Police reports and court documents obtained by the Arizona Daily Sun paint a devastatingly familiar picture of the January 31 hazing death at Northern Arizona University's Delta Tau Delta fraternity house. For anyone who has followed fraternity hazing cases over the past two decades, the details read like a script that repeats itself with tragic regularity, changed only by the names, the campus, and the Greek letters on the house.
An 18-year-old pledge invited to a final recruitment event. Hazing-related alcohol abuse as a condition of membership. A young man who can no longer speak or stand while fraternity members watch. Late-night internet searches about alcohol poisoning symptoms, but no emergency call until morning, when it's already too late.
The victim's name has not been publicly released out of respect for his family, but the circumstances of his death follow a pattern so well-established that David Bianchi, a hazing attorney who has represented victims' families in numerous high-profile cases, recognized it immediately.
"I've had far too many cases with almost the exact same scenario as you're describing here," Bianchi told the Daily Sun. "What typically happens is—in all of the cases I've had that are almost identical to this one—these pledges get drunk, they can't walk, they can't talk, so they are then laid down someplace in the fraternity house—either on the floor, on a couch, on a bed—to 'sleep it off.' Then people stop really paying attention. And at some point, late at night, they vomit and they aspirate their own vomit."
What the Police Records Show
Court filings reveal that Delta Tau Delta concluded its recruitment week with a January 31 dinner for four pledges who had been selected for membership. According to witness accounts, the evening's events included forced alcohol consumption through drinking games, a tradition the fraternity allegedly required as part of becoming a member.
The pledges collectively consumed two 1.75-liter bottles of vodka over the course of several hours. The victim drank a disproportionate share: roughly a third of the first bottle and nearly two-thirds of the second, amounting to what investigators estimate was the equivalent of two dozen shots or more.
The evening followed a ritualized pattern: pillowcases placed over pledges' heads, mandatory silence, a drinking game that required finishing entire bottles, a vomiting break, then another round of the same game. According to court documents, the alcohol had been provided by fraternity leadership. The chapter's New Member Educator, Carter Eslick, allegedly acknowledged to investigators that he supplied the liquor as part of the initiation process.
Older members facilitated underage drinking through a combination of purchasing alcohol themselves and looking the other way when younger members used fake identification, according to witness statements.
The Long Night Nobody Acted
By 10 or 11 p.m., the victim could no longer move or communicate on his own. He was placed on an air mattress, beginning a vigil that should have ended with a 911 call but instead dragged on for hours.
Around midnight, someone noticed unusual breathing and gagging. At 3 a.m., fraternity members were searching online for alcohol poisoning symptoms. Throughout the early morning hours, various people checked on the victim, adjusting his position, feeling for a pulse, confirming he was still breathing.
Vice President Ryan Creech checked at 5:30 a.m. Treasurer Riley Cass stayed nearby until approximately 6 a.m., then left to get a jacket and fell asleep elsewhere.
At 8:22 a.m., more than nine hours after the victim had become incapacitated, someone finally called emergency services. By then, the young man was unresponsive, cold, and beyond saving. Officers observed dark fluid, possibly blood, coming from his mouth as CPR was attempted.
A Pattern That Refuses to Break
For Bianchi, the NAU case was painfully recognizable because he's seen it before, multiple times.
Andrew Coffey died at a Florida State University Pi Kappa Phi "Big Brother Night" in 2017. The tradition was identical: a handle of hard liquor handed to a pledge with instructions to finish it. Andrew was laid on a couch while the party continued around him. Hours passed. By the time anyone realized he needed help, acute alcohol poisoning had already claimed his life.
Daniel Santulli survived his hazing at the University of Missouri's Phi Gamma Delta chapter in 2021, but only barely. During "Pledge Dad Reveal Night," he was given a bottle of Tito's vodka to consume rapidly. When that wasn't enough, a fraternity brother used a funnel to pour beer directly down his throat. Danny passed out. Brothers eventually tried to move him and dropped him on his head. Today, he is blind, unable to walk, and unable to communicate, requiring 24-hour care for the rest of his life.
These aren't just similar cases. They're nearly identical scripts performed by different casts on different campuses. The forced consumption of massive quantities of alcohol. The deterioration into helplessness while others watch. The hours of inaction punctuated by checking vital signs rather than calling for medical help. The eventual recognition that something is terribly wrong, always too late.
"It is absolutely heartbreaking to think that this factual pattern repeats itself over and over again, despite the efforts of so many people nationally to try to stop it," Bianchi said.
The Infrastructure Exists, But Not the Enforcement
The tragic irony is that the legal and policy infrastructure to prevent these deaths already exists.
"Almost every state in the United States has an anti-hazing law," Bianchi noted. "Every major fraternity in the country has an anti-hazing policy. And every significant college and university has an anti-hazing policy. So all the laws, rules and regulations needed to try to stop this behavior are already on the books." STFBC partners David Bianchi and Michael Levine were instrumental in drafting and lobbying for two pieces of anti-hazing legislation in Florida: Andrew's Law and the Chad Meredith Act.
Yet across the country, enforcement remains inconsistent. Whether perpetrators face serious consequences depends largely on prosecutorial decisions that vary wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some cases result in felony charges and prison time. Others produce misdemeanors with probation. Still others, like a hazing death at Cornell University, result in no criminal charges at all.
