Who can be held responsible in a Utah hazing case?

Depending on the facts: the individuals who did it, the local chapter, the national fraternity or sorority organization, the chapter house corporation, the property owner or landlord, the institution itself, responsible employees such as coaches and advisors, and whoever supplied the alcohol. The property owner is a defendant far more often than families expect. In both hazing petitions this firm has filed, the property owner is a named defendant.

Has any Utah fraternity or sorority been found responsible for hazing?

Yes. Under the federal Stop Campus Hazing Act, exactly two organizations in Utah have been formally found responsible and disclosed: Sigma Nu Fraternity at the University of Utah, whose recognition was terminated through at least Summer 2031 for hazing new members with alcohol, manual labor, and intimidation; and Pi Phi Alpha Sorority at Weber State University, placed on probation. Historically, both the Sigma Nu and Chi Omega chapters at Utah State were each charged with third degree felony hazing as entities after the 2008 alcohol poisoning death of pledge Michael Starks.

My child's school reports zero hazing findings. Does that mean it is safe?

No. A zero means no organization was formally found responsible during a reporting period that only began July 1, 2025. It excludes unsubstantiated allegations, anything before that date, any unrecognized organization, and all injury information. Utah Tech University's zero is structurally guaranteed because it recognizes no Greek organizations, so hazing by the unaffiliated fraternity operating near its campus would produce no entry no matter how severe it was.

What is rhabdomyolysis and why does it matter in hazing cases?

Rhabdomyolysis is the signature hazing injury. When muscle is pushed far past its limit by forced calisthenics, beating, or restraint, muscle tissue breaks down and floods the bloodstream, and the kidneys can fail trying to filter it. Watch for dark tea-colored or cola-colored urine, profound weakness, and muscle pain out of proportion to the exertion. Two things mislead people: it can look fine for a day or two, and the classic set of symptoms appears in fewer than half of patients. Go to an emergency room and say the word rhabdomyolysis out loud.

Is Attorney911 licensed in Utah?

No. Ralph Manginello is licensed in Texas and New York. Lupe Pena is licensed in Texas. The firm's office is in Houston, Texas. The firm is networked with trial lawyers nationwide and, for a Utah matter, associates locally licensed Utah counsel with any fee divided between the firms in accordance with applicable rules of professional conduct, which does not increase the fee paid by the client.

Utah Hazing: The Complete Guide for Victims and Families

Q: Is hazing illegal in Utah?

Yes. Utah Code 76-5-107.5 makes hazing a crime with four penalty tiers running from a class B misdemeanor to a second degree felony. Utah's statute is one of the broadest in the country on the conduct side: it expressly reaches mental health and safety, and expressly names calisthenics, sleep deprivation, extended isolation, and extreme embarrassment, shame, or humiliation. It also escalates automatically to a class A misdemeanor whenever an alcoholic product is involved, regardless of injury.

Q: How long do I have to file a hazing lawsuit in Utah?

Generally four years for a personal injury claim under Utah Code 78B-2-307, among the longest deadlines in the country. But claims against Utah's public universities are governed by the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah, which imposes a written notice-of-claim requirement with a deadline dramatically shorter than four years. If the University of Utah, Utah State, Weber State, Southern Utah, Utah Tech, Utah Valley, Snow College, or Salt Lake Community College is involved, treat your time as short and get advice immediately.

Q: My son agreed to it. Does that end our case?

No. Utah's criminal statute says consent is not a defense where the person hazed was under 21. The federal definition of hazing contains no age limit and applies regardless of the person's willingness to participate. And the criminal consent rule is not the civil rule: a civil claim for negligence, negligent supervision, premises liability, or wrongful death does not rise or fall on it. Coercion inside a hierarchy where refusal means expulsion from the group is not free choice as a factual matter.

Q: It happened off campus. Does that matter?

Usually not the way people fear. Utah State University's hazing policy expressly reaches conduct both on and off campus. The 2008 death of Michael Starks occurred at a private off-campus residence and still ended two chapters, produced entity-level felony hazing charges against both a fraternity and a sorority, and produced a settlement with the university. Off-campus conduct often strengthens the property-owner claim, because the landlord who leased the house becomes a defendant.

Q: Will we get in trouble for calling 911 in Utah?

Utah law protects you twice. Utah Code 76-3-203.9 provides 911 Good Samaritan immunity for drug and alcohol emergencies. Separately, Utah's hazing statute provides that a person who in good faith reports hazing is not subject to any civil or criminal liability regarding the reporting, a protection most states' hazing statutes do not contain. Call. A charge can be fought. A death cannot be appealed.

Q: Is hazing only a fraternity and sorority problem?

No. Federal law reaches any student organization, including varsity and club athletic teams, marching bands, student government, performance groups, ROTC and corps of cadets, spirit squads, honor and service organizations, residence hall communities, and student employee groups, whether or not the organization is formally recognized by the institution.

If someone is unconscious, cannot be woken, is breathing slowly or irregularly, has cold or bluish or pale skin, is vomiting while unresponsive, or has had a seizure — stop reading and call 911 right now. Roll them onto their side so they cannot choke. Stay with them. Nothing on this page matters more than that call.

Other numbers you may need this minute: 988 for suicidal thoughts or if you are frightened for someone, call or text, 24/7. Text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line (HOLA for Spanish). 1-800-222-1222 for Poison Help — but only when it is not an emergency; if someone is unconscious, not breathing, or seizing, call 911 instead. 800-656-HOPE (4673) for RAINN, sexual assault, 24/7.

And one thing about Utah specifically, because it may be the reason someone hesitates: Utah has a 911 Good Samaritan law. Utah Code §76-3-203.9 protects people who call for help during a drug or alcohol emergency. Utah’s hazing statute separately provides that a person who in good faith reports hazing is not subject to any civil or criminal liability regarding the reporting. In Utah, calling for help is protected. Call.

What this is, and why we built it

We are The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — Attorney911. Our office is at 1177 West Loop South, Suite 1600, Houston, Texas. We litigate hazing cases. We are going to tell you exactly who we are and exactly where we are licensed before we tell you anything else, because you should never have to guess at that.

Ralph P. Manginello has been licensed to practice law in Texas since November 6, 1998 — Texas Bar Card No. 24007597 — and is also admitted in New York and before the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Lupe E. Peña has been licensed in Texas since December 6, 2012 — Texas Bar Card No. 24084332 — and the State Bar of Texas records his status verbatim as Eligible to Practice in Texas with No Public Disciplinary History.

Neither of us is licensed in Utah. We are saying that plainly, in the second paragraph, because a firm that will not tell you that up front will not tell you the hard things later either.

Here is what we do instead, and why it works better for you than a local phone book ever did. Hazing is a national practice, not a local one. The fraternity that hurt your son is almost never headquartered in your state. Pi Kappa Phi is in Charlotte. Phi Kappa Sigma is in Carmel, Indiana. Sigma Nu is in Lexington, Virginia. The insurance tower that will actually pay a judgment is a national program, negotiated nationally, defended by the same handful of firms in every state. The medicine is identical in Logan and in Houston. The federal statute that now forces every school in America to publish its hazing findings is one statute. The expertise is national. Only the courtroom is local.

So we do what the best plaintiff-side work in the country has always done: we associate with excellent local counsel and we split the fee. We are networked with trial lawyers across the United States, and when a Utah family calls us, we do not hand them a phone number and wish them luck. We bring in the right Utah lawyer, we stay on the case, and the family gets both — the national hazing practice and the lawyer who knows the judge. You never pay twice for that. A fee split between lawyers does not increase a client’s fee; it divides the same contingency fee between the firms doing the work. That is the rule, and you should ask any lawyer who proposes it to confirm it to you in writing.

We built this page because of something we kept noticing. Families come to us months after the worst night of their lives and say some version of the same sentence: I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I didn’t know what to ask. I didn’t know anyone else this had happened to.

Everything a Utah family needs already exists. The medicine. The law. The crisis lines. The public records that show what a school already knew. It is scattered across a hundred websites, written in language nobody uses out loud, and almost none of it is anywhere near the rest of it. So we put it in one place, and then we did something nobody else has done: we read every single Utah college’s hazing record and published all of it here.

You do not have to call us to use this. You do not have to call any lawyer to use this. There is no form on this page. Nothing is hidden behind an email address. If you read this, find one phone number that helps, and never speak to us — this page did its job. That is genuinely how we mean it.

One thing before you go further

Hazing works by making you believe you agreed to it. That you chose it. That you could have said no, and therefore whatever happened is partly yours to carry.

Utah law disagrees with that, and so does the federal statute. The federal definition of hazing applies regardless of that person’s willingness to participate. Utah’s criminal statute states that consent is not a defense where the person hazed was under 21. You will find both spelled out, honestly and with their limits, in Utah hazing law, completely.

You did not do this to yourself. Neither did the person you love.

Everything on this page

If this is happening right now — what to do in the next sixty seconds, and Utah’s Good Samaritan protection
What hazing actually is — the federal definition, the Utah definition, and why it reaches far past fraternities
Utah hazing law, completely — Utah Code §76-5-107.5, four penalty tiers, the alcohol escalator, the felony threshold, consent, immunity, and your four-year clock
What hazing does to the body — rhabdomyolysis first, then every injury we see, in plain language
What hazing does to the mind — and why it lasts longer than the injury
The hour that kills people — the timeline of a delayed 911 call, hour by hour
The Utah record — every college, every fraternity and sorority chapter, and every hazing finding the schools themselves published
Michael Starks — Utah’s only known hazing death, and what happened afterward
One fraternity, two Utah campuses, sixteen years — the notice pattern
Who can be held responsible in Utah — and why the landlord is often on the list
When there is no national fraternity to sue — the Weber State problem
Where Utah’s record goes silent — and why silence is not safety
The first 48 hours — what disappears, and what to save tonight
How to read your school’s hazing transparency report
Reporting in Utah, and what actually happens
For the people who love them — including the wall you hit at 18
The hazing cases we litigate — named, filed, and verifiable
Before you speak to any attorney, including us
Questions people actually ask us
Every resource, verified
Sources, limits, and corrections
If you take one thing from this

This page is long on purpose. Section 1 is what to do in the next sixty seconds. Section 6 is the most important clinical thing on this page. Section 7 is the part that exists nowhere else. Read this first if you are going into section 7.

1. If this is happening right now

Call 911. Now. Before you finish reading this sentence.

Nothing on this page is more important than that. Not the organization. Not the chapter. Not whether anyone gets in trouble. Not what it will cost. Not whether you are overreacting.

The thing that kills people in hazing is almost never the moment itself. It is the delay. It is the hour where everyone stands around deciding whether it is bad enough to call. It is somebody being put to bed to sleep it off. We have written that hour out in detail, hour by hour, in the hour that kills people, because it is the single most important thing on this page.

A person who has passed out from drinking can die.

Cold showers, coffee, and walking do not reverse alcohol poisoning. Sleeping it off is not a plan. If you cannot wake someone, if their breathing is slow or irregular, if their skin is cold or bluish or pale, if they are vomiting while unresponsive, or if they have a seizure — that is an emergency. Put them on their side so they cannot choke, and call 911.

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism — Understanding the Dangers of Alcohol Overdose

Tell them everything

When help arrives, say exactly what happened and what was taken — how much, how long, what kind, what was done to them. Nobody is in trouble in that moment. Emergency clinicians are not there to punish anyone. They are there to keep someone breathing, and they need the truth to do it.

If there was forced exercise — hundreds of push-ups, squats, wall-sits, bear crawls, anything held past collapse — say the word rhabdomyolysis out loud to the triage nurse. You are allowed to. It tells them exactly what to check for, and it is the injury most often missed in these cases. We explain it fully in what hazing does to the body.

Will we get in trouble for calling? An honest answer, and Utah’s is a good one

Many states have 911 Good Samaritan or medical amnesty laws that shield the people who call for help. Many colleges have their own medical amnesty policies that do the same for campus conduct charges. This protection is not universal, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Utah: Yes. Utah Code §76-3-203.9 provides 911 Good Samaritan immunity. Utah is among the states that decided the call matters more than the charge.
Utah, again — the hazing statute itself: Yes, and this one is rarer. Utah Code §76-5-107.5 contains its own good-faith reporting immunity: A person who in good faith reports or participates in reporting of an alleged hazing is not subject to any civil or criminal liability regarding the reporting. Of the states we have studied closely, Utah is the only one whose hazing statute protects the reporter on its own face.
Michigan: Yes — enacted 2016.
Texas: No state overdose Good Samaritan immunity law.
Kansas: No civilian Good Samaritan immunity law currently enacted.

Call anyway. Even in the states that have no such law — call anyway. Many individual campuses have medical amnesty policies that operate regardless of state law. Look up your own school’s medical amnesty policy tonight, before you ever need it. But do not let the answer change what you do in an emergency.

A charge can be fought. A death cannot be appealed.

Every number, in one place

Medical emergency: 911
Suicidal thoughts, or you are frightened for someone: 988 — Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Call or text. 24/7. Chat at chat.988lifeline.org
You would rather text than talk: Text HOME to 741741 — Crisis Text Line. Text HOLA for Spanish.
Poisoning guidance — when it is NOT an emergency: 1-800-222-1222 — Poison Help. If someone is unconscious, not breathing, or seizing, call 911 instead.
Sexual assault: 800-656-HOPE (4673) — RAINN. 24/7. Text HOPE to 64673.
LGBTQ+ young people: 1-866-488-7386 — The Trevor Project. 24/7. Or text START to 678-678.
Mental-health information and navigation (not a crisis line): 1-800-950-6264 — NAMI HelpLine. Or text HELPLINE to 62640.
Substance use, treatment referral: 1-800-662-4357 — SAMHSA National Helpline. 24/7, free, confidential.
Anonymous hazing report: 1-888-NOT-HAZE (1-888-668-4293) — the Anti-Hazing Hotline. Disclosure: it is funded by the fraternal industry. It is still a real reporting channel, and you deserve to know who runs it.

2. What hazing actually is

Most people picture a fraternity basement. That picture is wrong in a way that matters, because it causes families to conclude this doesn’t apply to us when it does.

The federal definition — and the phrase that ends the argument

The Stop Campus Hazing Act, Public Law 118-173, signed December 23, 2024, defines hazing as any intentional, knowing, or reckless act committed against another person — regardless of that person’s willingness to participate — that:

occurs in the course of initiation into, affiliation with, or maintaining membership in a student organization; and
causes or creates a risk, above the risk ordinarily encountered in daily life, of physical or psychological injury.

The statute then names what it means, and these are the categories written into federal law:

whipping, beating, striking, electronic shocking, placing of a harmful substance on someone’s body, or similar activity;
causing an individual to consume food, liquid, alcohol, drugs, or other substances;
sleep deprivation, exposure to the elements, confinement in a small space, extreme calisthenics, or other activity that subjects the individual to an unreasonable risk of harm or adversely affects mental or physical health or safety;
activity involving a criminal violation of local, State, Tribal, or Federal law;
activity that induces, causes, or requires an individual to perform a duty or task involving a criminal violation.

Read that third bullet again. Extreme calisthenics is hazing under federal law. Sleep deprivation is hazing under federal law. Neither leaves a bruise. Both are why parents look at their exhausted, sore child and conclude nothing happened.

“Student organization” is far broader than Greek life

The federal Act defines a student organization as a club, society, association, varsity or club athletic team, fraternity, sorority, band, or student government in which two or more members are enrolled students — whether or not the organization is formally recognized by the institution.

Westminster University’s own hazing policy, which is representative of how Utah institutions read the statute’s scope, defines a covered organization as:

registered student organizations; student government; any group of students participating in or identified with an academic or athletic program, or performance group; residence hall community, or group of student employees; leaders, members, or alumni of said Organization

Westminster University Hazing Transparency Report, December 15, 2025

Athletic teams. Marching bands. Performance groups. Residence hall floors. ROTC. Cheer and spirit squads. Club sports. Student employee groups. Alumni. All of it is in scope. A guide that covered only fraternities and sororities would be structurally incomplete, and so would a family’s understanding of their own case.

The three tiers, and why the first one is the dangerous one

Hazing researchers sort conduct into three tiers. We use them here because families almost always underestimate the first two.

Tier 1 — Subtle and normalized: Deception, enforced silence periods, demerits, personal servitude, errands, being made to carry things for older members, social hierarchy enforcement. This is the tier everybody calls “tradition.” It is also the tier that establishes the authority gradient that makes Tier 3 possible.
Tier 2 — Harassment: Verbal abuse, threats, sleep deprivation, forced calisthenics, degrading attire, extreme embarrassment, isolation from family and friends. This is the tier that produces rhabdomyolysis and psychiatric injury, and it is the tier that leaves no visible marks.
Tier 3 — Violent: Forced or coerced substance consumption, beating, paddling, branding, forced ingestion of noxious substances, forced water intoxication, confinement, exposure, restraint, and sexual violence.

The sixteen mechanisms — what actually gets done to people

In our own research file we classify hazing conduct into sixteen act types, because each one produces a distinct and predictable set of medical injuries. If you recognize the thing that was done, you can find the injury it causes.

Forced or coerced alcohol consumption: Produces acute alcohol toxicity, aspiration of vomit into the lungs, anoxic brain injury, and death. See the injury section.
Forced water or fluid consumption: Produces dilutional hyponatremia, cerebral edema, and osmotic demyelination. Forced water can kill. People do not know this.
Forced ingestion of non-food or noxious substances: Caustic injury to the esophagus, esophageal rupture, toxic ingestion, aspiration, anaphylaxis where an allergen is involved.
Paddling, beating, striking, “the gauntlet”: Blunt trauma, traumatic rhabdomyolysis, acute kidney injury, compartment syndrome, splenic and hepatic laceration, bowel perforation, necrotizing infection of the buttock.
Forced calisthenics and extreme physical exertion: Exertional rhabdomyolysis, exertional heat stroke, exertional sickling, sudden cardiac death. The single most common mechanism in modern litigated hazing cases.
Sleep deprivation: Neurocognitive impairment, psychiatric decompensation and psychosis, drowsy-driving collisions, and synergistic potentiation of alcohol, exertion, and heat.
Confinement, restraint, burial, wrapping, taping: Positional and mechanical asphyxia, anoxic brain injury.
Exposure to the elements: Hypothermia, frostbite, heat injury. In Utah this mechanism is more dangerous than in most states, and we say why in the injury section.
Branding and burning: Full-thickness burns, keloid scarring, permanent disfigurement, infection.
Chemical application to skin, mucosa, or genitals: Chemical burns, mucosal injury, ocular chemical injury.
Forced swimming or water immersion: Drowning and non-fatal drowning, cold shock response, immersion hypothermia.
Sexual violence, forced nudity, forced sexual acts: Anorectal and genital trauma, sexually transmitted infection, post-traumatic stress disorder, complex PTSD, long-term sexual dysfunction.
Kidnapping, abduction, abandonment — “drop-offs”: Motor vehicle collisions, exposure, secondary trauma. This is the mechanism that killed Michael Starks at Utah State. See his case.
Psychological degradation, humiliation, isolation: Acute stress disorder, PTSD, major depression, suicidality, moral injury, shame-based identity damage.
Personal servitude: Chronic stress, academic derailment, lost earning capacity. This one is compensable and is almost always overlooked.
Electric shock: Burns, cardiac arrhythmia, neurologic injury.

The two properties that make hazing different from an accident

First: the volume is set by someone else. When you train yourself, your own pain stops you. That is a protective reflex and it works. In hazing, the number of repetitions is set by a person whose approval the victim needs, and the option to stop has been removed. That is why an ordinary workout injures nobody and a hazing workout puts a nineteen-year-old on dialysis.

Second: the person who hurt you is the person you were trying to belong to. That combination has a name — betrayal trauma — and it does something distinct. It does not only hurt. It rearranges how a person decides who is safe. We deal with this fully in the mind section.

3. Utah hazing law, completely

This section is longer than the equivalent section on any other page you will find, because Utah’s statute has features that genuinely matter to your case and that almost nobody explains.

Utah’s hazing statute is Utah Code §76-5-107.5. We tell you below where our confidence is high and where it is not, because a page that pretends to certainty it does not have is worse than useless to you.

