NBC News has obtained police records showing that friction between Cornell's campus police and the Tompkins County District Attorney's office goes back years further than the current Jane Doe case, to the 2019 investigation into Antonio Tsialas' death. Our own David Bianchi, who represents the Tsialas family, was interviewed for the story.
According to the records, campus investigators ran into repeated resistance from DA Matthew Van Houten's office while trying to piece together what happened to Tsialas after he left an unauthorized fraternity party. After a rideshare driver contacted police saying he thought he might have driven Tsialas that night, investigators spent weeks trying to get the DA's office to approve a subpoena for the trip records, an approval that only came once the request reached Van Houten personally.
A separate attempt to obtain the fraternity's financial records ran into the same wall: the DA's office told campus police the records were "outside the scope of the felony level investigation," then reversed that position about a week and a half later. The case stayed open for nearly a year, with campus police working through well over a hundred interviews and hundreds of individual leads before Van Houten ultimately declined to file charges in 2020.
That's the same prosecutor who, five years later, declined to pursue charges in the 2024 Jane Doe case before the state stepped in. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has since appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor to reinvestigate that case, and Cornell has separately hired former acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates to review how the university itself handled the allegations.
Speaking with NBC News, Bianchi didn't hold back on what the pattern means for the Tsialas family. "No one has ever told us how or why Antonio died," he said, pointing to the lack of charges in either case as proof that the family's long-standing concerns about Van Houten's office were never isolated to their son's case alone. As Bianchi put it, "the family does not believe he is doing his job."
Our firm has fought hazing and other fraternity misconduct for more than two decades. This latest reporting only reinforces what we've said for years: accountability has to mean more than policy on paper.