In the NAU case, three fraternity executive board members were arrested and released pending future court proceedings. Whether additional charges will be filed, and against how many individuals, remains to be seen.
"If you do not aggressively enforce the criminal statutes that make hazing a crime, then you're not going to stop fraternity members from doing it again, because they're not going to really fear the consequences," Bianchi said.
Universities Must Act Swiftly. They Rarely Do.
But criminal prosecution alone is not enough. Universities must demonstrate that hazing will result in immediate, severe consequences for everyone involved.
"Once the university has evidence that there was an illegal hazing event involving alcohol that was illegally served to people who are underage, the university should be immediately expelling everyone involved," Bianchi said. "And they rarely do that."
Instead, internal disciplinary processes drag on. In some cases Bianchi has worked on, students responsible for fatal hazing incidents graduated before the university completed its own review. The delay sends a clear message: you might face consequences eventually, but you won't face them quickly or certainly.
NAU has placed Delta Tau Delta on interim suspension and issued statements emphasizing its commitment to student safety. The university touts its training programs and policies. But every school where a hazing death has occurred had policies and training programs too. The question isn't whether universities have anti-hazing rules. It's whether they enforce them with the speed and severity necessary to create genuine deterrence.
What's needed is a zero-tolerance policy backed by immediate action: expulsion for anyone who participates in or helps plan hazing activities. Permanent charter revocation for organizations where hazing occurs. No probationary periods, no lengthy appeals, no students remaining on campus while "the investigation unfolds."
Interim suspensions and vague promises of accountability have failed to prevent these deaths. A different approach is long overdue.
Arizona's Good Samaritan Law Has Limits
Arizona's anti-hazing statute includes a provision designed to save lives. Anyone who calls 911 during a hazing emergency, cooperates with investigators, and stays with the victim until help arrives receives protection from criminal prosecution for the hazing itself.
The logic is sound: better to incentivize life-saving action than to prosecute everyone equally. As Bianchi put it: "Ask any parent who has lost their son to hazing, and they will all tell you the same thing: they would much rather have their son back than prosecute the person who did it."
But Good Samaritan protections only matter if someone actually calls for help, and that's only going to happen if hazing laws are strictly enforced. At the Delta Tau Delta house, nobody did. Not when the victim became nonverbal, not when his breathing turned unusual, not when people were Googling alcohol poisoning symptoms at 3 a.m.
"In this particular case, if someone in the fraternity house who saw this victim laying there so drunk that he could not move, if someone had called 911, there's a very good chance that he would be alive today," Bianchi said.
The law offered immunity, but fear or indifference or some calculus about consequences prevented anyone from picking up the phone until nine hours had passed. By then, immunity was irrelevant. There was no life left to save.
More Than Three People Are Responsible
Three fraternity officers have been arrested, but Bianchi believes the scope of responsibility extends far beyond that number.
"I can guarantee you that there are more than three people that could be facing criminal charges in the case we're talking about," he said. "Because there were more than three people involved in planning this event, in buying the alcohol, in serving the alcohol and in planning for the actual hazing that took place."
Hazing is collaborative. Someone organizes the event. Someone purchases the alcohol. Someone hands it to pledges. Someone enforces the rules about finishing bottles. Someone stands by and watches. Everyone who participated in that chain bears responsibility for what happened.
National fraternity organizations will inevitably claim their local chapters acted independently and violated clearly established policies. But when the same dangerous traditions persist across different chapters and different decades, it suggests not isolated bad actors but a systemic cultural problem, one that national organizations have failed to address despite their policies and training programs.
A Call for Zero Tolerance
The solution is not more policy revisions or additional training modules. What's missing is the institutional will to enforce existing rules without hesitation or compromise.
Zero tolerance must mean exactly that: immediate expulsion for any student who participates in hazing. Permanent charter revocation for any organization where hazing occurs. No warnings, no internal review processes that stretch across semesters, no second chances for behavior that puts lives at risk.
Some will argue this standard is too harsh, that young people make mistakes and deserve opportunities to learn from them. They'll point to the positive aspects of Greek life: the friendships, the service work, the networking advantages.
But weigh that against what's on the other side of the scale. Parents who buried their son. A young man who will never finish college, never have a career, never get married, never have children. A family forever shattered by a single night of "tradition."
When universities demonstrate that the consequences of hazing are certain, immediate, and severe enough to end college careers, the calculus changes. When every person in that fraternity house knows that participating means expulsion, not just for the organizer but for everyone who helped, everyone who watched, everyone who stood by, they might finally choose to call 911 instead of consulting Google at 3 a.m.
The pattern will only break when the consequences become too severe to ignore. Until then, police reports from different campuses will continue to read like copies of each other, changed only by the names and dates while the core tragedy remains the same.
The 18-year-old at NAU deserved better. So did Andrew Coffey. So did Daniel Santulli. So do the pledges who will walk into fraternity houses next semester, trusting that the organizations they're joining will protect them rather than destroy them.
It's time for universities to prove that trust is warranted by implementing zero-tolerance policies and enforcing them without exception. Anything less is just another variation on a script that has already been performed far too many times, with far too many young lives lost.