What Utah’s statute prohibits

A person commits hazing in Utah by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly committing an act that endangers the mental or physical health or safety of an individual, where the act involves:

Physical brutality — the statute names whipping, beating, branding, calisthenics, bruising, electric shocking;
Forced consumption — of food, alcoholic product, drug, or other substance endangering health;
Sleep deprivation, extended isolation from social contact, or conduct that subjects another to extreme embarrassment, shame, or humiliation;

… and is committed for the purpose of initiation into or membership in an organization, or is directed against members or candidates of a school team or organization.

Utah is the most expansive hazing statute of the states we have studied in depth. It is the only one that expressly reaches mental health and safety in its core definition. It is the only one that expressly names calisthenics, sleep deprivation, extended isolation, and extreme embarrassment, shame, or humiliation as qualifying acts. If your child was made to do hundreds of push-ups, kept awake for days, cut off from family, or systematically humiliated — Utah’s legislature wrote those words into the statute on purpose.

The four penalty tiers

Base offense: Class B misdemeanor.
Involves a motor vehicle, an alcoholic product, or a drug or other substance: Class A misdemeanor.
Involves a dangerous weapon: Third degree felony.
Results in serious bodily injury: Third degree felony.
Dangerous weapon AND serious bodily injury: Second degree felony.

The alcohol escalator — the most under-discussed feature of Utah law

Utah escalates hazing to a class A misdemeanor whenever an alcoholic product is involved, regardless of whether anyone was injured at all. Not if someone was hurt. Not if someone was hospitalized. If alcohol was involved.

Of the three state statutes we have analyzed line by line, Utah is the only one with an automatic alcohol escalator. Michigan has none. Kansas has none. This matters enormously, because alcohol is present in the substantial majority of documented hazing incidents — including both of the two substantiated hazing findings in Utah’s entire public record. We show you both of them, verbatim, in the Utah record.

“Serious bodily injury” — where the felony line actually is

Utah’s felony trigger is a defined term, and the definition comes from Utah Code §76-1-101.5:

Serious bodily injury means bodily injury that creates or causes serious permanent disfigurement, protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ, or creates a substantial risk of death.

Utah Code §76-1-101.5

Three separate doors, and you only need one. Permanent disfigurement. Or protracted loss of function. Or substantial risk of death.

That third door is the one families do not know about, and it is the reason Utah’s standard is meaningfully friendlier than some others. Utah’s test is functional, not a checklist. Michigan asks whether an injury matches a listed category. Utah asks whether the injury created a substantial risk of death, or a protracted loss of function, or permanent disfigurement.

The practical consequence: an acute, survivable-but-nearly-fatal injury can satisfy Utah’s felony threshold even if the person fully recovered. An alcohol poisoning that genuinely could have killed someone. A water-intoxication episode that produced brain swelling. A rhabdomyolysis with acute kidney failure requiring dialysis. Each of those can create a substantial risk of death and then resolve. Under Utah’s standard, the risk is the injury. A parent who hears “but he’s fine now” should understand that Utah law does not necessarily agree that this ends the matter.

Consent — and the honest limit on it

Utah’s statute provides:

It is not a defense to prosecution of hazing that an individual under 21 years old, against whom the hazing was directed, consented to or acquiesced in the hazing activity.

Utah Code §76-5-107.5

Note the age qualifier, because we are not going to hide it from you. Utah’s consent bar is expressly limited to victims under 21. Michigan’s is unqualified — it bars the consent defense for anyone of any age. Utah’s is narrower.

Why we are telling you this rather than glossing it: if the person hazed was 21 or older — a senior, a graduate student, someone pledging a professional or graduate chapter — consent becomes a live issue under Utah’s criminal statute in a way it is not for an eighteen-year-old freshman. That is a real limitation and any lawyer who tells you otherwise is selling you something.

Two things that remain true even then. First, the federal definition contains no age qualifier at all — it applies regardless of that person’s willingness to participate, full stop, and it governs the school’s reporting duty. Second, the criminal consent rule is not the civil rule. A civil claim for negligence, negligent supervision, premises liability, or wrongful death does not rise or fall on the criminal consent provision, and coercion inside a hierarchy where refusal means expulsion from the group is not, as a factual matter, free choice. Consent arguments in these cases are attacked on the facts, not surrendered on the statute.

Good-faith reporting immunity — Utah has it, and most states do not

A person who in good faith reports or participates in reporting of an alleged hazing is not subject to any civil or criminal liability regarding the reporting.

Utah Code §76-5-107.5

Of the states we have analyzed closely, Utah is the only one whose hazing statute protects the reporter on its own face. Kansas does not have this. Michigan does not have this. If fear of being sued by a fraternity is what is stopping someone in Utah from reporting — the legislature already answered that.

One honest caveat we have flagged in our own files and are flagging here: whether this immunity extends to the reporting person’s own conduct, as opposed to the act of reporting, is not resolved on the face of the statute. If you were present and are worried about your own exposure, get your own lawyer before you report. We say more about that in before you speak to any attorney.

Your clock — four years, and it is one of the best in America

Utah’s statute of limitations for a personal injury claim is four years — Utah Code §78B-2-307. That is among the longest in the country. Texas gives two. Kansas gives two. Michigan gives three.

That extra time is real and it is valuable. Do not spend it. Here is why, in order of how much damage each one does:

Evidence dies on a much shorter schedule than the claim does. GroupMe and Discord and Snapchat threads auto-delete or get wiped. Phones get traded in. Bruises fade in two weeks. Chapter members graduate and scatter. Four years of limitations does not preserve one minute of any of that. Read the first 48 hours tonight.
Claims against public institutions run on a completely different and much shorter clock. Every one of Utah’s eight public colleges — the University of Utah, Utah State, Weber State, Southern Utah, Utah Tech, Utah Valley, Snow College, Salt Lake Community College — is a governmental entity. Claims against governmental entities in Utah are governed by the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah, which imposes a written notice-of-claim requirement with a deadline dramatically shorter than four years, and failing to file that notice on time can extinguish an otherwise perfect claim. If a public Utah university is involved, treat your time as short and get advice immediately. This is the single most common way a good case is lost before it starts.
Minors are treated differently, and hazing reaches high schools. If the person hazed was under 18, ask specifically about tolling.

We are not going to publish a specific notice deadline number here. Notice-of-claim deadlines under the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah, and how they interact with a minor’s claim, are exactly the kind of detail that must be confirmed against current statute for your specific facts by a lawyer licensed in Utah. Getting this wrong ends cases. What we will tell you flatly: it is far shorter than four years, and the clock is already running.

Where Utah law is silent — and why that changes the theory of your case

Brigham Young University’s own Annual Security Report records the following, and it is worth more to a lawyer than it looks:

There are no applicable local laws on hazing in Provo or Utah County, though Utah criminalizes hazing and similar conduct.

Brigham Young University, 2025 Annual Security Report

In many states, a plaintiff can build a negligence per se theory on a municipal ordinance — the argument that violating a safety law is itself proof of negligence. In Provo and Utah County, there is no such ordinance to build on. Any negligence per se theory in that part of Utah must run through the state statute (§76-5-107.5) or through the federal Stop Campus Hazing Act itself. That is a strategic fact, not a trivia fact, and it comes from the university’s own compliance document.

How Utah compares — because families move, and cases cross state lines

Reaches psychological harm in the core definition?: Utah: yes. Michigan: only through a felony-tier category. Kansas: no.
Reaches athletic teams?: Utah: yes, expressly — school team or organization. Michigan: yes. Kansas: doubtful; its statute is written around social or fraternal organization.
Reaches K-12?: Utah: yes — school team or organization. Michigan: yes, expressly naming middle, junior high, and high school. Kansas: not on the face of the statute.
Consent barred as a defense?: Utah: yes, but only for victims under 21. Michigan: yes, unqualified. Kansas: not stated.
Penalty escalation?: Utah: four tiers, up to a second degree felony. Michigan: three tiers, up to fifteen years. Kansas: none — a flat class B misdemeanor with no death provision at all.
Automatic alcohol escalator?: Utah: yes. Michigan: no. Kansas: no.
Good-faith reporter immunity?: Utah: yes. Michigan: no. Kansas: no.
Civil deadline: Utah: four years. Michigan: three. Kansas: two. Texas: two.
State law requiring campuses to publish hazing findings?: Utah: no. Ten states have one — Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington. Utah is not among them. Everything Utah schools publish, they publish because federal law requires it. That is why the Stop Campus Hazing Act matters so much in this state specifically, and it is why the Utah record below exists at all.

Sourcing note, stated plainly. We hold Utah Code §76-5-107.5 at high confidence but not at the highest tier, because Utah’s own legislative website returned a navigation shell at one URL pattern, 404 errors at two others, and unparseable output from its PDF endpoint when we tried to capture the verbatim subsection numbering directly. The substance above is confirmed across independent sources and we stand behind it. The exact subsection numbering should be confirmed against le.utah.gov before anyone relies on it in a filed document. We would rather tell you that than pretend.

4. What hazing does to the body

You do not need to become a doctor. You need enough to know when something is wrong, enough to ask the right question in an emergency room, and enough that a shrug does not end the conversation.

What we have deliberately left out: clinical dosing, lab thresholds, and treatment protocols. Those belong to your doctors, and a frightened person reading numbers out of context at 3 a.m. is not helped by them — they are frightened worse. What follows is what helps you recognize something, ask about it, and advocate for it.

The one thing most people have never heard of

Rhabdomyolysis. Say it once out loud so it stops being frightening: rab-doe-my-OL-uh-sis. People call it rhabdo.

When muscle is pushed far past its limit — hundreds of squats, endless push-ups, wall-sits held until collapse, being beaten, being restrained — muscle tissue breaks down and spills its contents into the bloodstream. The kidneys try to filter it. Sometimes they fail.

It is the signature hazing injury. It appears again and again in these cases, including in matters this firm currently handles. Both of the petitions we have filed and can show you plead it.

What to watch for

Muscle pain far worse than ordinary soreness — pain out of proportion to the workout
Weakness. Not being able to stand, climb stairs, rise from the floor, or lift the arms overhead
Dark urine — tea-colored, cola-colored, brown. This is the sign families remember for the rest of their lives
Visible swelling and rock-hard tightness in the thighs, gluteals, calves, forearms, or shoulders — whichever muscles were loaded
Confusion, nausea, vomiting, dramatically reduced urination, or not having urinated at all since the event

Three things that mislead people, and cost lives

One: it can look fine at first. Symptoms and blood markers may not peak for a day or two. Someone who seems okay the morning after can be in serious trouble by the second day.

Two: severe pain is not required. The full classic set of symptoms — muscle pain, weakness, and dark urine together — shows up in fewer than half of patients. Muscle pain appears in roughly half of adults; dark urine in only thirty to forty percent. He wasn’t complaining that much has never ruled this out, and the medical literature is explicit that the classic triad is the exception rather than the rule.

Three: the person most at risk is exactly the person being hazed. In the best available data — U.S. military surveillance, which tracks this injury because the military produces it — recruits in training carry a rate more than thirteen times higher than established service members. The recruit is the epidemiological twin of the pledge: young, newly arrived, out of condition relative to what is being demanded, and under an authority gradient that has removed the option to stop. Rates are also concentrated in the under-20 age band, which is to say the freshman year of college.

If you see dark urine after extreme exertion, beating, or restraint — go to an emergency room and say the word rhabdomyolysis out loud. You are allowed to. It tells the triage nurse exactly what to check for. And photograph the urine. It clears within days and the color is otherwise unrecoverable evidence.

What it can turn into

Most rhabdomyolysis that is caught early resolves completely, and we are not going to tell you otherwise — overstating this is how families end up disappointed and how experts get destroyed on cross-examination. But in the subset where it goes wrong, the things that do not come back are:

Nephron loss. Kidney tissue destroyed by acute tubular necrosis does not regenerate. A young person who had severe or dialysis-requiring kidney injury carries permanently reduced kidney reserve — a lower baseline, an accelerated path toward chronic kidney disease, reduced tolerance for any future kidney-stressing medication, and decades of runway for that to play out. This is the most valuable and most frequently missed permanent finding, because it is often missed when the discharge creatinine looks normal.
Compartment syndrome and fasciotomy. When swelling inside a muscle traps its own blood supply, the treatment is a surgical emergency: the surgeon cuts the muscle compartment open. The scars are large, permanent, and visibly disfiguring, and often require skin grafting with its own donor-site scarring.
Permanent nerve palsy where that decompression came too late. Foot drop is the classic result and it does not resolve.
End-stage renal disease in the extreme tail — dialysis three times a week, transplant listing, lifetime immunosuppression, and repeat transplantation across a young person’s lifespan.
Permanent categorical exclusion from military service and certain occupations. Firefighting, law enforcement, wildland fire, offshore and industrial work with heat exposure. This is a real and frequently missed loss.

Every other injury we see, and why each one matters

What follows is organized by mechanism, because that is how a family thinks: this is what they did to him — what does that cause?

Alcohol

Acute alcohol poisoning: The brain’s breathing drive and gag reflex shut down. This is the mechanism of most hazing deaths. Passing out is not sleeping. See the box in section 1 and act on it.
Loss of protective airway reflexes: The specific reason an unconscious person must be placed on their side and never left alone. The reflex that stops you from inhaling your own vomit is switched off by alcohol before consciousness is.
Aspiration of stomach contents into the lungs: Chemical burn of the lung tissue, progressing in severe cases to acute respiratory distress syndrome. A person can survive the alcohol and die of this days later.
Anoxic brain injury: When breathing stops, the brain is deprived of oxygen. The damage is permanent and the outcomes range from full recovery to coma, vegetative state, and death by neurologic criteria.
Low blood sugar, ketoacidosis, and hypothermia from intoxication: Alcohol suppresses the liver’s ability to release glucose and destroys the body’s ability to hold temperature. This is why an intoxicated person left outdoors in Utah in winter is in a different category of danger than an intoxicated person indoors.

Forced water — the one nobody believes until it happens

Dilutional hyponatremia, or water intoxication: Forcing someone to drink large volumes of water dilutes the sodium in their blood. Water, by itself, with nothing added, can kill a healthy young person. Signs: headache, confusion, nausea, and then seizures.
Hyponatremic cerebral edema and brain herniation: The brain swells inside a skull that cannot expand. This is how water intoxication kills.
Osmotic demyelination syndrome: A devastating brain injury that can be caused by correcting the sodium too quickly in the hospital. We include it because families deserve to know it exists, and because whether a hospital’s own error breaks the chain of responsibility back to the people who forced the water is a genuinely unsettled legal question that a Utah lawyer needs to be thinking about from day one.

Being beaten, paddled, or struck

Deep contusion and hematoma of the buttocks and back: The index injury of paddling. Looks survivable. Frequently is not the whole story.
Traumatic rhabdomyolysis: The same kidney-destroying process described above, produced by crushing rather than exertion. Where paddling and forced calisthenics were combined — which is common — the injury is mixed, and the medical coding and the causation analysis both change.
Acute compartment syndrome: A surgical emergency. The hallmark is pain far greater than the injury should cause, and pain on passive stretching of the muscle.
Necrotizing soft-tissue infection and gluteal abscess: Flesh-eating infection following paddling. Rare, catastrophic, and it starts as what looks like an ordinary bruise.
Concussion and post-concussive syndrome: Symptoms can emerge over hours or days. Headache, light sensitivity, memory trouble, personality change, sleep disruption.
Subdural and epidural hematoma: Bleeding inside the skull. Can be delayed. A person can walk, talk, and seem fine, and deteriorate hours later.
Diffuse axonal injury: Shearing of the brain’s wiring from rotational force. Among the most severe forms of traumatic brain injury.
Second impact syndrome: Catastrophic brain swelling from a second head impact before the first concussion healed. This is the reason repeated hazing sessions across a pledge period are more dangerous than any single one of them.
Splenic or hepatic laceration: Damage to the spleen or liver from strikes to the trunk. Bleeding can be delayed by days. Left-shoulder pain or upper-left abdominal pain after being hit is not just a bruise — it is a classic referred-pain sign of a bleeding spleen.
Bowel perforation with peritonitis and sepsis: A tear in the intestine spilling contents into the abdomen. Presents as worsening abdominal pain and fever, and is fatal untreated.
Skull and other serious fractures, facial and dental trauma: Including avulsed teeth. Dental reconstruction after facial trauma in a nineteen-year-old is a lifetime cost, not a one-time bill.
Testicular trauma and rupture; renal contusion from flank strikes: Both are specific consequences of specific hazing practices, both are surgical, and both are chronically under-reported by young men who are embarrassed.

Forced exercise

Exertional rhabdomyolysis: See above. The dominant mechanism in modern hazing litigation.
Exertional heat stroke with multi-organ failure: Core temperature climbs past what the body can shed. Confusion and altered behavior are diagnostic signs, not side effects — a person acting strangely during forced exercise in heat is having a medical emergency, not being difficult.
Permanent heat intolerance: After heat stroke, some people never regulate temperature normally again. It is permanent, it is disabling in outdoor work, and it is invisible.
Exertional sickling: People with sickle cell trait — not disease, trait, which is common and usually harmless — can collapse during extreme exertion. Many carriers do not know they are carriers.
Sudden cardiac arrest and death during forced exertion: The fastest way forced calisthenics kills.
Fatal arrhythmia from potassium released by destroyed muscle: The mechanism by which rhabdomyolysis kills quickly rather than slowly. Chest pain or palpitations after extreme exertion is a 911 finding.

Being confined, restrained, wrapped, taped, or buried

Positional asphyxia: A body position that prevents breathing. It does not require anyone’s hands. It requires only that someone be left in a position they cannot get out of — which is exactly what restraint plus intoxication produces.
Mechanical and compressive asphyxia: From wrapping, taping, burial, pile-ons, or confinement in an enclosed space.
Manual and ligature strangulation: Including chokeouts and blackout games. Brain injury from strangulation can occur without any loss of consciousness at all, and delayed death from arterial injury days later is documented.
Drowning and non-fatal drowning: Including cold-shock response, which causes involuntary gasping on entry into cold water — a particular danger in Utah’s mountain lakes and reservoirs, which stay dangerously cold well into summer.
Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy; coma, vegetative state, minimally conscious state; brain death: The end of the road for every mechanism above.

Burning, branding, and chemicals

Branding: A deliberate full-thickness contact burn. Permanent by design.
Hypertrophic scar, keloid, and permanent disfigurement: Disfigurement is its own compensable harm in Utah — it is one of the three doors into serious bodily injury and therefore into felony territory. See the law section.
Caustic ingestion with esophageal stricture: Swallowing a corrosive substance scars the esophagus closed. Treatment is repeated dilation — a rod passed down the throat — sometimes for the rest of a person’s life.
Chemical burns to skin, mucosa, and genitals: Icy Hot, Bengay, hot sauce, cleaning products, and similar substances applied to the body or genitals as pranks.
Ocular chemical injury: Chemical burn of the eye. Vision loss can be immediate and permanent, and irrigation in the first minutes changes the outcome more than anything a hospital does later.
Electrical injury from forced shock: Burns at entry and exit, cardiac arrhythmia, and neurologic injury that can appear weeks later.

Exposure — and why Utah is worse than most states for this

Hypothermia: From cold exposure or cold-water immersion. Alcohol is a leading contributor in young adults, because it destroys the body’s ability to hold temperature at the same time it destroys the judgment to come inside. A victim frequently cannot recognize their own danger.
Frostbite and cold-induced tissue loss: Up to and including amputation of fingers and toes.

Utah-specific warning. Utah’s campuses sit at altitude, in a state with severe winters and enormous day-to-night temperature swings. Logan, Cedar City, Ephraim, and Ogden are cold. An intoxicated nineteen-year-old left outside in Cache Valley in November is in a materially more dangerous situation than the same young person in Houston. Michael Starks died in Logan on November 21. Cold and alcohol are a combination that Utah families should treat as an emergency on sight.

