university’s duty to supervise recognized student organizations, its duty to report hazing under the Clery Act as amended, and its special relationship with enrolled students all create avenues for liability. The university’s prior knowledge of hazing at the specific fraternity — documented in its ASRs, disciplinary files, or internal communications — is the evidence that proves the breach of that duty.
My child “agreed” to the hazing — does that mean we cannot sue?
No. In many states, anti-hazing statutes explicitly provide that the consent of the victim is not a defense. The psychological pressure of hazing — weeks of grooming, isolation, hierarchy, and the threat of social exclusion — means that “agreement” under those conditions is not legally valid consent. The law understands that a pledge told to drink or be cast out has not made a free choice.
How long do I have to file a hazing lawsuit?
The statute of limitations varies by state — typically one to three years for personal injury and wrongful death claims, with some states having shorter notice-of-claim deadlines for claims against state-funded universities. If your child was a minor, the deadline may be tolled until they reach adulthood. The discovery rule may extend the deadline if the full extent of the injury was not immediately apparent. You must confirm the specific deadline with an attorney in the state where the university is located, and you should do so immediately — not because the filing deadline is imminent, but because the evidence is disappearing.
What if the university says it had no idea hazing was happening?
We do not take the university’s word for it. Discovery in a hazing case targets the internal communications that universities do not voluntarily produce: the emails between the Dean of Students and the Greek Life director, the incident reports that were filed and never acted on, the prior complaints from students and parents, and the fraternity’s own conduct records. The Stop Campus Hazing Act’s reporting requirement means the university was required to track hazing — and if its ASR shows zero incidents while its internal files tell a different story, the gap is the evidence.
What is the fraternity’s national organization responsible for?
The national fraternity that chartered the local chapter can be held liable both vicariously — for the actions of the chapter it created and supervised — and directly, for its own failure to enforce the health and safety policies it published. When a national fraternity’s own risk-management manual prohibits the exact hazing that occurred, and its inspection reports said the chapter was compliant, the national organization’s failure to detect or stop the danger is its own negligence.
How much is a hazing case worth?
Hazing-related wrongful death settlements and verdicts involving major universities and national fraternities frequently reach mid-to-high seven figures. Cases involving catastrophic brain injury or permanent disability can exceed $10 million due to lifetime care costs. The specific value depends on the severity of the injury, the number and depth of the defendants, the strength of the prior-notice evidence, and the jurisdiction’s damage-cap rules. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What evidence disappears the fastest?
The digital communications — GroupMe threads, Snapchat messages, text groups, and social-media posts — are the fastest-dying evidence. Students delete them within hours of learning someone was hospitalized or killed. Security-camera footage at the fraternity house may overwrite within days. The physical scene itself — the room, the bottles, the arrangement of furniture — is altered immediately. This is why the preservation letter goes out the day you call.
Can the university’s “internal investigation” be trusted?
No. A university’s internal investigation is conducted by the institution’s own risk-management office or outside counsel retained by the institution, and its primary purpose is to protect the university from liability — not to find the truth. The report will be written to minimize the university’s role, emphasize the fraternity’s “rogue” conduct, and frame the student’s participation as voluntary. It is not independent, it is not objective, and it is not your friend. Your family’s investigation is separate, and it is the one that matters.
What if the university is a state school with sovereign immunity?
Sovereign immunity can limit recovery against state-funded universities, but it is not absolute. Many states have waived immunity for certain types of claims or up to certain dollar amounts, and notice-of-claim requirements — which can be far shorter than the ordinary statute of limitations — must be identified and met early. Even where immunity limits recovery against the university, the national fraternity, the local chapter, and the property owner are not shielded, and the real recovery may come from those defendants.
Should I talk to the fraternity’s insurance company?
No. The fraternity’s insurer, the university’s risk-management office, and any “representative” who contacts your family in the days after the incident is working for the other side. Their job is to minimize the institution’s exposure, not to help your family. Every word you say will be recorded and used against you. Every document they ask you to sign is designed to close the case. Direct all communication to your attorney.
Why This Firm — Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
Ralph Manginello has spent 27+ years in courtrooms, including federal court. He is lead counsel in an active hazing lawsuit against Pi Kappa Phi and the University of Houston, filed in Harris County in November 2025, seeking more than $10 million in damages. He did not learn hazing law from a seminar. He learned it from building the case — from sending the preservation letters, from fighting through the discovery, from sitting across the table from the university’s lawyers and the fraternity’s national counsel. That experience is on this page because it is in the courtroom.
Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims from people exactly like the families who call us. He knows how the other side values a hazing claim, how they set reserves in the first 48 hours, how they select their doctors and their experts, and how they engineer the “personal responsibility” defense before the family has even finished grieving. He uses that knowledge for your family now. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter — because your family deserves to understand every word of this fight in the language you think in.
We work on contingency. That means we do not get paid unless we win your case — 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. Your consultation is free. Our staff is live, 24 hours a day, seven days a week — not an answering service, but people who can take your call right now and begin the process of protecting your family.
If we are not the right fit for your case, we will tell you. But if your child was injured or killed in a hazing incident at a university, a fraternity, or any recognized student organization, and you need a firm that is already in this fight — call us.
1-888-ATTY-911. Free consultation. No fee unless we win.
Hablamos Español. Lupe Peña conducts full consultations in Spanish, and our bilingual staff is ready to help your family now.
This page is legal information, not legal advice. Every case is different, and the specific facts of your situation determine your rights and deadlines. Contacting the firm is free and confidential.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.