Forced eating and drinking of things that are not alcohol

Mallory-Weiss tear: A tear at the junction of esophagus and stomach caused by violent, repeated vomiting. Presents as vomiting blood.
Boerhaave syndrome: Full-thickness rupture of the esophagus from forceful vomiting. It is a surgical emergency with high mortality and it is frequently misdiagnosed as a heart attack or as ordinary chest pain.
Aspiration during forced ingestion: The same lung injury as the alcohol pathway, produced by being force-fed.
Acute nicotine toxicity: From forced tobacco, dip, or nicotine pouches. Vomiting, seizures, and cardiac effects. Nicotine pouches are a newer hazing vector and the dose is far higher than people assume.
Forced ingestion of non-food substances: Petroleum products, detergents and surfactants, urine, animal products, live animals, concentrated capsaicin, and deliberately spoiled preparations.
Foreign body obstruction: Blocking or perforating the gut, or blocking the airway outright.
Anaphylaxis: Forced ingestion of a substance the victim is known to be allergic to. Where the organization knew about the allergy, this is not an accident and it is not treated as one.

Sleep deprivation — the mechanism that is never taken seriously enough

Acute neurocognitive impairment: Attention, working memory, and executive function measurably collapse. This is a documented physiological state, not being tired.
Psychiatric decompensation, mania, and psychosis: Sustained forced wakefulness can produce a genuine psychotic episode in a person with no psychiatric history whatsoever.
Synergistic potentiation: This is the important one. Sleep deprivation multiplies the danger of alcohol, of exertion, and of heat. A pledge who has been kept awake for three days and is then made to do calisthenics and drink is not facing three separate risks. He is facing one compounded risk that is far greater than the sum.
Drowsy-driving collisions: A pledge sent to drive home after a night of forced wakefulness is a foreseeable motor-vehicle death, and it is a hazing injury even though it happens on a highway.

Sexual violence and forced nudity

We are going to name these plainly, because euphemism is how they stay hidden, and because male victims in particular are told constantly that what happened to them was a prank.

Penetrative anorectal trauma, including injury from inserted objects: This occurs in hazing. It is sexual assault. It is not a prank and it is not horseplay.
Anorectal fistula and fecal incontinence: Permanent, life-altering consequences that young men will not volunteer to a doctor and often will not volunteer to their own parents.
Genital and perineal injury: From forced acts, chemical application, or blunt trauma.
Sexually transmitted infection: Post-exposure prophylaxis is time-critical. If a sexual assault occurred, the window for preventive treatment is measured in hours, not days. Say it at triage.
PTSD and long-term sexual dysfunction: Follows hazing sexual assault at high rates and responds to treatment. See the mind section.
Forced nudity and sexual humiliation as injury in their own right: They do not require physical contact to cause lasting psychological harm, and male sexual victimization in hazing is systematically under-recognized by victims, families, campuses, and sometimes by doctors.

Where sexual conduct was involved, Title IX may also apply — a separate process with its own rights and its own deadlines. See reporting.

Injuries to people who were not the target

Witness, bystander, and vicarious traumatization: The pledge who watched. The one who was made to participate in hurting someone else. These are real injuries with a real literature, and the people who carry them almost never think they are allowed to be hurt.
Prolonged grief disorder in families of people who died: A recognized diagnosis, distinct from ordinary grief, that responds to specific treatment.

The medical references we checked ourselves

Every link below was loaded and confirmed. These are patient-facing pages from the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, and equivalent bodies — the same sources your doctors use. No law firm page, including ours, is cited as a medical source here.

MedlinePlus — Rhabdomyolysis: NIH/National Library of Medicine patient encyclopedia entry: definition, causes, symptoms, tests, treatment, prognosis, complications.
MedlinePlus — Creatine Kinase (CK) test and CPK test: What the CK blood test measures, why it is ordered, and what an elevated result means. This is the number that will appear on your discharge paperwork.
MedlinePlus — Myoglobin urine test: Why muscle protein shows up in urine after muscle damage, and how it injures kidneys.
MedlinePlus — Acute kidney failure and Prerenal azotemia: Kidney failure and kidney injury caused by reduced blood flow — dehydration, heat, vomiting, shock.
NIDDK — Kidney Failure and Hemodialysis: The four treatment paths, what dialysis actually involves, session length, frequency, and how patients feel.
MedlinePlus — Compartment syndrome and StatPearls — Acute Compartment Syndrome: The emergency surgery, the window, and the complication list.
StatPearls — Rhabdomyolysis and Ochsner Journal — Rhabdomyolysis: Pathogenesis, Diagnosis, and Treatment: Peer-reviewed clinical chapters. Where the classic triad is the exception finding comes from.
NIAAA — Understanding the Dangers of Alcohol Overdose: The critical signs, what to do, and what never to do. Read this one tonight even if nothing has happened.
NIAAA — Harmful and Underage College Drinking: Binge-drinking definition, standard drink sizes, campus risk factors.
MedlinePlus — Ethanol poisoning and Blood Alcohol Level: Symptoms, poison control instructions, ER course, and what each BAC range does — including which levels are potentially fatal.
MedlinePlus — Low blood sodium (hyponatremia) and Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia: 2017 Update: Water intoxication: why acute onset is more dangerous, and the documented deaths.
MedlinePlus — Hypothermia first aid, Hypothermia topic page, and StatPearls — Hypothermia: Step-by-step first aid, what never to do, and why alcohol is a leading contributor in young adults.
MedlinePlus — Aspiration pneumonia and BMJ Open — Aspiration risk in severe acute alcohol intoxication: What happens when vomit enters the lungs, and the study quantifying that risk during intoxication.
NINDS — Traumatic Brain Injury: TBI types, symptom lists, hematomas, secondary damage, treatment, rehabilitation, and support.

About lab numbers. You may be handed a printout with a CK or CPK value on it. Different laboratories measure and report this differently, and a number that looks alarming in one system is normal in another. Compare it only against the reference range printed on that same report, and ask the treating clinician what it means for this patient. Do not compare it to a number from a website — including ours, or anyone else’s.

5. What hazing does to the mind

This is the part people skip, and it is the part that lasts longest.

Hazing is not simply an injury. It is an injury delivered by people you chose, who you wanted to belong to, in a group you were proud to be joining. That combination has a name — betrayal trauma — and it does something distinct. It does not only hurt. It rearranges how a person decides who is safe.

And Utah’s statute knows this. Utah is the only hazing statute among those we have analyzed in depth that reaches mental health and safety in its core definition, and that expressly names extreme embarrassment, shame, or humiliation as qualifying conduct. Psychological injury in a Utah hazing case is not an add-on. It is inside the statute.

Things survivors describe, that they usually believe only they feel

“I should have said no.” Nearly universal. And Utah law expressly says that for anyone under 21, consent did not make it lawful.
Shame that outlives the injury. The body heals faster than this does.
Loyalty to the people who hurt you. This is not weakness or foolishness. It is what the process was engineered to produce. The literature on this is clear: the more someone suffers to join a group, the more they value it. That is the mechanism, and it was used on purpose.
Grief for the friendship you thought you were getting. Real, and almost never spoken out loud.
Not being believed, or being told to move on.
Retaliation — from the chapter, from mutual friends, sometimes from an entire campus.

The diagnoses that follow hazing

Acute stress disorder: The first weeks. Intrusive memories, dissociation, avoidance, hyperarousal.
Post-traumatic stress disorder: The specific traumatic content in hazing — being ordered to continue while in agony, being denied water, being told collapse means rejection — is exactly the inescapable-threat exposure most associated with PTSD.
Complex PTSD: Where the exposure was prolonged and repeated across a pledge period rather than a single event.
Depression and anxiety: Frequently with onset in the months after discharge, not immediately. A young person who seemed fine in December can fall apart in March.
Social anxiety and avoidance of group affiliation: An entirely rational learned response that nonetheless closes doors for decades — jobs, teams, professional societies, church groups.
Substance use disorder: Particularly where alcohol was the instrument of the hazing.
Moral injury: What happens to someone who was made to hurt another person — or who watched and did nothing. We tell you honestly that moral injury is a recognized clinical construct but is not itself a psychiatric diagnosis, and we do not overstate it.
Shame-based identity damage: Distinct from depression. The sense that what happened revealed something true about who you are, rather than something true about who they are.
Suicidality: Real, documented, and the reason the warning signs below are on this page.
Academic derailment: Lost semesters, withdrawn courses, a changed major, a degree never finished. This is a psychological injury with an economic price tag, and it is the one families most often fail to claim. It is also the one most easily proven, because the transcript is an objective, contemporaneous, third-party record — and the school already has it.

Signs that matter

Trouble sleeping · nightmares or flashbacks · panic · avoiding places, people, or campus · numbness or feeling far away from yourself · anger that arrives from nowhere · drinking or using to sleep or to stop thinking · withdrawing from people who love you · talking about being a burden · giving things away · sudden calm after a long low period.

Those last three are warning signs for suicide. If you see them, ask directly and stay. Call or text 988.

Asking someone plainly whether they are thinking about killing themselves does not plant the idea. It is one of the most protective things one person can do for another. Ask the question.

It can get better, and that is not a platitude

Trauma treatment works. There are specific, well-studied therapies for exactly this. People who could not walk across their own campus have gone back, finished, graduated, and built lives. Not by getting over it — by getting real treatment from someone who knows this territory.

When looking for a therapist, the words to ask for are trauma-informed or trauma-focused. That single phrase will change the quality of care you receive.

One practical caution about campus counseling. A campus counseling center may be free and close — and it is also part of the institution that may bear responsibility for what happened. Ask two questions before you talk: “Is what I say here confidential?” and “Are you a mandatory reporter?” Counselors are usually confidential; resident advisors, coaches, advisors, and many staff are not, and telling them can start a formal process before you are ready. Both answers are fine. You simply deserve to know which room you are in.

Mental health and crisis resources, verified

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988. Chat at chat.988lifeline.org. 24/7/365, free.
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 (HOLA for Spanish). Also WhatsApp and web chat. For anyone who would rather not speak out loud.
SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (1-800-662-4357); TTY 1-800-487-4889; text your ZIP to 435748. Federal treatment referral, confidential, free, 24/7.
VA National Center for PTSD: The U.S. government’s leading research and education center on PTSD. Its public library covers PTSD basics, complex PTSD, moral injury, and depression after trauma. You do not have to be a veteran to use it.
VA PTSD Treatment Decision Aid: A free interactive tool that explains each PTSD treatment, plays short videos, and builds a personalized side-by-side comparison. If you read one thing before your first therapy appointment, read this.
AboutFace: A video library of real people with PTSD describing what it felt like, what treatment was like, and what changed.
VA — how to find a trauma therapist: A government page that tells you exactly what to look for and what to ask when hiring one.
VA PTSD mobile apps: Free iOS/Android. PTSD Coach for the person living with symptoms; PTSD Family Coach for the family member.
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE (800-656-4673); text HOPE to 64673; chat at hotline.rainn.org. Free, confidential, 24/7.
ISTSS — Find a Trauma Specialist: The clinician directory of the leading interdisciplinary professional body for traumatic stress.
EMDRIA — Find an EMDR Therapist: Searchable by location with a 10–500 mile radius. Useful in rural Utah, where radius matters.
ADAA — Find Your Therapist: Filterable by ZIP and radius, state, specialty including PTSD, and treatment modality.
APA Psychologist Locator: The American Psychological Association’s directory of licensed psychologists.
Psychology Today Therapist Directory: The largest public therapist directory in the U.S. Filter for Trauma and PTSD.
FindTreatment.gov: The federal locator for mental health and substance use services, operated by SAMHSA.
National Child Traumatic Stress Network: For high school hazing and for anyone under 18. Federally funded, co-coordinated by UCLA and Duke.
The Compassionate Friends: 877-969-0010. Peer support for families after the death of a child of any age, from any cause. More than 500 chapters across all 50 states.
NIMH — Warning Signs of Suicide: Free, plain-language, organized by what a person talks about, feels, and does. Print it and put it somewhere.

6. The hour that kills people

If you take one clinical thing from this entire page, take this one.

In hazing cases, the injury is usually not what kills. The delay is. The recurring fact pattern is not that something terrible happened. It is that everyone stood in a room deciding whether it was bad enough to call, while the clock ran.

Here is what that clock is doing, using forced calisthenics and rhabdomyolysis as the example, because it is the most common modern mechanism and because the timeline is the clearest.

During, and immediately after: Muscle fibers are already dying. The victim is symptomatic — pain, weakness, cannot continue — but blood tests are still normal. This is the moment everyone decides he is just being dramatic. He is not. He is in the injury.
Two to twelve hours: The muscle enzyme in the blood begins to rise. Muscle protein is already reaching the kidneys.
The first six to twelve hours — THE INTERVENTION WINDOW: This is the window that decides the outcome. Aggressive intravenous fluid started here largely prevents kidney injury, by restoring flow through the kidney before the damage sets. Every hour of delay converts a reversible problem into a fixed one.
Twelve to twenty-four hours: The marker that would have shown up early has already cleared the blood. A victim who arrives late can have a normal test result and a devastating injury — a discordance that a defense expert will later misuse to argue nothing happened. Kidney function begins to deteriorate if it is going to.
One to five days: The muscle enzyme peaks. A single value tells you almost nothing about timing without a second value drawn hours later. Serial testing is the standard of care and it is the evidence that matters.
Twenty-four to seventy-two hours: The compartment syndrome window. Swelling often peaks after admission, so the leg is tightest after the person is already in the hospital. This is where surgeons decide whether to cut the muscle open.
Days three to ten: If kidney failure is going to happen, it happens here. This is where dialysis decisions are made.
Weeks two to six: Recovery, if there is going to be one.

Here is the whole thing in one sentence, and it is the sentence we would put in front of a jury:

The difference between a pledge driven to the emergency room at 11 p.m. and one monitored in a chapter house until noon the next day is the difference between a two-day admission with normal kidney function and a two-week admission with dialysis.

What this means for you, tonight

If it happened in the last twelve hours, go now. Not in the morning. Now. The window is open and it is closing.
If it happened yesterday and he “seems fine,” go anyway. Blood markers peak on days one through five. Seeming fine on day one means nothing.
Say the timeline out loud at triage. Not he worked out too hard. Say: “He did several hundred squats and push-ups under coercion at approximately 11 p.m. on Friday. He collapsed. He has not urinated since. Please check for rhabdomyolysis.” Vague history produces a vague record, and the medical record is the single most important document that will ever exist about this.
Write down the times. When it started. When it stopped. When he collapsed. When someone first said he needed help. When someone actually called. That last gap is the case.

The same principle applies to every other mechanism

Alcohol: Death comes from the airway, and the airway fails while everyone waits to see if he sleeps it off.
Head injury: Bleeding inside the skull can present with a completely lucid interval. He was talking and walking is how families describe the hours before a person dies of a subdural hematoma.
Blunt abdominal trauma: A lacerated spleen can bleed slowly for days before it ruptures.
Compartment syndrome: There is a surgical window. After it, the nerve damage is permanent.
Sexual assault: Preventive treatment for infection is measured in hours. Forensic evidence degrades continuously.
Heat stroke: Cooling comes before everything, including transport. Minutes change outcomes.

In every single one, delay is the variable that changes the ending. And in every single one, the people standing in that room had a reason not to call — the chapter would get in trouble, he would be embarrassed, it was probably nothing. Utah’s law removes the reason. Call.

7. The Utah record

This is the part that does not exist anywhere else, and it is the reason we built this page.

Because of the federal Stop Campus Hazing Act, every college and university in America that takes federal student aid must now publish a public list of the student organizations it has formally found responsible for hazing. Before December 2024, assembling what follows would have meant scraping news archives with no way to prove you had found everything. Now it is a bounded, public, free record.

We went and read every one of them for the entire state of Utah. All thirty-one degree-granting institutions with a physical campus in the state. Five of them required downloading and decompressing a PDF to extract the text. One required inflating a 1.6-megabyte security report and searching 305,857 characters of extracted text. We did that so a family would not have to.

Read this before you read the record below

We are about to name every fraternity and sorority chapter in the state of Utah. You must understand what that list is and what it is not, and we have structured this section so the two can never be confused.

The chapter rosters are neutral public lists.: They are drawn from the universities’ own published directories and from the national organizations’ own chapter listings. The presence of an organization on a roster is not an allegation of anything. It means only that the organization exists, or existed, at that school. The overwhelming majority of the organizations named below have no hazing finding of any kind against them, and we say so explicitly under each school.
The findings are the schools’ own words.: Where a hazing finding exists, we quote the university’s own published report verbatim and link you to the page it came from so you can read it yourself. We are not characterizing anyone’s conduct. We are reproducing an institution’s own adjudicated finding, which that institution published because federal law required it to.
Nothing is inferred, and nothing is blended.: Roster and findings never appear in the same list. A chapter with a finding appears in a clearly marked findings subsection with its dates, its violation description, and its sanction — all as published.
“No findings” never means “no hazing.”: This is the most important sentence in this section. A report showing zero findings means no organization was formally found responsible during the reporting period. It does not mean nothing happened. We explain exactly why in where Utah’s record goes silent, and you should read that section before drawing any conclusion from a zero.

Every substantiated hazing finding in Utah under federal law — there are two

Across all thirty-one Utah institutions, exactly two organizations have been formally found responsible for hazing and disclosed under the Stop Campus Hazing Act. Here they are, in full.

Finding 1 — University of Utah · Sigma Nu Fraternity, Epsilon Lambda Chapter

Institution: University of Utah
Organization: Sigma Nu Fraternity, Epsilon Lambda chapter — a social fraternity governed by the Interfraternity Council
The violation, as the university stated it: Hazing of new members with alcohol, manual labor, intimidation
Incident period: Fall 2024 / Spring 2025 recruitment
Investigation initiated: January 29, 2025
Investigation concluded: March 19, 2025
Outcome notice issued to the organization: May 19, 2025
Sanction, verbatim: Termination of the chapter until at least Summer 2031. Termination of University recognition and full removal from being a student group on the University of Utah campus.
Alcohol involved: Yes — confirmed on the face of the university’s own record. Under Utah Code §76-5-107.5, alcohol involvement escalates hazing to a class A misdemeanor independent of any injury. Whether any criminal referral followed is not stated in the report.
Source: University of Utah Hazing Transparency Report, Dean of Students

Additional detail reported by five or more independent Utah news outlets — Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribune, KSL, Fox 13, ABC4, KUTV, the Utah News Dispatch, and the Daily Utah Chronicle:

Fourteen documented instances of hazing were found more likely than not to have occurred
At least thirteen incidents spanning all three hazing categories — subtle, harassment, and violent
Pledges were blindfolded and transported to a South Salt Lake strip club without the option to refuse
Required pledge packs containing tobacco, condoms, gum, Zyns, and a marijuana pen
Coerced alcohol consumption, unregistered parties, required chores, encouragement of illegal substance use
New members required to stay overnight on a basement floor
The university cited a six-year history of alcohol-related violations and property destruction
Vice President for Student Affairs Lori McDonald characterized the pattern as egregious
Sigma Nu’s national organization independently suspended the chapter’s charter

This chapter is the subject of section 9, and you should read that section, because it is not the first time.

Finding 2 — Weber State University · Pi Phi Alpha Sorority

Institution: Weber State University, Ogden
Organization: Pi Phi Alpha Sorority — a local sorority with no national or international affiliation. Not NPC. Not NPHC. This fact changes everything about a case against it, and we explain why in section 11.
The conduct, verbatim: Allegations of alcohol and cannabis use, as well as the requirement to watch a video of a sexual nature.
Incident dates, verbatim: Spring 2025 and Fall 2025 I-Weekends — two separate initiation weekends across two different semesters
Investigation initiated: April 16, 2026
Investigation concluded and outcome notice provided: June 5, 2026
Illegal use of alcohol or drugs: Yes — the report field states it, and the conduct description names both alcohol and cannabis
Policy sections cited, verbatim: Weber State Student Code PPM 6-22, sections 6.3.1 (hazing), 6.3.22 (unlawful use, possession, distribution, sale, or manufacture of any controlled substance or illegal drug), and 6.3.24 (unauthorized sale, possession, manufacture, distribution, or consumption of alcoholic beverages)
Sanction, verbatim: Probation, with pledging restriction and educational requirements.
Source: Weber State University Dean of Students — Hazing Prevention, “Recent Incidents”

Three things about this record that a family should notice, because we did:

It is repeat conduct recorded as one event. The incident field covers both the Spring 2025 and the Fall 2025 initiation weekends. The same organization ran the same conduct across two consecutive initiation cycles. Weber State resolved both in a single consolidated finding, which has the effect of making the transparency record read as one incident when the underlying facts are repeated conduct.
The reporting lag is extraordinary. Conduct beginning in Spring 2025 was not investigated until April 16, 2026 — roughly a year later on the earliest conduct, and roughly six months on the Fall 2025 conduct. Once opened, the investigation moved fast: fifty days from initiation to finding. The delay is in detection, not adjudication. That raises a real and answerable question: what did the university know before April 16, 2026, and when did it know it?
The sanction does not match the conduct. Conduct spanning two semesters and involving illegal drugs, alcohol, and compelled exposure to sexual material drew probation. No suspension. No loss of recognition. The organization remains recognized.

No injuries are disclosed in either finding. That is not because none occurred. Campus hazing transparency reports do not report injuries at all — student records are protected by federal privacy law, and the reports are built to disclose organizational findings, not individual harm. The absence of injury information in a transparency report tells you nothing about whether anyone was hurt.

Every Utah institution, what it published, and every Greek organization on its campus

Thirty-one institutions. Eighty-seven instructional locations. Forty-five active social fraternity and sorority chapters, concentrated at exactly four schools. Here is all of it.

Jump straight to a school:

University of Utah — 25 chapters, Greek Row, one hazing finding
Utah State University — 9 chapters, zero current findings, site of Utah’s only known hazing death
Weber State University — 6 chapters, all local, one hazing finding
Southern Utah University — 5 chapters, zero findings, best-executed report in the state
Utah Tech University — no recognized Greek system, one unrecognized chapter, a zero that is structurally guaranteed
Utah Valley University — no active Greek system, zero findings, best-built report instrument
Snow College — did not report the federally required period
Salt Lake Community College — zero findings
Brigham Young University — no Greek system, no transparency report published
Every other Utah institution — Westminster, Ensign, Neumont, Rocky Vista, Roseman, RMUoHP, Joyce, Nightingale, Noorda, WGU, Galen, Arizona College of Nursing, Provo College, Eagle Gate, Utah College of Dental Hygiene, Fortis, Charter, Grand Canyon, Park, Embry-Riddle, North-West, John Adams, Hubbard, Salt Lake Baptist, Newlane, and Chamberlain

University of Utah — Salt Lake City

Type: Public, doctoral / R1. Utah System of Higher Education. Accredited by NWCCU. Participates in federal student aid, which is what makes the federal hazing law binding on it.
Greek system: The largest in Utah — 25 active chapters plus one terminated. Governed by the College Panhellenic Council and the Interfraternity Council. It is the only Utah campus with a true Greek Row.
Hazing transparency report: Published. deanofstudents.utah.edu/hazing/transparency.php — filed under Dean of Students. Updated June 1, 2026.
Findings: One — Sigma Nu, terminated through at least Summer 2031.
Compliance note we recorded: The page does not state a publication or update schedule, which the federal Act appears to require. Recorded as a possible minor deficiency, not asserted as a violation.

All twenty-five active chapters at the University of Utah. This is a neutral roster. Only one organization on this campus has a published hazing finding, and it is named separately above.

Alpha Chi Omega (ΑΧΩ): Beta Nu chapter · Panhellenic (NPC) · social sorority · nationally founded 1885 · at Utah since March 23, 1934
Alpha Phi (ΑΦ): Beta Sigma chapter · Panhellenic (NPC) · social sorority · nationally founded 1872
Chi Omega (ΧΩ): Xi Alpha chapter · Panhellenic (NPC) · social sorority · nationally founded 1895 · at Utah since 1985
Delta Gamma (ΔΓ): Beta Gamma chapter · Panhellenic (NPC) · social sorority · nationally founded 1873 · at Utah since 1932
Kappa Kappa Gamma (ΚΚΓ): Delta Eta chapter · Panhellenic (NPC) · social sorority · at Utah since November 11, 1932
Pi Beta Phi (ΠΒΦ): Utah Alpha chapter · Panhellenic (NPC) · social sorority · nationally founded 1867 · at Utah since September 11, 1929
Zeta Tau Alpha (ΖΤΑ): Panhellenic (NPC) · social sorority
Delta Sigma Theta (ΔΣΘ): Sigma Omicron chapter · Panhellenic associate member · historically Black sorority, one of the NPHC “Divine Nine”
Kappa Delta Chi (ΚΔΧ): Alpha Chi chapter · Panhellenic associate member · Latina-founded sorority (NALFO)
Phi Sigma Rho (ΦΣΡ): Beta Gamma chapter · Panhellenic associate member · professional sorority for women in engineering
Alpha Tau Omega (ΑΤΩ): Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Beta Theta Pi (ΒΘΠ): Gamma Beta chapter · Interfraternity Council · social fraternity · nationally founded 1839 · at Utah since 1913
Delta Chi (ΔΧ): Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Delta Sigma Phi (ΔΣΦ): Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Kappa Sigma (ΚΣ): Delta-Sigma chapter · Interfraternity Council · social fraternity · founded at Utah May 16, 1928 · 2,249 all-time initiates and 174 current undergraduates per the national organization’s own chapter listing — the largest single Greek chapter documented anywhere in our research, in any state. This chapter has a prior conduct history that is set out separately below.
Phi Delta Theta (ΦΔΘ): Utah Alpha chapter · Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Phi Gamma Delta (ΦΓΔ) — known as FIJI: Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Pi Kappa Alpha (ΠΚΑ): Alpha Tau chapter · Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Pi Kappa Phi (ΠΚΦ): Interfraternity Council · social fraternity. We note for completeness and full disclosure that this firm currently litigates a matter against Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity, Inc. and a different chapter of it, at the University of Houston in Texas. That case has no connection whatsoever to the University of Utah chapter, and nothing here should be read as suggesting otherwise. Our cases are set out in section 17.
Sigma Chi (ΣΧ): Beta Epsilon chapter · Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Sigma Phi Epsilon (ΣΦΕ): Utah Beta chapter · Interfraternity Council · social fraternity · nationally founded 1901 · at Utah since 1950
Tau Kappa Epsilon (ΤΚΕ): Interfraternity Council — council affiliation disputed. The University’s own Fraternity & Sorority Life directory lists thirteen fraternities under the IFC; the IFC’s own materials say it governs twelve. Tau Kappa Epsilon appears on the directory but not on the university’s student organization portal. We are recording the discrepancy rather than picking a side.
Triangle (uses no Greek letters): Interfraternity Council · professional fraternity for engineering, science, and architecture students. Note: the University’s own directory incorrectly renders Triangle with the letters ΔΤΔ, which belong to Delta Tau Delta — a different organization entirely. Triangle Fraternity uses no Greek letters. We have recorded it correctly here rather than reproducing the error.
Omega Delta Phi (ΩΔΦ): No council affiliation listed · multicultural fraternity
Theta Chi Eta (ΘΧΗ): No council affiliation listed · local organization · status single-source and unverified. This is a separate organization from the national Theta Chi fraternity and is unconnected to it.
Sigma Nu (ΣΝ) — RECOGNITION TERMINATED: Epsilon Lambda chapter · formerly Interfraternity Council · nationally founded 1869 · at Utah since 1924 · terminated June 2025 through at least Summer 2031. See the finding in full above. A note that matters if you are researching this yourself: the University’s Fraternity & Sorority Life website still hosts a live chapter page for Sigma Nu more than a year after termination. Anyone building a list from that site alone would count a terminated chapter as active.

Also present at the University of Utah, outside the Fraternity & Sorority Life system: Order of Omega, a Greek leadership honor society administered through FSL programming; and Sigma Theta Tau International, the nursing honor society, with a chapter in the College of Nursing.

Prior conduct history at the University of Utah — Kappa Sigma, 2022

This is not a current finding and it is not in any transparency report, because it predates the federal reporting requirement. It is in the public record, and a roster snapshot alone would show a clean, thriving chapter with no indication of it.

Early 2022: Placed on probation for policy violations
October 26, 2022: Placed on administrative suspension over hazing allegations
During the suspension week: Defied the suspension by holding prohibited social and philanthropy events
December 21, 2022: Recognition terminated. Eligible to reapply after January 1, 2024; probation ran through January 2025
What the university said: Vice President for Student Affairs Lori McDonald: I do not have confidence the Kappa Sigma chapter will follow the university’s directions, policies, or the terms of a suspension or probation.
Current status: Returned. The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2024 that the chapter, terminated in 2022, had been recently reinstated. It appears as an active IFC chapter on current university sources and holds a chapter house at 41 S University Street.

The University of Utah has terminated two fraternities in three years — Kappa Sigma in 2022 and Sigma Nu in 2025.

Greek Row, reconstructed from federal tax filings

We include this because it is public, because no other consumer page has it, and because in a hazing case the owner of the building is frequently a defendant — see section 10. These are IRS-registered addresses from Form 990 filings, indexed publicly through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. We distinguish an actual chapter house from a campus mailbox or an officer’s home address, because conflating them would be misleading.

Chapter houses — East 100 South: 1387 E 100 S — Alpha Chi Omega, Beta Nu House Corporation · 1395 E 100 S — Sigma Chi, Beta Epsilon Chapter · 1431 E 100 S — Pi Kappa Alpha · 1435 E 100 S — Chi Omega · 1443 E 100 S — Pi Beta Phi, Utah Alpha House Corporation. All Salt Lake City 84102.
Chapter houses — South Wolcott Street: 33 S Wolcott St — Kappa Kappa Gamma, Delta Eta House Association · 70 S Wolcott St — Beta Theta Pi · 74 S Wolcott St — Sigma Phi Epsilon, Utah Beta Chapter. All Salt Lake City 84102.
Other chapter houses: 41 S University St — Kappa Sigma · 369 S 1300 E — Triangle Fraternity National Council · 1522 E Military Way — Delta Sigma Phi. Salt Lake City.
Campus mailbox addresses — not chapter houses: Delta Chi, Delta Sigma Phi, and Phi Sigma Rho each register an address at 200 S Central Campus Drive or 201 Presidents Circle. These are university mail stops, not residences, and should never be treated as chapter houses.
Chapters with no separate Utah tax record at all: Alpha Tau Omega, Kappa Delta Chi, Omega Delta Phi, Phi Delta Theta, Pi Kappa Phi, Tau Kappa Epsilon, Theta Chi Eta, Zeta Tau Alpha. This is expected, not suspicious. Most undergraduate chapters operate under their national organization’s group tax exemption and never file separately. Absence of a tax record is not evidence that a chapter does not exist — or that it owns nothing.

Utah State University — Logan

Type: Public, doctoral, land-grant. Utah System of Higher Education. Operates 29 sites statewide — the largest satellite network in Utah, including branch campuses at Price, Blanding, Brigham City, Tooele, the Uintah Basin, and Moab. Six of Utah’s satellite instructional sites are located inside public high schools.
Greek system: Active. Interfraternity Council and College Panhellenic Council. The university’s roster reflects nine recognized chapters plus one not recognized. Eight are named on the sources we captured and are listed below; we have not seen the ninth named on any public university page and we are not going to invent it.
Hazing transparency report: Published. usu.edu/dps/police/campus-hazing-transparency-report — filed under the Department of Public Safety / USU Police, not Student Conduct or Dean of Students. If you went looking and could not find it, that is why.
Findings, verbatim: 2025-2026 Academic Year: There were no findings of hazing behavior during this time period. and 2024-2025 Academic Year: There were no findings of hazing behavior during this time period. Zero organizations named. USU exceeded the federal minimum by voluntarily publishing the 2024-2025 year, which predates the federal trigger date.
Governing policy: USU Policy 2406, last revised June 12, 2025 for federal compliance. It establishes zero tolerance for hazing, regardless of whether the victim consents and prohibits hazing in any form, both on and off campus, and within Student Organizations. The off-campus reach is material — it extends the university’s conduct jurisdiction to leased chapter houses and private residences, which is exactly the setting of the death described in section 8.
Historical record: Utah State is the site of the only known hazing death at a Utah institution. Michael Starks, November 21, 2008. Section 8 is devoted to it.

Recognized chapters at Utah State University — a neutral roster. No organization at Utah State has a hazing finding in the current federal reporting period.

Alpha Chi Omega: College Panhellenic Council · social sorority
Kappa Delta: College Panhellenic Council · social sorority
Delta Sigma Theta: College Panhellenic Council · historically Black sorority, NPHC Divine Nine · listed by USU with the qualifier that it is a statewide chapter sorority and depending on membership, may or may not be an active member of the USU Panhellenic Council certain academic years
Sigma Alpha: Professional agricultural sorority
Alpha Tau Omega: Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Pi Kappa Alpha: Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Sigma Phi Epsilon: Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Alpha Sigma Phi: Interfraternity Council · social fraternity
Sigma Chi — NOT RECOGNIZED: Confirmed not recognized by Utah State’s own published chapter status report. The national organization still lists the chapter as active. Reported basis: hazing, respect of persons, and other policy violations, with a reported two-year suspension effective February 7, 2022 and charter closure March 1, 2022. We record the non-recognition as verified and the specific dates as unresolved — USU’s own status page carries a revision date that precedes the reported suspension, and the dates surfaced in a search that also returned an unrelated University of Tampa page. Non-recognition: confirmed. Dates: not confirmed.
Kappa Sigma, Epsilon-Kappa chapter — DORMANT: Found only through the national organization’s own chapter listing, which records 225 all-time initiates and zero current undergraduates. It appears on no university page. We record it because a chapter that is dormant today is a chapter that can be recolonized tomorrow.
Sigma Nu, Epsilon Upsilon chapter — DISSOLVED 2009: Terminated by the university and closed by its national office following the death of Michael Starks.
Chi Omega, USU chapter — DISSOLVED 2009: Closed by its national office following the same incident.

Why two chapters are missing from Utah State’s roster, and what a list alone will never tell you. Neither Sigma Nu nor Chi Omega appears anywhere on Utah State’s current Greek roster. Both were dissolved as a consequence of a student’s death. A roster snapshot shows two organizations that simply are not there. This is the explanation, and it is the single strongest argument for why a page like this needs to exist.

Weber State University — Ogden

Type: Public, four-year, open-enrollment, dual-mission. Utah System of Higher Education. Four instructional sites.
Greek system: Active — and structurally unlike every other Greek system in Utah. Every single chapter is a local organization with no national affiliation of any kind. Not NPC. Not NIC. Not NPHC. Not MGC, NAPA, or NALFO. This has enormous consequences for anyone injured there, and section 11 is devoted to it.
Hazing transparency report: Published, but not labeled as one. Weber State publishes no document titled Campus Hazing Transparency Report. The federally required disclosure is embedded as a “Recent Incidents” section inside the Dean of Students hazing prevention page: weber.edu/dean-of-students/hazing.html. The required per-incident fields are present and populated, so the substance complies — but it is not titled as the report, states no five-year window, and states no update frequency. A parent searching for “Weber State campus hazing transparency report” does not land on it. We record that as a presentation deficiency, not a reporting failure.
Findings: One — Pi Phi Alpha Sorority, above.
An unresolved item we are disclosing rather than hiding: A 2020 report in The Signpost, Weber State’s student newspaper, appears to concern Greek life allegations and a ten-day suspension of Greek events. We could not read it — the article returns an HTTP 403 error to automated retrieval. We are not going to characterize an article we could not open. It is recorded as an open question, and it is worth a records request.

Every Greek organization identified at Weber State University. All are local, unaffiliated organizations. One — Pi Phi Alpha — has the published finding described above; the others do not.

Pi Phi Alpha: Local sorority. Subject of Weber State’s one published hazing finding.
Delta Chi Nu: Local sorority
Kappa Omega Eta: Local sorority
Pi Theta Xi: Local organization
Tau Psi Beta: Local organization
Phi Gamma Lambda: Local organization
Zeta Gamma Eta: Local organization
Psi Phi Psi: Local organization

Three of these were identified from the university’s own Fraternity & Sorority Life pages and the remainder from student-newspaper coverage; the university’s own summary count and the number of organizations we could name across all sources do not perfectly agree. We are listing every organization we could actually name from a source, and telling you the counts do not reconcile, rather than quietly picking a number.

Southern Utah University — Cedar City

Type: Public, four-year. Utah System of Higher Education.
Greek system: Active, small, and — unlike Weber State — entirely nationally affiliated. There is no university Greek infrastructure of the kind the University of Utah operates. SUU also hosts nineteen honor societies, the most of any Utah institution.
Hazing transparency report: Published. suu.edu/health/stop-hazing.html — filed under Health Services, which is a fourth distinct location pattern.
Findings, verbatim: As of 06/11/2026, Southern Utah University has no reportable incidents for the Campus Hazing Transparency report as outlined in SUU Policy 5.67
Why we single this one out as the best-executed in the state: It is the only disclosure in Utah that carries an explicit “as of” date. That is exactly what a transparency report should do: it converts no findings from an ambiguous silence into a dated, citable institutional assertion. A dated zero is affirmative evidence — the school has represented, as of a specific date, that it had no hazing findings. That representation is impeachable if contrary evidence later emerges. An undated blank page is worth nothing to a family. A dated one is worth a great deal.

Greek organizations at Southern Utah University — a neutral roster. No hazing findings.

Alpha Phi: Theta Sigma chapter, established 1995 · National Panhellenic Conference sorority
Delta Psi Omega: Sorority
Sigma Chi: North American Interfraternity Conference fraternity
Chi Phi: North American Interfraternity Conference fraternity
Kappa Sigma: Phi-Iota chapter · active per the national organization’s own chapter listing · 33 all-time initiates, 30 current undergraduates — which tells you it is a very new or very recently rechartered chapter

Utah Tech University — St. George

Type: Public, four-year, open enrollment, dual-mission. Formerly Dixie State University; renamed in 2022. Two sites.
Greek system: None recognized. Utah Tech has decided to abstain from participating in Greek life, and its policy extends to prohibiting Greek letters in club names. However, an unaffiliated Kappa Sigma fraternity operates near campus and is expressly not affiliated with the university. It does not appear on the national Kappa Sigma organization’s chapter listing at all.
Hazing transparency report: Published. police.utahtech.edu/clery-act/hazing-reporting-resources/ — filed under University Police / Clery. Verbatim: No Incidents Reported as of 08/05/2026.
⚠ The most important caveat on this entire page: Utah Tech’s zero is structurally guaranteed and tells you nothing about whether Greek hazing occurs in the Utah Tech student community. The federal Act obligates schools to report findings against student organizations that are institutionally established or recognized. Utah Tech recognizes no Greek organizations. The Kappa Sigma chapter operating near campus is expressly not affiliated with the university. Therefore hazing by that chapter would produce no entry in the transparency report no matter how severe it was — because the university has no recognition relationship to adjudicate and no reporting obligation to trigger. Utah Tech’s “No Incidents Reported” reflects the absence of a reporting duty, not the absence of conduct. We deal with this fully in section 12.

Utah Valley University — Orem

Type: Public, four-year, open enrollment, dual-mission. The largest enrollment in Utah. Six sites.
Greek system: None active. UVU operated a Greek system from 2011 to 2018. Both chapters are gone: Alpha Sigma Alpha, Theta Pi chapter — chartered October 29, 2011, closed 2018 per the national organization’s own chapter roll; and Kappa Sigma, Rho-Phi chapter — dormant, 60 all-time initiates, zero current undergraduates per the national listing. UVU does host Phi Theta Kappa and Beta Alpha Psi honor societies.
Hazing transparency report: Published, and it is the best-built instrument in the state. cm.maxient.com/chtr.php?UtahValleyUniv — a dedicated, purpose-built transparency report at a stable canonical URL, linked from the Student Conduct hazing page, carrying an explicit last-updated date of April 1, 2026 and displaying two academic years.
Findings, verbatim: 2025-2026 Academic Year: There were no findings of hazing behavior during this time period. and the identical statement for 2024-2025. Zero organizations named.

Snow College — Ephraim and Richfield

Type: Public, two-year with limited four-year offerings. Utah System of Higher Education. Roughly 11% of students live on campus. Fields athletics including wrestling.
Greek system: Unclear. Snow’s own hazing page references hazing occurring at fraternities, sororities, sports teams, and more but the college does not confirm any recognized Greek chapters. It reports 50+ student-led organizations.
Hazing transparency report: ⚠ PARTIAL — and this is a material problem. snow.edu/offices/dean-of-students/stophazing.html
What it says, verbatim: There were no confirmed incidents of hazing behavior during the 2024-25 academic year.
⚠ Why that is not the same as a clean record: The report covers the wrong period. Snow’s only disclosure addresses the 2024-2025 academic year, which ended in June 2025. The federal obligation covers findings on or after July 1, 2025. As of August 2026 — more than seven months past the inaugural federal deadline and thirteen months into the reporting period — Snow College has published nothing covering the period the statute actually requires. It also carries no last-updated date, no five-year history statement, and no update-frequency commitment.
What this means for a family: There is no public basis to say Snow College had zero hazing findings during the federal reporting period. The record is silent, not negative. Any honest description of Snow College says did not report, never reported none. We are holding ourselves to that on this page.

Salt Lake Community College

Type: Public community college. Utah System of Higher Education. Eight campuses.
Greek system: No social Greek organizations. Hosts Phi Theta Kappa honor society.
Hazing transparency report: Published — slcc.edu/deanofstudents/hazing-transparency.aspx. Reports zero findings for January through June 2026.

Brigham Young University — Provo

Type: Private non-profit, doctoral. Church Educational System. Accredited by NWCCU. Participates in federal student aid, which makes the federal hazing law binding on it.
Greek system: None — prohibited. BYU has never had Greek-letter social organizations and prohibits them outright. It hosts six honor societies.
Hazing transparency report: ⛔ NOT PUBLISHED. BYU maintains a hazing prevention page and prohibits hazing under the Church Educational System Honor Code, but publishes no Campus Hazing Transparency Report. This is documented in national compliance tracking by HazingInfo.org as of January 2026, which places BYU among the roughly 21% of large campuses out of compliance.
The obligation applies regardless of whether findings exist: An institution with zero incidents must still publish a report saying so. Ten Utah peers have done exactly that.
The language BYU uses: BYU’s own Clery compliance page describes compiling a Campus Hazing Transparency Report (if necessary) — a reading of the federal duty as conditional rather than affirmative. Ensign College, governed by the same Church Educational System, uses similar conditional language and published an affirmative report anyway. The divergence between two commonly governed institutions applying the same reading is itself worth recording.
⚠ Why this matters more than any other compliance gap in Utah: Of all the institutions in Utah that published nothing, BYU is by a wide margin the one with the largest exposure. Its Greek exposure is genuinely zero — but the federal Act covers athletic teams, marching bands, performance groups, ROTC, and residence hall communities, and BYU has all of them, at very large scale, with a large residential population. The single Utah institution with the most students living together in organized groups is the one that published no record of hazing findings at all.

Every other Utah institution

The remaining institutions are smaller, and most are non-residential, graduate-only, career-focused, or online. Almost none has any Greek presence. We checked and read every one anyway, because a list that only covers the big schools is not a census.

Westminster University — Salt Lake City, private non-profit: No Greek organizations among 32 clubs. Report published as a PDF. Verbatim: No incidents of hazing reported to Westminster University in the following periods: Academic Year 2022–2023 / 2023–2024 / 2024–2025. Westminster’s hazing policy is one of the broadest in Utah — it reaches negligent conduct and off-campus activity, expressly includes residence hall communities and alumni within “Organization,” and imposes organizational responsibility for negligently permitting hazing and for failing to report firsthand knowledge. For a lawyer, an institutional policy broader than the federal floor is itself evidence of the standard of care the institution set for itself.
Ensign College — Salt Lake City, private non-profit, Church Educational System: No Greek organizations among 12 clubs. Report published at ensign.edu/hazing. Verbatim: Ensign College has had no findings of hazing from July 1, 2025, to June 1, 2026.
Neumont College of Computer Science — Salt Lake City, private for-profit: No Greek organizations among 35 clubs. Report published — and it is the best-structured report in Utah. Neumont publishes a full six-column report with organization name, incident dates, investigation timeline, violation description, findings and sanctions, and code violations; states its reporting period; states its publication date; commits to biannual updates; and archives its three prior reports, which is exactly what the five-year retention requirement is meant to produce. Verbatim: No student organizations were found responsible for violating Neumont University’s anti-hazing policies during this report period. Reporting period December 1, 2025 to May 31, 2026, published June 1, 2026. neumont.edu/campus-safety
Rocky Vista University — Ivins, private for-profit, osteopathic medicine: No social Greek. Hosts Sigma Sigma Phi (Omicron Theta) and Gold Humanism honor societies. Report published at rvu.edu/campus-safety-security. Verbatim: In compliance with the Stop Campus Hazing Act, during the 2025 calendar year and since June 1, 2026, there were no student organizations found responsible for hazing violation(s). Rocky Vista’s own anti-hazing policy is unusually broad — it reaches mere physical or mental discomfort, embarrassment with no above reasonable risk threshold, and applies on or off campus. ⚠ Two caveats: this statement appears identically under Rocky Vista’s Colorado, Utah, and Montana campus sections and does not break out the Utah campus separately; and the language leaves January 1 through May 31, 2026 unaddressed.
Galen College of Nursing — Salt Lake City / Draper, private for-profit: No Greek organizations located. Report published. Verbatim: Galen College of Nursing is committed to maintaining a safe and respectful campus environment. There have been no incidents of hazing reported at our institution as of May 2026. ⚠ Reports institution-wide across a national footprint; the Utah campus is not broken out.
Arizona College of Nursing — Murray, private for-profit: No Greek organizations located. Report published as a PDF. Verbatim: Between June 23, 2025 and December 23, 2025, there are no responsible findings of hazing for student organizations and the same for December 23, 2025 to April 30, 2026. ⚠ Reports institution-wide; the Utah campus is not broken out.
Provo College and Eagle Gate College — private for-profit, operated by Unitek: No Greek organizations — and this is affirmed in a federal filing. Their shared report marks fraternities and sororities N/A and states that the College does not participate in sports or have athletic teams, and does not sponsor or promote official or unofficial student groups. The report is the most detailed format in Utah, carrying a quantitative metrics table no other Utah institution publishes: reports received 0, investigations initiated 0, investigations concluded 0, violations found 0, organizations sanctioned 0, individuals sanctioned 0, suspensions or loss of recognition 0. Reporting period July 1 to December 23, 2025. ⚠ Two documented gaps: the colleges’ 2025 Annual Security Report promised that By December 23rd, 2025, the Colleges will begin posting a Campus Hazing Transparency Report, and the report located covers five campuses across two states — Boise, Idaho Falls, Layton, Murray, and Provo — but Eagle Gate’s Murray and Layton Utah campuses are not covered by the security report located, and both are confirmed operating.
Roseman University of Health Sciences — South Jordan, private non-profit: Parent institution files in Henderson, Nevada. No social Greek; hosts Kappa Psi, Phi Delta Chi, Phi Lambda Sigma, and Tau Sigma professional pharmacy fraternities plus a nursing honor society — five Greek-letter professional organizations, the most of any Utah health-sciences institution. ⚠ No transparency report located. An Annual Security Report exists; its PDF could not be text-extracted. Clery Compliance Manager reachable at 801-878-1027.
Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions — Provo, private for-profit, graduate only: No Greek organizations found. ⛔ No hazing content of any kind. We downloaded RMUoHP’s 2025 Annual Campus Safety and Security Report, inflated its compressed streams, and extracted 305,857 characters of full text. We then ran a whitespace-insensitive search to defeat PDF letter-spacing. The word “clery” appears 27 times. The institution’s own name appears 8 times. The word “hazing” appears zero times. The extraction is proven sound by those first two counts. This is a verified absence, not an unread file. No separate transparency report exists.
Joyce University of Nursing and Health Sciences — Draper, private for-profit: Publishes no student organization roster; a Sigma Theta Tau chapter is unconfirmed. ⚠ No transparency report located. A 2025 Annual Security Report exists but could not be text-extracted.
Nightingale College — distance education only: Hosts Sigma Theta Tau, Alpha Beta Xi chapter — notable because a distance-only institution nonetheless chartered a Greek-letter honor society. Likely exempt. Nightingale states: As a distance education-only institution, Nightingale College is exempt from completing the Campus Safety and Security Survey. ⚠ That exemption is written to the Clery survey; whether it extends to the hazing transparency obligation is unconfirmed.
Noorda College of Osteopathic Medicine — Provo, private: No Greek-letter organizations among its 49 student organizations. Likely lawfully exempt — Noorda does not participate in federal Title IV student aid, and the federal Act binds institutions in federal student aid programs. Its absence from the reporting system is probably lawful, not non-compliance. Noorda is also invisible in the federal education database entirely, in every state, in two consecutive years — we found it only by independent verification.
Western Governors University — Salt Lake City, online: No Greek organizations. ⚠ Two compliance sources returned HTTP 403 and could not be read. We are recording that as unreachable rather than as a finding either way.
Utah College of Dental Hygiene — Orem, private for-profit: Hosts Sigma Phi Alpha, the dental hygiene honor society. ⚠ No transparency report located.
Fortis College — Salt Lake City, private for-profit: No Greek organizations located. ⚠ No transparency report located. We retrieved and read the Education Affiliates Consumer Information Guide in full; it contains no hazing content whatsoever.
Charter College — Sandy, private for-profit: Utah campus opened 2023. Out-of-state parent institution. No Greek organizations located. ⚠ No transparency report located.
Grand Canyon University — Salt Lake City ABSN Site, Sandy: Opened 2022. A real instructional campus with skills and simulation labs, classrooms, and faculty offices. Parent in Phoenix, Arizona. Greek life is at the Phoenix campus and does not extend here. ⛔ NON-COMPLIANT per national tracking — GCU publishes none of the information the federal Act requires. Utah’s third documented non-compliance, after BYU and RMUoHP.
Park University — Hill Air Force Base: 39 bachelor’s and 7 associate degrees taught in residence on the installation. Parent in Parkville, Missouri. No Greek organizations here — Park’s are at its Missouri campus. ⚠ No transparency report located.
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University — Northern Utah Campus, Hill AFB: Associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees. Parent in Daytona Beach, Florida. No Greek organizations here. ✔ Report published — and Embry-Riddle is the only out-of-state parent in Utah that publishes campus-specific reports rather than folding everything into a national figure: no student organizations found responsible for hazing violations during the most recent reporting period.
North-West College — Provo (Marsha Fuerst School of Nursing): Opened January 2026. Three-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Parent is Success Education Colleges, California. No Greek organizations. ⚠ No transparency report located.
John Adams College — Provo (formerly Mount Liberty College): Relocated from Murray to Provo in summer 2025 and renamed August 2025. Classical liberal arts. 25 students. No Greek organizations. Deliberately unaccredited — the college has intentionally declined accreditation to preserve curricular independence — and therefore almost certainly outside the federal Act’s trigger. Likely exempt.
Hubbard College of Administration — St. George: Bachelor’s in Business Administration and an associate degree. No Greek organizations. Publishes no accreditation information of any kind, which is a notable omission for a degree-granting institution. ⚠ No transparency report located.
Salt Lake Baptist College and Newlane University: Both determined outside the federal Act’s scope. Newlane publishes its own explanation of why it forgoes federal financial aid. No Greek organizations at either.
Chamberlain University — Sandy: Not yet operating. First classes October 26, 2026 at 9490 S. 300 W., Sandy. Listed here so that it is added deliberately at the next refresh rather than discovered as a gap. ⚠ An earlier source placed this campus in West Valley City; Chamberlain’s own July 2026 announcement confirms Sandy.

What the whole Utah picture looks like

Institutions checked: 31, operating roughly 87 instructional locations across the state
Substantiated hazing findings under federal law: 2 — University of Utah (Sigma Nu) and Weber State (Pi Phi Alpha)
Institutions publishing a verified zero: 14
Documented non-compliance: 3 — Brigham Young University, Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions, and Grand Canyon University’s Utah site
Report not located despite targeted search: 7 — Roseman, Joyce, Fortis, Charter College, Utah College of Dental Hygiene, Park University, and Hubbard College. “Not located” is not the same as non-compliant, and we are not going to accuse an institution of a federal violation on the strength of a search that might have missed a PDF.
Likely lawfully exempt: 3 — Noorda College of Osteopathic Medicine, Nightingale College, John Adams College
Partial compliance: 1 — Snow College, which did not report the required period
Historical cases predating the federal reporting era: 4, including one death
Active social fraternity and sorority chapters statewide: 45, concentrated at four institutions: University of Utah (25), Utah State (9), Weber State (6), Southern Utah (5). UVU has none.
Terminated, unrecognized, or dormant chapters: University of Utah Sigma Nu (terminated) · Utah State Sigma Chi (not recognized) · Utah State Kappa Sigma Epsilon-Kappa (dormant) · UVU Alpha Sigma Alpha (closed 2018) · UVU Kappa Sigma Rho-Phi (dormant) · Utah Tech Kappa Sigma (operating without recognition)
Greek-letter honor and professional organizations statewide: 50+, the majority at Southern Utah (19) and BYU (6)
Institutions with zero Greek-letter organizations of any kind: 10

One national organization worth watching. Kappa Sigma alone accounts for five separate entities across four Utah institutions — two active (University of Utah, Southern Utah), two dormant (Utah State, Utah Valley), and one operating near Utah Tech without university recognition and without appearing on its own national organization’s chapter listing at all. That makes it the most widely distributed national fraternity in the state, and the only one with a chapter that is invisible to both the university system and its own headquarters.

There is no standard place to find these reports, and that is a real barrier for families. In Utah, transparency reports sit under Dean of Students, University Police or Public Safety, Health Services, Compliance, or on a third-party vendor’s website. Four different patterns must be checked at every institution. Utah State’s and Utah Tech’s are filed under campus police. A parent who checks the Dean of Students page and finds nothing will reasonably conclude the school published nothing. They would be wrong, and we made that exact mistake ourselves before catching it. Section 14 tells you how to search properly.

8. Michael Starks

Michael Starks was eighteen years old. He was a freshman at Utah State University. He died on November 21, 2008.

We include his name and his case because his death is the reason two organizations no longer exist at Utah State, because it is the only known hazing death at a Utah institution, because every fact below comes from Utah State’s own statements, from Utah newspapers, and from the national hazing deaths database — and because erasing him would serve nobody. It would certainly not serve the next family.

What happened

Institution: Utah State University, Logan
Date of death: November 21, 2008
Organizations involved: Sigma Nu Fraternity, Epsilon Upsilon chapter and Chi Omega Sorority, both Logan chapters
Cause of death: Acute alcohol poisoning
What occurred: Starks was mock-kidnapped by members of the neighboring Chi Omega sorority during an off-campus initiation and taken to a private residence. He and a second pledge were told to strip to their underwear and were body-painted blue and white — Utah State’s colors. Reporting at the time described how the sorority women captur[ed] the two Sigma Nu pledges and took them to a fraternity member’s home, where they bound the young men with duct tape, painted their skin Aggie blue and hoisted bottles of vodka to their lips. Starks was given vodka and consumed close to a fifth. He was also bound with cords.
Blood alcohol content: .373 — described in contemporaneous reporting as more than four times the legal limit

Map that against the mechanisms in section 2 and you have four of the sixteen, in one night: forced and coerced alcohol; confinement and restraint (bound with cords and duct tape); kidnapping and transport; and psychological degradation through forced body painting. Map it against section 4 and you have alcohol poisoning, loss of protective airway reflexes, and cold exposure — in Cache Valley, in November.

What happened afterward — and why it matters to your case

This is the part that almost nobody knows, and it is the part that changes what a Utah family should believe is possible.

Criminal charges against the organizations themselves: The former Utah State charters of Sigma Nu Fraternity AND Chi Omega Sorority were each charged with one count of third-degree felony hazing. Not the individuals — the organizations, as entities. Utah prosecutors charged a fraternity and a sorority with a felony.
Criminal charges against individuals: Twelve students charged with misdemeanor hazing, including the Sigma Nu chapter president. Thirteen students were charged in total; four were additionally charged with supplying alcohol to a minor. Three hazing cases were later dropped.
The fraternity: Utah State terminated its relationship with the chapter on January 26, 2009. The university’s own statement, verbatim: Utah State University has terminated its relationship with Epsilon Upsilon Chapter of Sigma Nu in connection with the tragic death of Michael Starks in November. Sigma Nu’s national office separately closed the chapter.
The sorority: Chi Omega’s national office closed the Utah State chapter.
Civil settlements: Both organizations reached out-of-court settlements with the Starks family.
The case against the university: The family sued Utah State University and the State of Utah. The suit was dismissed by agreement in January 2011 after the university committed to implementing five recommendations of a University Task Force. The family traded the claim for institutional change. President Stan L. Albrecht had convened that task force in January 2009 to review university policies on student groups and clubs.

The three things a Utah family should take from this

A sorority can be a co-perpetrator, not a bystander. This is one of the clearest documented instances in the country of a sorority acting as a co-participant in a fatal fraternity hazing, and both charters were criminally charged as entities. Any assumption that sorority national organizations are categorically insulated from hazing exposure does not survive this case.
“Off campus” is not a shield. This happened at a private residence, off university property. It still ended two chapters, produced entity-level felony charges, and produced a settlement with the university. Utah State’s current hazing policy expressly reaches conduct both on and off campus.
Utah State cannot say it did not know. The university has documented, litigated, settlement-memorialized notice that fatal alcohol hazing happened on its campus. It convened a task force. It settled a wrongful death case. It rewrote its hazing policy in 2025. In any future Utah State matter, that history is the institution’s prior-notice anchor, and it is not going away.

Sources: Utah State University’s own official statements; Deseret News; the Salt Lake Tribune; NBC News; the Herald Journal; Salt Lake City Weekly; Fraternal Law; KSL; and the Hank Nuwer hazing deaths database. No law firm marketing page, including our own, was used as a source for any fact in this section.

9. One fraternity, two Utah campuses, sixteen years

This is the single most important pattern in Utah’s entire hazing record, and we have not seen it published anywhere else.

2008–2009 — Utah State University, Epsilon Upsilon chapter: Relationship terminated by the university following the alcohol-poisoning death of pledge Michael Starks. The national office closed the chapter. The chapter was charged with felony hazing as an entity. The family sued and settled.
2025 — University of Utah, Epsilon Lambda chapter: Recognition terminated for hazing the university’s own record describes as hazing of new members with alcohol, manual labor, intimidation. Fourteen documented instances. Coerced alcohol consumption. New members required to sleep on a basement floor. Six-year history of prior alcohol violations. Characterized by the Vice President for Student Affairs as egregious. No application for re-recognition accepted before 2031. The national office independently suspended the charter.

Sigma Nu Fraternity has now lost recognition at two different Utah institutions, sixteen years apart, both times for initiation practices centered on forced alcohol. The first one ended in a student’s death.

Why lawyers care about this, in plain English

When a family sues a national fraternity, the organization’s most common defense is some version of: we did not know, we could not have known, the local chapter went rogue, and we cannot supervise every campus.

The legal question is notice. Did the national organization know, or should it have known, that this kind of thing was happening in its chapters? If it knew and did nothing effective, the claims available change — negligent supervision, negligent undertaking, and in some cases gross negligence supporting punitive damages.

Here, the pattern belongs to the national organization, not to either campus. Sigma Nu National had actual knowledge, from a fatality at one of its Utah chapters in 2008, that Utah chapters were running forced-alcohol initiations. Sixteen years later, a second Utah chapter was terminated for forced alcohol and drug consumption during initiation, at a university that cited a six-year history of prior violations.

Both of those facts come from institutional records. Neither comes from us. One is a university’s public statement about a student’s death. The other is a university’s federally mandated transparency report. We simply read both and noticed they involve the same national fraternity in the same state.

We are describing a documented pattern in the public record. We are not alleging that Sigma Nu Fraternity, Inc. is liable to anyone — that is a question for evidence and a jury in a specific case, and no such case is described here. What we are saying is that a family whose child is hurt by a fraternity should ask, on day one: has this organization done this before, and where, and did anyone tell them? That question is answerable now, publicly, for free, because of the federal transparency law — and almost nobody asks it.

10. Who can be held responsible in Utah

Almost every family we speak to believes the answer is the guys who did it. That is the shortest and usually the least valuable list.

The people who physically did the hazing are frequently nineteen years old, uninsured, and judgment-proof. A judgment against them may be worth nothing. The reason experienced hazing lawyers build a defendant list rather than a defendant is that responsibility in these cases is layered, and the layers with resources are usually further out.

The layers

1. The individuals: The pledge master. The chapter president. The risk management officer. The members who administered the conduct. Individual defendants matter for accountability and for discovery even when they cannot pay, and the officers of an unincorporated association can be personally exposed in ways ordinary members are not.
2. The local chapter: Usually an unincorporated association. Often it holds assets, a house corporation, or a bank account. In our own filings we plead the local chapter as an alter ego of the national organization where the facts support it.
3. The national organization: The deep pocket in most hazing litigation, and the entity that writes the risk-management policies the chapter violated. Theories: negligent supervision, negligent undertaking, failure to enforce its own standards, and — where a pattern like the one in section 9 exists — actual notice. Note the exception that matters in Utah: Weber State’s entire Greek system has no national organization at all.
4. The chapter house corporation: A separate legal entity that frequently owns the building and carries its own insurance. The Greek Row tax records in section 7 identify several of these by name and address for the University of Utah.
5. The property owner — and read this one twice: The owner of the building where the hazing happened is a defendant more often than families expect, and in Utah the property owner is sometimes the most important defendant. This is not theory for us. In both of the hazing petitions this firm has filed and can show you, the property owner is a named defendant. In one, it is a corporation that owned the house where the pledging occurred. In the other, it is the trustee of a family trust that held title to the residence. Both are set out in section 17. Premises liability and negligent entrustment are real theories, the owner usually carries real insurance, and the owner is frequently an alumnus, a parent, or a local landlord who knew exactly what the house was being used for.
6. The institution: The university or college itself. Utah’s eight public institutions are governmental entities, which means the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah applies — with a written notice-of-claim requirement and a deadline dramatically shorter than the four-year limitations period. See section 3, and treat your time as short. Private institutions — BYU, Westminster, Ensign, Neumont, Roseman, Rocky Vista, and the rest — are not governmental entities and the analysis is entirely different.
7. Individual employees and advisors: Coaches, band directors, chapter advisors, resident advisors, and staff who knew. In a coach-driven or band-driven case, this layer is often the whole case.
8. Whoever supplied the alcohol: Depending on the facts, a bar, a store, a social host, or the individuals who bought it for minors. In Utah, alcohol involvement independently escalates the criminal grade of the hazing offense — see the alcohol escalator in section 3.

What the institution’s own record does for you

This is where section 7 stops being interesting and starts being useful.

The transparency report is notice evidence. If a school published a finding against an organization in 2025 and the same organization hurt your child in 2026, the school documented its own knowledge. It cannot argue it did not know.
The institution’s own policy sets its own standard of care. Several Utah institutions wrote hazing policies broader than the federal minimum — Rocky Vista reaches mere “physical or mental discomfort, embarrassment” with no risk threshold; Westminster reaches negligent conduct, off-campus activity, and imposes responsibility for negligently permitting hazing and for failing to report it; Provo and Eagle Gate’s policy reaches organizations “whether officially recognized or not.” When an institution sets a standard for itself and then falls short of it, that gap is evidence.
A sanction that does not match the conduct is evidence too. Two semesters of conduct involving illegal drugs, alcohol, and compelled sexual material drawing only probation is the kind of fact that supports a negligent-supervision or institutional-indifference theory.
Utah State’s 2011 settlement is permanent notice. A settled wrongful death case conditioned on implementing safety recommendations is an institution’s own written acknowledgment that it knew.

What a Utah case looks like when it is built properly

Not a lawsuit against three sophomores. A case that names, where the facts support it: the individuals · the local chapter · the national organization · the house corporation · the property owner · the institution · and the responsible employees — with the university’s own transparency report, its own policy, its own prior findings, and its own conduct history in evidence, and with the medical proof organized around the hour nobody called.

Nobody can promise you an outcome, and we are not going to. What we can tell you is which doors exist, because most families are never told there is more than one.

11. When there is no national fraternity to sue

This section exists because of a fact about Weber State University that we have not seen published anywhere, and that would blindside a family and an inexperienced lawyer alike.

Every single Greek organization at Weber State University is a local organization with no national affiliation whatsoever. Delta Chi Nu. Kappa Omega Eta. Pi Phi Alpha. Pi Theta Xi. Tau Psi Beta. Phi Gamma Lambda. Zeta Gamma Eta. Psi Phi Psi. None is affiliated with the National Panhellenic Conference, the North American Interfraternity Conference, the National Pan-Hellenic Council, or any multicultural Greek council. They are not chapters of anything. They exist only in Ogden.

Why that matters enormously

The standard architecture of American hazing litigation assumes a national organization at the top. That is where the risk-management policy lives, where the insurance tower lives, and where the notice evidence lives. At Weber State, that entire layer does not exist.

There is no national defendant: No national organization to sue for negligent supervision. No national risk-management policy to prove was breached.
There is likely no national insurance tower: The multi-million-dollar liability program that a national fraternity carries and extends to its chapters almost certainly is not there.
There is no national headquarters record to subpoena: No prior-incident file, no chapter discipline history, no accreditation reports from a headquarters that does not exist.
And there is no headquarters to report to: One of the reporting channels we recommend in section 15 — the national fraternity or sorority headquarters, which can act independently of the school — simply is not available at Weber State.

What it means instead — and it is not nothing

The absence of a national organization does not make a case worthless. It relocates it. Recovery in a Weber State matter runs against:

The university itself — a governmental entity, with the Governmental Immunity Act’s short notice deadline. The clock here is the tightest in the case and it is running now.
The unincorporated association itself — whatever assets and accounts the local organization holds.
The officers, individually. Officers of an unincorporated association can carry personal exposure that ordinary members do not.
The property owner — who becomes the primary defendant, not a secondary one. The landlord who leases a house to a local chapter, with no national organization and no university housing oversight sitting between them, is the entity most likely to carry real insurance. Weber County property records are where a Weber State case starts.
Homeowner’s and umbrella policies of individual members and of the property owner — which, in the absence of a national tower, is sometimes the only real coverage in the case.

The same logic applies with even more force at Utah Tech University. There, the Kappa Sigma chapter operating near campus is not recognized by the university and does not appear on its own national organization’s chapter listing. There is no university oversight layer at all. That posture strengthens the property-owner theory rather than weakening it, and it makes Washington County property records, St. George Police and Washington County Sheriff incident reports, Kappa Sigma national headquarters records (which will exist even though the university’s do not), and Utah Tech student conduct records for individual students the places a case has to look. A university can discipline individual students for off-campus conduct even where it does not recognize the organization.

The point of this section: a lawyer who walks into a Weber State or Utah Tech case running the standard national-fraternity playbook will find the top of the pyramid missing and may conclude there is no case. There is a case. It is a different case, and it has to be built from the ground up instead of the top down.

We have shown you every hazing finding in Utah. Now we are going to tell you everything that record cannot see, because a family that misreads a zero can make a catastrophic decision about a school, a chapter, or a case.

The governing rule for reading everything in section 7: a “zero” means no organization was formally found responsible during a reporting period. It never means no hazing occurred.

The nine blind spots, in order of how much they matter

1. The record starts on July 1, 2025.: The federal Act only captures findings from that date forward. Anything adjudicated before then appears only through news coverage, litigation, or institutional memory. At the time we compiled this, that is roughly thirteen months of visible history for an entire state. Michael Starks’s death would not appear in any transparency report. Neither would the University of Utah’s 2022 Kappa Sigma termination. Neither would Utah State’s Sigma Chi matter.
2. Only findings appear. Allegations do not.: A transparency report contains adjudicated outcomes only. Reports that were made and not substantiated, investigations that closed without a finding, and complaints that were never investigated do not appear anywhere. This is what makes the data reliable — every entry is a real finding — and it is also what makes it incomplete.
3. Unrecognized organizations are outside the system entirely.: The Act reaches organizations that are institutionally established or recognized. An underground chapter, a disaffiliated chapter, or a chapter at a school with no Greek system produces no entry no matter what it does. This is precisely the situation at Utah Tech University.
4. Injuries are never reported.: Transparency reports disclose organizational findings. Federal student privacy law protects individual student records. Neither of Utah’s two findings discloses a single injury, and that tells you nothing about whether anyone was hurt.
5. The reports are snapshots, and they are stale between updates.: Institutions update at least twice a year. Weber State’s finding concluded June 5, 2026. A school updating on a January/July cycle can be sitting on an unpublished finding at any given moment. Everything in section 7 has a shelf life measured in months, and we say so.
6. Out-of-state parents hide Utah events inside national figures.: Rocky Vista files under Colorado. Roseman under Nevada. Galen under Kentucky. Arizona College of Nursing under Arizona. Charter College out of state. Rocky Vista’s zero statement covers Colorado, Utah, and Montana together. Galen and Arizona College report institution-wide. A hazing finding at any of their Utah campuses would be absorbed into a national number and would be invisible as a Utah event. Of all the out-of-state parents operating in Utah, only Embry-Riddle publishes campus-specific reports.
7. Reports hidden inside PDFs are a systemic blind spot.: Westminster’s, Neumont’s, and Arizona College of Nursing’s reports were unreadable to ordinary web retrieval and were recovered only by downloading and decompressing the PDFs. RMUoHP’s defeated even that on our first attempt. Any institution we have marked “not located” may in fact publish a report inside a PDF nobody can search. That is why we did not accuse any of them of non-compliance.
8. Utah’s eight public technical colleges are not in this census.: Bridgerland, Davis, Mountainland, Ogden-Weber and the others were outside the scope of the roster we built — but they participate in federal student aid and are subject to the same federal requirement. We located no transparency report for any of them. That is an open extension, not a closed question, and we are telling you rather than letting the omission look like a finding.
9. The federal hazing statistics have not arrived yet.: Separately from the transparency reports, colleges must begin including hazing statistics in their Annual Security Reports. The first ones in the history of the United States publish on or before October 1, 2026. Every Utah security report currently shows hazing as not applicable for 2022 through 2024. The picture in section 7 is incomplete until that date and we intend to re-run it.

One distinction that will save you from a serious error

Annual Security Report hazing statistics and Campus Hazing Transparency Report findings are two different numbers, and they do not contradict each other.

Neumont College states it plainly in its own report: hazing statistics in the security report do not reflect actual findings of hazing behavior, which are included in the Campus Hazing Transparency Report.

The security report counts reports made to campus security or police. The transparency report contains only adjudicated findings of responsibility. A school can show fifteen hazing reports and zero findings simultaneously, with no inconsistency whatsoever. Never treat one as disproving the other.

The rule we hold ourselves to, and you should too

Early in building this, we recorded two Utah institutions as having published nothing. We were wrong about both. Utah State’s report existed the whole time — filed under campus police, where nobody looks. Another school’s sat on a standalone subdomain invisible to an ordinary site search.

We also once ran a court records search for a case we now hold the file-stamped petition for, and the public search returned no cases match your search for a real, pending, filed lawsuit.

So this is the standing rule, and it governs every negative statement on this page:

A negative result from a search interface is never evidence of absence unless the interface has first been tested with a query known to return results. Absence of evidence is recorded as absence of evidence — never as evidence of absence. And an inaccessible source is not an absent source.

That is why this page says not located where other pages would say none, and why exactly three Utah institutions are described as non-compliant while seven are described as not located.

13. The first 48 hours

You do not need a lawyer to start. You need a record.

Evidence in these cases disappears fast — not usually by conspiracy, though that happens too, but because group chats auto-delete, bruises fade, phones get wiped, and memories blur. What you capture in the first days often cannot be recreated later at any price.

Tonight

Get medical care and say what actually happened. The medical record is the single most important document that will ever exist about this. A vague history produces a vague record. Do not say he worked out too hard. Say what was done, by whom, for how long, and under what threat. Section 6 tells you how to say it at triage.
Photograph everything, with dates. Injuries daily as they change — bruises often look worse on days two through four than on day one. Photograph the location. The objects. The clothing. And if there is dark urine, photograph it — it clears within days and the color is otherwise unrecoverable.
Save the phone. Do not delete anything. Screenshot GroupMe, Discord, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, and text threads — including group chats you are still in. Back the phone up tonight. Do not leave the group chat before you have exported it.
Write it down while it is fresh. Times, places, who was present, who said what, who else was hurt. Date every entry. Keep adding as you remember. Memory does not improve.
Write down the times nobody called. When it started. When it stopped. When he first said he felt wrong. When someone first said he needed help. When someone actually called. That last gap is often the case.
Keep every communication from the school or the organization — emails, letters, portal notices, voicemails. Note the date of every phone call and who you spoke to.
Write down witnesses — names, numbers, who saw which part. Pledge classes scatter. Get numbers now.
Keep every receipt and bill. Medical, travel, parking, prescriptions, lost work, a plane ticket to get to a hospital.

How to export your own data, from the companies themselves

These are the official instructions from each platform. Do this before anyone deletes an account.

Discord — request a copy of your data: Official export of a full copy of your account data, including message history.
Snapchat — My Data export: At accounts.snapchat.com or in-app under Settings.
Google Takeout: Covers Gmail, Photos, Drive, Calendar, YouTube, and account activity.
GroupMe — Help & Learning: Microsoft’s official support hub, including account and data export.
Apple — back up your iPhone: To iCloud or to a computer. Do this before a phone is traded in or reset.

Records you are entitled to ask for — and the law that gives them to you

Medical records: Federal law gives every patient the right to inspect and get a copy of their own medical records, with a 30-day response deadline. Ask the hospital’s medical records or health information management department. An adult child can request their own, or sign an authorization naming you. 45 CFR 164.524 — the actual regulation. If a provider refuses, delays, or overcharges: file a complaint with the HHS Office for Civil Rights or call 1-800-368-1019.
Student conduct records: A student generally has the right to inspect their own education records under FERPA — including conduct files. Ask the registrar or dean of students in writing. 34 CFR 99.10 — the right to inspect · The Department of Education’s plain-language guide written for college students · How to file a FERPA complaint.
Public records — and in Utah this is called GRAMA: At a public Utah university — the University of Utah, Utah State, Weber State, Southern Utah, Utah Tech, Utah Valley, Snow, or Salt Lake Community College — campus police reports and many institutional records may be obtainable through Utah’s public records law, the Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA). That includes prior complaints about the same organization. Note the limit: GRAMA reaches government entities. It does not reach BYU, Westminster, Ensign, Neumont, Roseman, Rocky Vista, or any other private Utah institution — those require a direct request or litigation discovery. The Reporters Committee’s state-by-state open government guide and the National Freedom of Information Coalition’s directory with sample request letters both cover Utah.
The campus hazing transparency report: Public, free, and it may already document that the school knew. Section 14 tells you how to find yours.
The Annual Security Report: Every college receiving federal aid must distribute one by October 1 each year and give a copy to anyone who asks. 34 CFR 668.41. You can also look up any school’s reported crime statistics for free at the federal Campus Safety and Security Data Analysis Tool.

What to preserve, by what was done

Different mechanisms leave different evidence, and most of it is perishable.

If there was forced exercise: The dark urine, photographed. Serial blood draws — ask specifically whether more than one creatine kinase level was drawn and at what times, because a single value proves almost nothing. Fitness tracker and phone health data showing step counts, heart rate, and time. The location. The surface. The temperature that day.
If there was alcohol: The blood alcohol level and the time it was drawn. Receipts. Bottles. Who bought it. Photographs and video from the night — these exist far more often than families expect, because someone always films.
If there were blows: Photographs daily for a week. The implement, if it still exists. Emergency room imaging. Any complaint of abdominal or left-shoulder pain, documented with a date.
If there was confinement or restraint: The room. The container. The tape, cords, or wrapping. Marks on wrists and ankles, photographed.
If there was cold exposure: The weather record for that night and location. Clothing. The time outdoors, and who knew.
If there was sexual conduct: Go to a hospital that performs forensic examinations, and go quickly. Preventive treatment for infection is measured in hours. Do not shower or launder clothing first if it can be avoided. RAINN at 800-656-HOPE will walk you through it, 24/7.
In every single case: The group chats. The timeline. The witnesses. And every communication the school or the organization sends you, from the first one.

One thing about deleting evidence, in both directions. Once litigation is reasonably foreseeable, a duty to preserve electronic evidence arises — and that duty falls on the chapter and the school too, not only on you. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e) governs what happens when electronic evidence is lost. A lawyer can send a preservation letter that puts a chapter, a national organization, a landlord, and a university on formal notice not to delete anything. That letter is often the single most valuable thing that happens in the first week, and it is far more time-sensitive than filing a lawsuit.

There is a clock, and nobody will remind you

Utah gives you four years for a personal injury claim — among the longest in the country. Read section 3 for what that does and does not protect. The short version:

Four years does not preserve one minute of evidence. Everything above expires on its own schedule.
Claims against Utah’s public universities run on a much shorter clock under the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah, with a written notice requirement. If a public institution is involved, treat your time as short and get advice now — from anyone, including a free legal aid line. Not necessarily us.
Crime victim compensation programs — every state has one, funded partly under the federal Victims of Crime Act — can reimburse medical bills, counseling, and lost wages. They usually require a police report, often within a short window. Ask early. Federal overview of state compensation programs.

14. How to find and read your school’s hazing transparency report

This is a free public document that may already prove what a school knew and when. Most families do not know it exists. Here is how to get yours.

Step 1 — if the school is in Utah, we already found it

Every located Utah report is linked directly in section 7. Start there.

Step 2 — if the school is anywhere else, check all four locations

There is no standard place. We learned this the hard way. Check every one of these before concluding a school published nothing:

Dean of Students / Student Conduct. The most common location and the one everyone checks first.
University Police, Public Safety, or the Clery Compliance office. Two of Utah’s schools file here, including Utah State. This is the most common miss in the country.
Health Services or Wellness. Southern Utah University files here.
The Maxient endpoint. Maxient is the conduct-records vendor used by a large share of American colleges, and it hosts transparency reports at a predictable address: cm.maxient.com/chtr.php? followed by the school’s key. Utah Valley University’s is cm.maxient.com/chtr.php?UtahValleyUniv. Try this before you conclude a school published nothing.

Also try: a standalone subdomain such as stophazing.[school].edu, which some universities use and which is invisible to an ordinary site search; and a plain search for the school’s name plus campus hazing transparency report plus PDF.

Step 3 — what each field is telling you

Organization name: The first federal requirement that ever compelled schools to name specific groups rather than publish aggregate numbers. That is why this document exists at all.
Date of the incident: Compare it to the date the investigation started. That gap is the school’s detection time. Weber State’s is roughly a year.
Date the investigation was initiated, concluded, and notice was given: The institution’s own timeline, in its own words, admissible as its own record.
Description of the violation: Usually brief and sanitized. Read it against the sixteen mechanisms in section 2 and you will often see exactly what happened. Manual labor means servitude. Physical activity means calisthenics. Compelled individuals to engage in behavior likely to produce mental or physical discomfort is boilerplate that can cover almost anything.
Whether alcohol or drugs were involved: In Utah this field is legally significant on its own — alcohol involvement escalates the criminal grade regardless of injury.
Findings and sanctions: Compare the sanction to the conduct. A mismatch is evidence. So is a chapter that appears more than once.
What is NOT there: Injuries. Names. Allegations that were not substantiated. Anything before July 1, 2025. Anything by an unrecognized organization. Section 12.

Step 4 — if there is no report at all

Publishing is mandatory for institutions receiving federal student aid, and the duty applies even when there are zero findings. A school with nothing to report must publish a report saying so. Ten Utah institutions did exactly that.

Before concluding a school failed to publish: check all four locations above, try the Maxient endpoint, and look inside PDFs. Then, if it genuinely is not there, that omission is itself a fact worth recording — and worth asking the school about in writing.

Where else to look

HazingInfo.org — campus lookup: A free national database, launched in 2024, covering roughly 1,478 U.S. colleges. Each campus page shows the applicable state hazing law and links to that school’s disclosures. Founded by Jolayne Houtz and Héctor Martinez after their son Sam Martinez died from fraternity hazing at Washington State.
StopHazing — Transparency Reports: A Guide for Students and Families: Written specifically for parents and students deciding whether a young person should join an organization.
StopHazing — Transparency Reports resource hub: Includes a downloadable flowchart for interpreting a report, which StopHazing notes can be tricky to navigate and fully understand.
Federal Campus Safety and Security Data Analysis Tool: Free federal database of every school’s reported crime statistics. Hazing statistics arrive here beginning October 1, 2026.
HazingInfo.org — Hazing Deaths Database: Interactive, searchable, and downloadable. Every recorded U.S. hazing death from 1838 to the present, built from Hank Nuwer’s database. Michael Starks is in it.

15. Reporting in Utah, and what actually happens

There is no single right answer about reporting, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you. Reporting can bring accountability. It can also bring retaliation. You are allowed to weigh that.

What we would say: document first, then decide. Documentation keeps every door open. It costs you nothing to be ready. Section 13 is the documentation list.

Your channels, and what each one actually does

911 or local police: For an emergency or a crime. Utah’s Good Samaritan law and its hazing-statute reporting immunity both protect you here. See section 1.
Campus police: At a public Utah university, their reports are often obtainable as public records under GRAMA. At a private institution such as BYU or Westminster, they are not.
Dean of Students or Student Conduct: Starts the institutional process. This is the office that produces the finding that ends up in the transparency report.
Title IX office: Where sexual conduct was involved. A separate process with its own rights and its own deadlines. You can also complain directly to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights at 800-421-3481 — but note the deadline: an OCR complaint generally must be filed within 180 calendar days. How to file · How OCR handles complaints. Anyone may file — you do not have to be the victim.
The national fraternity or sorority headquarters: This channel is independent of the school and it is the fastest one. A national office can close a chapter in days, without any university process. It has happened repeatedly — Sigma Nu National suspended the University of Utah chapter’s charter independently, Chi Omega and Sigma Nu both closed their Utah State chapters, and in one of the matters this firm handles a national headquarters closed the chapter before any lawsuit was filed. Report to the North American Interfraternity Conference for men’s fraternities, or contact the specific organization’s headquarters directly. ⚠ Remember: at Weber State, this channel does not exist — there is no national headquarters for any chapter there.
The Anti-Hazing Hotline: 1-888-NOT-HAZE (1-888-668-4293). Anonymous, 24 hours. Disclosure: it is funded by the fraternal industry — currently sponsored by 47 national and international organizations. It is still a real reporting channel, and you deserve to know who runs it.
The U.S. Center for SafeSport: 833-5US-SAFE (833-587-7233). If the hazing happened in an Olympic or Paralympic sport, a national governing body, or a local affiliated club, this is the right channel and almost nobody knows it exists. Hazing is expressly within its jurisdiction. Report a concern.
Courage First Athlete Helpline: 1-888-279-1026, call or text. Free, confidential support and guidance on any type of abuse in sport — hazing explicitly included.
Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline: 800-422-4453, call or text GO. For high school hazing and anyone under 18. 24/7, live counselors, interpretation in 170 languages.
VictimConnect: 1-855-4VICTIM (855-484-2846), call or text. Confidential, anonymous referral for victims of any crime — support, information, and connection to local legal and financial resources.

Two things to understand before you report

Anonymous is not always anonymous in effect. If only three people know a detail, the detail identifies you. Ask directly what will be shared and with whom. Some campuses are candid about this — UC Santa Cruz’s reporting page states plainly that anonymous reports significantly limit what the university can do. Others are not.

Retaliation is common. From the chapter, from mutual friends, sometimes from a campus that would rather this went away. Document any retaliation exactly the way you documented everything else — it is frequently actionable in its own right.

What happens after you report

Two tracks run in parallel and they are independent. The criminal track runs through police and a prosecutor. The disciplinary track runs through student conduct. They have different standards of proof, different timelines, and different outcomes. One can fail while the other succeeds.
A third track exists that nobody mentions: the national organization’s internal process, which is faster than both and can close a chapter outright.
A fourth, if you choose it: the civil track, which is the only one that pays for a lifetime of medical care and which is entirely within your control rather than a prosecutor’s.
If a finding results, it goes into the transparency report — publicly, with the organization named, for five years. That is how the record in section 7 was built, and it is how the next family will find out.

The thing nobody tells you about who is on your side. When a school investigates, its investigator is not your advocate. When a chapter’s insurer calls, that adjuster is not your advocate. When a national organization sends a risk-management representative, that person is not your advocate. They may all be perfectly decent people doing their jobs, and none of their jobs is protecting you. You are allowed to have someone whose only job is that — and it does not have to be a lawyer, and it does not have to be us. It can be a parent, a victim advocate, or a legal aid attorney. But it should be someone.

16. For the people who love them

If you are a parent, a sibling, a partner, a friend — you are also hurt. That is allowed, and it does not take anything away from them.

If your child was hurt

Believe them the first time. Most survivors test the water with a partial story to see how it lands. What you say in the first sixty seconds decides whether you get the rest.

Say: I believe you. This was not your fault. I am glad you told me. What do you need?

Try not to say: Why didn’t you just leave? · Why didn’t you call me? · What were you thinking? · Let’s not tell anyone. Even asked from love, these land as blame.

Let them keep some control. Their control was taken from them. Give choices wherever you can — who to tell, when to report, which doctor. Where safety is at stake, decide as the parent and say so plainly.

Watch the quiet ones. Withdrawal is not recovery. The warning signs are in section 5, and three of them are suicide warning signs.

Get your own support. You cannot carry someone else while drowning. This is not indulgent; it is logistics.

The wall you may hit at 18

If your child is eighteen or older, you have no automatic right to their medical records or their school conduct records — even as their parent, even while paying tuition. Hospitals are bound by HIPAA. Schools by FERPA. Parents discover this at the worst possible moment, standing at a hospital desk.

This is solvable, and it is far easier to solve before a crisis. Your adult child can sign:

a HIPAA authorization naming you, so a hospital can speak to you;
a FERPA release naming you, so a school can speak to you;
and many families also complete a healthcare power of attorney.

Ask the hospital and the registrar for their forms. Do it now, tonight, while nothing is wrong. If your child is heading to a Utah campus in the fall, this is the single most useful thing you can do before they leave. And note the other side of it: federal law requires that a “personal representative” be treated as the patient — which covers a person with legal authority to make health care decisions for an adult, and the executor of an estate.

If your child is choosing a school or a chapter right now

You can do all of this in twenty minutes, for free, before anyone pledges anything:

Read the school’s hazing transparency report. Every Utah one is linked in section 7. Find out whether the specific organization has been found responsible before.
Check the national organization for chapter closures elsewhere. A pattern across campuses is the thing nobody looks for.
Look up the school on HazingInfo.org.
Read the school’s medical amnesty policy and make sure your child knows it exists before they need it.
Sign the HIPAA and FERPA releases.
Have one conversation: “If you or anyone else is ever in trouble, call 911 first and me second. I will never be angry that you called. In Utah, the law protects the person who calls.” That sentence has saved lives.

If you have lost someone

We are not going to tell you it gets better on a schedule, or that anything makes it make sense.

What other families say is that the loneliest part was believing nobody else had lived it — and that finding one person who had was the first thing that helped.

Several of the organizations below were founded by parents who lost a child to hazing. They are not abstractions. They are families who decided nobody else should go through it alone, and every one of them will talk to you.

The Compassionate Friends — 877-969-0010: Peer support after the death of a child of any age, from any cause. More than 500 chapters across all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. There are chapters in Utah.
Max Gruver Foundation: Founded by Rae Ann and Steve Gruver after their son Max died from hazing at LSU on September 14, 2017. Authored the Max Gruver Act.
Love Like Adam Foundation — (571) 375-5495: Created by the family of Adam Oakes, who died February 27, 2021 after fraternity hazing at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Collin Wiant Foundation: Established by Kathleen Wiant after her 18-year-old son Collin died from extreme hazing at Ohio University.
iamstonefoltz Foundation: Created by Cory and Shari Foltz after their son Stone died March 7, 2021 of alcohol poisoning three days after a fraternity hazing ritual at Bowling Green State University.
The Timothy J. Piazza Memorial Foundation — (908) 325-2370: Run by the family and friends of Tim Piazza, who died February 4, 2017 after hazing at Penn State’s Beta Theta Pi.
HazingInfo.org: The first comprehensive national database of college hazing incidents, founded by Jolayne Houtz and Héctor Martinez after their son Sam Martinez died from fraternity hazing at Washington State University.
“Love, Mom and Dad” parent speakers program: Parents who lost children to hazing speak at colleges and high schools. If you ever reach the point of wanting to turn this outward, this is where families go.

17. The hazing cases we litigate

Everything above this section is information you can use whether or not you ever speak to a lawyer. This section is about us, and we have put it at number seventeen on purpose.

These are Texas cases. We are telling you that first. They are the cases we actually litigate, in the courts where we are licensed, and we are describing them because they are the answer to the only question that matters when you are choosing a hazing lawyer: have you actually done this, and can you prove it?

Every fact below comes from a court file or from independent news coverage. Where a document says something, we quote the document. We are not going to describe outcomes, because these are pending cases and no outcome exists. A pleading is an allegation. It is not a finding, and it is not a promise about anything.

Case 1 — Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity, Inc.

Plaintiff: Leonel Bermudez
Court: Harris County, Texas
Filed: November 2025 — outlets reported the filing date as both November 20 and November 22; we record both rather than picking one
Relief sought: In excess of $10 million
Defendants — thirteen: The University of Houston · the Board of Regents of the University of Houston System · Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity, Inc., the national organization · the Beta Nu Chapter · the chapter housing corporation · and eight current or former fraternity members, including the chapter president, the pledge master, the sorority relations chair, and the risk management officer. That is section 10’s defendant list, in a real filing.
Counsel: Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
Conduct alleged in the petition, as reported by ABC13, KHOU, Houston Public Media, FOX 26, and KPRC 2: 100+ push-ups and 500 squats plus wall-sits, performed blindfolded, while reciting the fraternity creed under threat of expulsion, with the plaintiff collapsing repeatedly and being made to continue · being sprayed in the face with a water hose in a manner amounting to waterboarding · forced eating until vomiting · sleep deprivation · physical punishment and public humiliation · and a hog-tying incident involving another pledge
Injuries reported: Rhabdomyolysis · acute kidney failure · critically elevated creatine kinase · brown urine · loss of the ability to stand or move without assistance · a prior loss of consciousness · inpatient admission (reported as three days by KPRC 2 and four by ABC13 and the Daily Cougar — we record the conflict) · ongoing medical and psychological care
What the university found: The University of Houston’s investigation found violations of policy and evidence of hazing, including physical abuse, forced consumption, and public humiliation. Pi Kappa Phi’s national headquarters closed the Beta Nu chapter. UH’s own hazing transparency report records the finding, and states the chapter was closed by Pi Kappa Phi Headquarters on November 17, 2025.
Independent coverage: 19 items across 11 outlets — all five major Houston network affiliates (ABC13, KPRC 2, KHOU 11, FOX 26, CW39), Houston Public Media, the Daily Cougar, statewide syndication to KENS 5 in San Antonio and KVUE in Austin, Hoodline, and the national Greek-life trade publication Fraternal Law. First reported by KPRC 2 as an Only on 2 exclusive on November 21, 2025.

Map that fact pattern against this page: forced calisthenics and forced ingestion and sleep deprivation from section 2; rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney injury from section 4; and the national organization, the local chapter, the housing corporation, the institution, and the individual officers from section 10. This page is not theory. It is how we build a case.

Case 2 — Wang v. Omega Phi Gamma

Verified from the file-stamped Plaintiff’s Original Petition itself.

Style: Alan Wang, Plaintiff v. Phan A/C and Refrigeration, LLC; Omega Phi Gamma Fraternity Incorporated; Omega Phi Gamma Beta Chapter, Defendants
Court: District Court of Harris County, Texas · Clerk Marilyn Burgess · e-file envelope 113245031
Submitted / filed: Submitted April 3, 2026; filed April 6, 2026
Relief sought, verbatim: seeks monetary relief over $10,000,000.00. However, should a jury award Plaintiff over $10,000,000.00, Plaintiff reserves the right to amend his pleadings to comport with such an award.
★ The first defendant is the landlord: Phan A/C and Refrigeration, LLC — pleaded as the owner of the residence known as the “O House” at 3819 Reveille Street, Houston, where the conduct is alleged to have occurred. The cause of action pleaded against it is premises liability. This is exactly the property-owner theory described in section 10 — and it is why we told you the landlord is often a defendant.
The other defendants: Omega Phi Gamma Fraternity Incorporated, the national order · and the Beta Chapter, an unincorporated entity pleaded as the alter ego of the national organization
Facts as pleaded: The plaintiff was entering his first semester at the University of Houston in Fall 2025 when he accepted a bid to pledge. The conduct is pleaded as occurring September through November 2025. He pleads severe psychological and physical injuries proximately caused by the pledge program, and that he did nothing that caused or contributed to his injuries.
Independent institutional corroboration: The University of Houston’s own Campus Hazing Transparency Report records a formal hazing finding against Omega Phi Gamma for Fall 2025, with all six charged violations found “In Violation,” and the Beta Chapter placed on suspended status through Fall 2030. Investigation initiated November 3, 2025; organization notified November 6, 2025; process resolved December 19, 2025.
Still outstanding: The Harris County cause number, which is blank on the petition as filed and is assigned by the clerk after submission.

Case 3 — Thomson & Camp v. Phi Kappa Sigma — Cause No. 26CVDC-00084

Verified from the file-stamped Plaintiffs’ Original Petition itself.

Style: Charles Thomson and Damian Camp, Plaintiffs v. Phi Kappa Sigma International Fraternity; Phi Kappa Sigma Epsilon Alpha Chapter; Rhyne Gailey as Trustee of The Legacy Trust, Defendants
Cause number: 26CVDC-00084
Court: 266th District Court, Erath County, Texas · Clerk Rebecca Facio · e-file envelope 113721311
Filed for record: April 16, 2026, 8:07 a.m.
Institution: Tarleton State University, Stephenville, Texas
★ The third defendant is, again, the property owner: Rhyne Gailey, as Trustee of The Legacy Trust — who holds title to 961 N. Meadowlark Lane, Stephenville, the incident property. Two petitions, two property owners named as defendants.
The national organization: Phi Kappa Sigma International Fraternity, a foreign nonprofit corporation with its home office in Carmel, Indiana. It designated no registered agent in Texas, so it was served through the Texas Secretary of State under the Long Arm Statute. We include this detail because families should know that a national fraternity’s failure to designate an agent does not put it out of reach.
Conduct as pleaded: The plaintiffs were entering their Spring 2026 semester when they accepted bids. They pleaded that they accepted because the fraternity advertised a values-driven, safety conscious brotherhood focused on leadership, service and integrity. On or around February 2026, at a private residence, pledges were required to memorize the Greek alphabet, penalized with multiple push-ups and other exercises for wrong answers, and required to “chug” beers between memorization and exercise.
Injuries as pleaded, verbatim: Plaintiffs sustained severe psychological and physical injuries including hospitalization for rhabdomyolysis.
Relief sought, verbatim: seeks monetary relief over $10,000,000.00.
Independent institutional corroboration: Tarleton State University’s own Campus Hazing Transparency Report lists, verbatim: “Phi Kappa Sigma, Epsilon Alpha Chapter – Spring 2026.” For the preceding academic year the report states there were no findings of hazing behavior — making this the only such finding in the reporting window.

Notice what the combination of alcohol and forced calisthenics produced in Case 3: rhabdomyolysis requiring hospitalization, in two pledges. Section 4 explains why alcohol and forced exercise together are worse than either alone. Beer-chugging between sets of push-ups is not a party. It is two myotoxic exposures acting on the same muscle fibers plus an amplified kidney insult — and the alcohol was supplied by the defendants.

The lawyers, in full, with the sources

Ralph P. Manginello — founding attorney: Licensed in Texas since November 6, 1998 — Texas Bar Card No. 24007597, verifiable on the State Bar of Texas member record. Twenty-seven years at the bar. Also admitted in New York — a dual-jurisdiction credential comparatively few Texas personal injury practitioners hold — and admitted before the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Juris Doctor, South Texas College of Law Houston, July 1998. Registered practice areas of record with the State Bar: Litigation: Personal Injury, Criminal, and Labor-Employment. Speaks Spanish — recorded on his official bar profile, not merely claimed in marketing.
Lupe E. Peña: Licensed in Texas since December 6, 2012 — Texas Bar Card No. 24084332, verifiable on the State Bar of Texas member record. The State Bar records his status verbatim as Eligible to Practice in Texas with No Public Disciplinary History. Juris Doctor, South Texas College of Law Houston, May 2012. Registered practice areas: Litigation: Personal Injury, Litigation: Commercial, and Construction. A third-generation Texan, born and raised in Sugar Land. Practices in fluent Spanish — recorded on his State Bar profile as language assistance offered to clients. Before moving to the plaintiff’s side, he practiced at a national insurance-defense firm, where he saw firsthand how large carriers evaluate and value injury claims. He is the signing attorney on both of the petitions described above, with Ralph Manginello as co-counsel.

How a Utah family actually works with us

We will say it a third time, because it should be impossible to miss: neither of us is licensed in Utah. Ralph is licensed in Texas and New York. Lupe is licensed in Texas.

Here is exactly what happens when a Utah family calls.

We take the call ourselves, and it is free. Not an intake service. Not a screener. You will talk to a lawyer about what happened.
We tell you what we think, honestly, including if we think you do not need a lawyer at all. Sometimes the answer is a records request and a phone call to a national headquarters. We will tell you that.
If there is a case, we bring in Utah counsel. We are networked with trial lawyers across the country and we associate with excellent local counsel in the state where the case belongs. We do not hand you a phone number and disappear. We stay on the matter, and the family gets both firms.
The fee is split between the firms — not added to your bill. A fee division between lawyers divides the same contingency fee. It does not increase what a client pays. Ask us to confirm that in writing. Ask any lawyer who proposes it to confirm it in writing.
Nothing is owed unless there is a recovery. Ask for the percentage in writing, and ask separately how case expenses are handled and who pays them if the case is lost. Section 18 is the full list of questions to ask us.

Why we think the national practice is the right one for a hazing case, stated as an argument rather than a slogan: the national fraternity is not in your state. The insurance program is national. The risk-management policy the chapter violated was written at a headquarters in another state. The medicine is identical everywhere. The federal transparency statute is one statute. The pattern evidence that makes these cases — a national organization’s conduct across many campuses — is invisible to a lawyer looking at one campus. Section 9 is exactly that kind of pattern, and we found it by reading two states’ records, not one campus’s.

We built the research behind this page — every Utah institution, every chapter, every transparency report, and a medical reference covering seventy-five distinct hazing injuries — because that is the work the practice requires. We are publishing it rather than keeping it because a family armed with it is better off, whoever they hire.

18. Before you speak to any attorney

Including us.

Questions worth asking anyone

Have you handled hazing cases specifically? Not just personal injury — hazing. Ask which ones. Ask for the case names. A lawyer who has done this can name them.
Are you licensed in my state? If not, who will be, and what is that relationship? There is nothing wrong with a national firm associating local counsel — it is standard and it is often better. But you are entitled to know exactly who is who.
Will the fee split cost me anything extra? The answer should be no, and you should get it in writing.
Who will actually work my case, and who will I talk to?
How does the fee work? Most injury firms work on contingency — a percentage of any recovery, nothing if there is no recovery. Ask for the percentage in writing, and ask separately how case expenses are handled and who pays them if the case is lost. Those are two different questions and the second one surprises people.
What is my deadline? Any competent lawyer answers this immediately. If a Utah public university is involved, the honest answer includes the Governmental Immunity Act’s notice requirement. If they do not raise it, raise it yourself.
Who can be held responsible? If the answer is only “the guys who did it,” keep looking. Section 10 is the list a serious lawyer should walk you through.
Have you read the school’s hazing transparency report? This is our favorite question, because it takes ten minutes and tells you everything about how hard someone is willing to work.
What will this ask of me and my family, and for how long?
What do you think are the weaknesses in my case? Be wary of anyone who says there are none.

Things you deserve to hear from an honest lawyer

Litigation is slow, and it can be hard. Depositions are unpleasant. Not every case should be filed. Anyone who guarantees you an outcome or a number at a first meeting is telling you something they cannot know.

You should also hear this: a settlement is not an admission and a dismissal is not a verdict. The three matters described in section 17 are pending. They have no outcomes. Nothing on this page predicts what would happen in your case, and nobody — including us — can honestly tell you otherwise.

If you are also worried about your own exposure

Some survivors were also present when others were hazed, or participated before they were harmed. If that is your situation, be careful about talking to school investigators, chapter lawyers, or insurers before getting independent advice of your own.

Their lawyer is not your lawyer. The chapter’s attorney represents the chapter. The school’s investigator works for the school. The insurer’s adjuster works for the insurer.

This is common and it does not make you a bad person. It makes your situation more complicated, and you deserve someone in your corner. And note the specific Utah wrinkle: Utah’s good-faith reporting immunity clearly protects the act of reporting, but whether it extends to your own conduct is not resolved on the face of the statute. Get your own lawyer first.

Free and low-cost help exists, and you should use it

Your state bar’s lawyer referral service: The neutral, regulator-run alternative to advertising-driven lead generation. Every state has one. Many offer free or reduced-fee consultations.
Legal aid organizations: Free civil legal help based on income. They will not usually take an injury case, but they will help with records access, school conduct proceedings, and knowing your rights.
Crime victim compensation: Every state has a program, funded partly under the federal Victims of Crime Act, that directly reimburses crime-related expenses — medical bills, counseling, lost wages. It is not a lawsuit and it does not require one. These programs usually require a police report, often within a short window, so ask early. Federal overview of state programs.
VictimConnect: 1-855-4VICTIM (855-484-2846) — free, confidential, anonymous. They will tell you what exists in your state without selling you anything.

19. Questions people actually ask us

Is hazing illegal in Utah?

Yes. Utah Code §76-5-107.5 makes hazing a crime, with four penalty tiers running from a class B misdemeanor up to a second degree felony. Utah’s statute is one of the broadest in the country on the conduct side — it expressly reaches mental health and safety, and it expressly names calisthenics, sleep deprivation, extended isolation, and extreme embarrassment, shame, or humiliation. Full breakdown in section 3.

How long do I have to file a hazing lawsuit in Utah?

Generally four years for a personal injury claim under Utah Code §78B-2-307 — among the longest deadlines in the country. But there is a critical exception: claims against Utah’s public universities are governed by the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah, which imposes a written notice-of-claim requirement with a deadline dramatically shorter than four years. Missing it can extinguish an otherwise perfect claim. If the University of Utah, Utah State, Weber State, Southern Utah, Utah Tech, Utah Valley, Snow College, or Salt Lake Community College is involved, treat your time as short and get advice immediately. Section 3.

My son agreed to it. Does that end our case?

No, and here is the honest, complete answer. Utah’s criminal statute says consent is not a defense where the person hazed was under 21. The federal definition contains no age limit at all — it applies regardless of that person’s willingness to participate. And the criminal consent rule is not the civil rule: a civil claim for negligence, negligent supervision, premises liability, or wrongful death does not rise or fall on it. Coercion inside a hierarchy where refusal means expulsion from the group is not free choice as a factual matter, and that is how consent arguments are met. Section 3 has the full treatment, including the limit.

It happened off campus. Does that matter?

Usually not the way people fear. Utah State University’s own hazing policy expressly reaches conduct both on and off campus, and within Student Organizations. The death of Michael Starks occurred at a private, off-campus residence and still ended two chapters, produced entity-level felony charges, and produced a settlement with the university. And off-campus conduct often strengthens the property-owner claim, because the landlord who leased the house becomes a defendant. Section 10.

Who can actually be sued?

Far more than the individuals. Depending on the facts: the individuals · the local chapter · the national organization · the chapter house corporation · the property owner · the institution · responsible employees such as coaches and advisors · and whoever supplied the alcohol. In both hazing petitions this firm has filed and can show you, the property owner is a named defendant. Section 10 explains each layer.

Has any Utah fraternity actually been punished for hazing?

Yes, and here is the entire public record. Under the federal Stop Campus Hazing Act, exactly two organizations in Utah have been formally found responsible and disclosed: Sigma Nu at the University of Utah, terminated through at least Summer 2031, and Pi Phi Alpha Sorority at Weber State, placed on probation. Historically, both the Sigma Nu and Chi Omega chapters at Utah State were each charged with third-degree felony hazing as entities after Michael Starks’s death. Section 7 has everything, verbatim, with links.

My child’s school shows zero hazing findings. Is it safe?

That is not what a zero means, and this is the most dangerous misreading on the internet. A zero means no organization was formally found responsible during a reporting period that only began July 1, 2025. It excludes unsubstantiated allegations, anything before that date, any unrecognized organization, and every injury. Utah Tech University’s zero is structurally guaranteed — it recognizes no Greek organizations, so hazing by the unaffiliated chapter near its campus would produce no entry no matter how severe. Section 12 lists all nine blind spots.

Why does BYU not have a hazing transparency report?

We do not know why, and we are not going to guess. What we can tell you is the documented fact: BYU has published no Campus Hazing Transparency Report, per national compliance tracking as of January 2026. BYU’s own Clery page describes compiling a report (if necessary), reading the federal duty as conditional. The obligation applies regardless of whether findings exist — ten Utah peers published reports saying zero. BYU prohibits fraternities and sororities entirely, so its Greek exposure is genuinely nil — but the federal Act covers athletic teams, bands, performance groups, ROTC, and residence hall communities, and BYU has all of them at very large scale. Section 7.

What is rhabdomyolysis, and why does everyone keep mentioning it?

It is the signature hazing injury. When muscle is pushed far past its limit — hundreds of push-ups or squats, wall-sits held to collapse, beating, restraint — muscle tissue breaks down and floods the bloodstream, and the kidneys can fail trying to filter it. Watch for dark, tea-colored, or cola-colored urine, weakness, and pain out of proportion to the workout. Two things mislead people: it can look fine for a day or two, and the classic symptoms appear in fewer than half of patients. Section 4.

He seems fine the next morning. Do we still need a doctor?

Yes. Blood markers for muscle breakdown peak between one and five days. Bleeding inside the skull can present after a completely lucid interval. A lacerated spleen can bleed slowly for days. “He seemed fine” is how families describe the hours before something terrible. Section 6 is the hour-by-hour timeline, and it is the most important clinical section on this page.

Will we get in trouble for calling 911?

In Utah, the law is on your side twice. Utah Code §76-3-203.9 provides 911 Good Samaritan immunity. And Utah’s hazing statute separately provides that a person who in good faith reports hazing is not subject to any civil or criminal liability regarding the reporting — a protection most states’ hazing statutes do not contain. Call. A charge can be fought. A death cannot be appealed. Section 1.

My child is over 18 and the hospital will not talk to me. What do I do?

This is the wall almost every parent hits, and it is solvable — far more easily before a crisis than during one. Your adult child can sign a HIPAA authorization naming you and a FERPA release naming you. Many families also complete a healthcare power of attorney. Ask the hospital and the registrar for their forms. If your child is leaving for a Utah campus, do this before they go. Section 16.

What should we do in the first 48 hours?

Get medical care and say exactly what happened. Photograph everything daily, including dark urine. Do not delete a single message — export the group chats tonight. Write down the timeline while it is fresh, especially the gap between when someone needed help and when someone called. Save every school and organization communication. Get witness phone numbers before the pledge class scatters. Section 13 is the full checklist with the official data-export instructions from Discord, Snapchat, Google, GroupMe, and Apple.

How do I find my school’s hazing transparency report?

Every located Utah report is linked in section 7. For any other school, check four places, because there is no standard location: Dean of Students, campus police or Clery, health services, and the Maxient endpoint at cm.maxient.com/chtr.php? plus the school’s key. Two Utah schools file theirs under campus police, which is the most common miss in the country. Section 14.

Is hazing only a fraternity problem?

No, and this misconception costs families their cases. Federal law reaches any student organization: varsity and club athletic teams, marching bands, student government, performance groups, ROTC and corps of cadets, spirit squads, honor and service organizations, residence hall communities, and student employee groups — recognized or not. Section 2.

Does hazing law cover high schools in Utah?

Yes. Utah’s statute reaches conduct directed against members or candidates of a school team or organization. Note, though, that the federal transparency-report system applies only to colleges receiving federal student aid — there is no K-12 equivalent of the transparency report anywhere in the country. For a high school matter, the evidence comes from the district, the athletic association, law enforcement, and local news instead.

What if the fraternity has no national organization?

Then the case changes shape entirely, and this is a live issue in Utah. Every Greek organization at Weber State University is a local organization with no national affiliation whatsoever — no national defendant, no national risk-management policy, likely no national insurance tower, and no headquarters to report to. Recovery shifts to the university, the unincorporated association, its officers individually, and the property owner, who becomes the primary defendant rather than a secondary one. Section 11 is devoted to this.

Are you licensed in Utah?

No. Ralph Manginello is licensed in Texas and New York. Lupe Peña is licensed in Texas. Our office is in Houston. We are networked with trial lawyers nationwide, and when a Utah family has a case we associate excellent Utah counsel and split the fee between the firms — which does not increase what a client pays. We stay on the matter. You get both firms. Section 17 explains exactly how it works, and section 18 tells you what to ask us about it.

What does it cost to talk to you?

Nothing. The consultation is free, there is no fee unless there is a recovery, and there is no form on this page. If we think you do not need a lawyer, we will tell you that too — sometimes the right answer is a records request and a call to a national headquarters, and we will say so.

Can you promise us a result?

No, and neither can anyone else. The three matters described in section 17 are pending. A pleading is an allegation, not a finding. No outcome exists in any of them, and nothing on this page predicts what would happen in your case. Anyone who guarantees you an outcome or a number at a first meeting is telling you something they cannot know.

20. Every resource, verified

Everything below was checked. Phone numbers were verified on the operating organization’s own site. Sources are government, academic, or established nonprofit. Law firm marketing pages were excluded as a class — including our own.

Research and national data

StopHazing: The research-to-practice organization behind the national hazing research base, led by Dr. Elizabeth Allan at the University of Maine.
Allan & Madden, Hazing in View: College Students at Risk · full report PDF: The landmark national prevalence study: 11,482 undergraduate survey responses from 53 U.S. campuses plus 300+ interviews. Its most-quoted finding is that 55% of students involved with a campus club, team, or organization experience hazing — and we state the denominator every time, because it is almost universally misreported as “55% of college students.” It also found 47% reported hazing before college.
University of Maine — Hazing Prevention Research Lab: Where the national research is produced.
Timothy J. Piazza Center, Penn State — 814-865-7000: University research center created in January 2019 and named for Timothy Piazza, who died in February 2017 after hazing at Beta Theta Pi.
The Gordie Center, University of Virginia: National center working to end hazing and substance misuse among college and high school students.
Hank Nuwer — hazing deaths chronology · HazingInfo.org — searchable deaths dashboard: The canonical compilation of U.S. hazing, initiation, and pledging deaths, maintained since 1975, now searchable and downloadable covering 1838 to the present.
Perez (2023), “Deadly Initiations: Characteristics of Hazing Deaths in the United States (1994–2019)”: Peer-reviewed empirical study in Violence and Victims.
Alfred University — NCAA athletics initiation survey (1999) · high school survey (2000): The first large national survey of hazing in college athletics, and the only located national prevalence survey of U.S. high school hazing.

Prevention and advocacy organizations

Hazing Prevention Network: 501(c)(3) founded in 2007. Runs National Hazing Prevention Week, held the last full week of September.
Clery Center — (484) 580-8754: National nonprofit on campus safety compliance. Its Stop Campus Hazing Act guide is the clearest plain-English explanation of the law we have found.
Anti-Hazing Coalition: Formed September 10, 2018 by parents whose sons died from hazing, together with the North American Interfraternity Conference and the National Panhellenic Conference.
North American Interfraternity Conference · National Panhellenic Conference · National Pan-Hellenic Council: The three umbrella bodies. The NIC sets baseline health-and-safety standards for member fraternities and takes standards-violation reports. NPC represents 26 women’s sororities; NPHC represents the nine historically African American organizations known as the Divine Nine.

Federal law and government tools

Stop Campus Hazing Act — Public Law 118-173, full text: The complete official text of the federal law as enacted, published by the U.S. Government Publishing Office. This is the statute that made the entire Utah record in section 7 possible.
20 U.S.C. §1092 — the Clery Act as amended · 34 C.F.R. §668.46 — implementing regulations: The currently-in-force codified text with the hazing amendments integrated, and the binding regulations telling colleges how to comply.
Campus Safety and Security Data Analysis Tool: Free federal database of crime and safety statistics for every college receiving federal aid.
Office for Civil Rights — file a complaint — 800-421-3481: Federal Title IX complaints. Anyone may file; you do not need to be the victim. Generally within 180 days.
StopHazing — State Anti-Hazing Laws map: Every state’s statute with links to the actual legislation. Useful context: 44 states plus D.C. have some form of anti-hazing law, but if the question is “is hazing a crime where I live,” the honest count is 38 states plus D.C. Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Wyoming have no anti-hazing statute at all — though the federal Act still binds their institutions.

Reporting channels

Anti-Hazing Hotline — 1-888-NOT-HAZE (1-888-668-4293): Anonymous, 24 hours. Funded by the fraternal industry — disclosed so you can weigh it.
U.S. Center for SafeSport — 833-5US-SAFE (833-587-7233): Independent national body with authority over 50+ Olympic and Paralympic sports and their affiliated clubs. Hazing is expressly within its jurisdiction.
Courage First Athlete Helpline — 1-888-279-1026: Free call, text, or chat. Confidential support and guidance on abuse in sport, hazing included.
Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline — 800-422-4453: 24/7, live counselors, 170 languages. Call or text GO. For anyone under 18.
Hazing Prevention Network — How to Report Hazing: Plain-language walkthrough of every reporting route.

Records, rights, and self-advocacy

45 CFR 164.524 — your right to your own medical records: The actual regulation. 30-day response deadline, one 30-day extension.
HHS Office for Civil Rights complaint portal — 1-800-368-1019: If a provider refuses, delays, or overcharges for your records.
Student Privacy Policy Office · student guide to FERPA · file a FERPA complaint: Everything on education-record rights, written for students and parents.
Reporters Committee — Open Government Guide · NFOIC — state FOI laws and sample letters: Both cover Utah’s GRAMA and give you sample request letters.
Cornell Legal Information Institute — statute of limitations · U.S. Courts — how a civil case works: Free, non-commercial, neutral. The federal judiciary’s own plain-language walkthrough of complaint, answer, discovery, settlement, trial, verdict.
FRCP 37(e) — failure to preserve electronic evidence: Establishes that a duty to preserve arises when litigation is reasonably foreseeable. Why a preservation letter matters in week one.
DOJ Office for Victims of Crime — crime victim compensation: Every state has a program that reimburses medical bills, counseling, and lost wages. Usually requires a police report within a short window.
State Attorneys General directory: Official federal directory for every state including Utah.

21. Sources, limits, and corrections

We hold ourselves to a set of rules on this page. Here they are, so you can hold us to them too.

How this page was built

Every fact carries its source. Where we quote an institution, we quote it verbatim and link the page.
Marketing language is not a fact. No Attorney911-owned or operated property was used as a source for any fact on this page — not attorney911.com, not our social channels, not anything we published. Our own website is marketing, and marketing is only as good as the marketing. A page that cites its own promotional copy cannot be defended by anyone against anyone.
Unverified is labeled unverified. Where we could not confirm something, we say so rather than smoothing it into confident prose.
Conflicts are surfaced, not resolved. Where two sources disagree — a filing date, a hospital stay length, a chapter count — we record both.
Absence of evidence is never evidence of absence. A negative result from a search interface is never treated as proof of nothing, and an inaccessible source is never treated as an absent one. We learned this the hard way and section 12 explains how.

What we deliberately left out, and why

Clinical dosing, lab thresholds, and treatment protocols. Those belong to your doctors. A frightened person reading numbers out of context at 3 a.m. is not helped by them.
The widely circulated statistic that some large percentage of hazing deaths involve alcohol. You will see 69%, 82%, and 96% quoted across the internet, including by law firms. We could not trace any version of that figure to a primary source with a stated denominator or methodology, and the canonical hazing deaths database publishes no aggregate percentage at all. So we do not use it. Alcohol involvement is nonetheless extensively documented at the level of individual incidents — including in both of Utah’s two hazing findings, and in the death of Michael Starks. We cite the incidents rather than an orphan number.
Any claim that brain scans can prove hazing changed someone’s brain. The research does not support it for an individual case, and offering it would hand a defense expert its best argument. The far stronger proof of cognitive and life impact is the academic transcript and enrollment record — objective, contemporaneous, third-party generated, and already in the school’s own files.
Any promise, guarantee, or prediction of outcome.

What we know is incomplete

The federal record only reaches back to July 1, 2025. Nine specific blind spots are listed in section 12 and you should read them before drawing any conclusion from a zero.
The first federal Clery hazing statistics in U.S. history publish on or before October 1, 2026. This page is incomplete until then, and we intend to update it.
Utah’s eight public technical colleges are not in this census even though the same federal requirement binds them.
Seven Utah institutions are described as “report not located.” That is not the same as non-compliant, and we deliberately did not accuse them.
Transparency reports update at least twice yearly. Everything in section 7 has a shelf life measured in months.
Resource pages change. Check anything before relying on it.

If you find an error on this page

Tell us and we will fix it. That includes universities, fraternities, sororities, and their counsel. If an organization named on this page believes something here is inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date — including a chapter that has been reinstated, a report that has since been published, or a finding that has been overturned — write to us and we will correct the record. Every disclosure here is drawn from a public institutional source, and a public record that has changed should be reflected.

The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — Attorney911
1177 West Loop South, Suite 1600
Houston, Texas 77027
713-528-9070

Ralph P. Manginello is licensed to practice law in Texas and New York. Lupe E. Peña is licensed to practice law in Texas. Neither attorney is licensed in Utah. Utah matters are handled in association with locally licensed Utah counsel, with any fee divided between the firms in accordance with applicable rules of professional conduct — a division that does not increase the fee paid by the client. Ralph P. Manginello is responsible for the content of this page.

This page is information, not medical advice and not legal advice. Advice requires knowing your specific situation, and we do not. Reading this page, or contacting us, does not create an attorney-client relationship — that relationship is created only by a signed written agreement. Do not send confidential information through any website. Every case is different and prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome. The matters described in section 17 are pending; the allegations in a petition are allegations only and have not been proven. Nothing on this page asserts that any organization, institution, or individual named here is liable to anyone. Institutional findings are reproduced as published by the institutions themselves. Laws change; statutory citations should be confirmed against current text before anyone relies on them.

If you take one thing from this

You are not the first. You are not alone in it. And the shame belongs to the people who did it, not to the person it was done to.

Whatever you decide about lawyers, lawsuits, reporting, or telling anyone at all — decide it with good information and with people around you.

That was the whole point of this.

Utah Hazing Lawsuits: The Complete Guide for Victims and Families — Every Utah College, Every Fraternity and Sorority Chapter, Every Published Hazing Finding, and Everything Utah’s Record Cannot See