Chi Psi Colorado Proceeds
 

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_5213016

This is the Gordie Bailey case out of Colorado. His mother is suing the fraternity. She is blaming Gordie's death on hazing.

Perhaps as important is that she is also suing seven individual members of the chapter.

I saw this mentioned on the news. Do I have standing to sue her for being stupid?

Really not trying to start a fight. I am sincerely curious about your statement/question.

Seriously?! You've got to be kidding.

His death is as much her fault as it is the fraternity's.

Again, if you could just explain a little more. Not being sarcastic at all, but I am interested in how you are connecting the charges that this kid was alledgedly blindfolded, led up into the mountains, was encouraged to drink a lot of alcohol, passed out and had slurs painted on his body his mother's fault?

And, again, I said alledgedly. Except for the known part of this tragedy, a young man dying, nothing else has been proven yet.

Yeah i'm gonna agree with LaneSig. How is any of that her fault?

This guy was a grown adult who participated in hazing. Maybe if she'd raised him better he would've had more sense. That's being blunt and an exaggeration of what I'm really saying here, but if she's trying to blame the fraternity, I don't think the fraternity would be wrong to turn around and try to put some of the blame on her. Why should she be entitled to recover money because her adult son did something stupid?

My opinion would be different if there were NEVER any acts of hazing that happened before this and he had no idea what was coming; or if something was slipped into his drink and he was, against his free will, unaware of what was happening; or if he was physically forced to do everything he did and could not possibly escape at any time. Is any of that the case here? All I've heard is that he was blindfolded and taken into the woods -- are you telling me that a healthy adult male couldn't have put the smackdown on anybody trying to blindfold him if he really didn't want to participate?

Yes, this is a tragedy and things like this should never happen again. Yes, these guys were assholes and they should've done something to help him when he was unconscious. However, parents blaming the fraternities is ridiculous. I'm sure my position is unpopular, but holy hell people should take responsibility for themselves and stop blaming others for their actions.

Wow. This is quite a statement.

Was this Young Man an Adult. Yes, but by law because of age, not His Mothers teachings. Being of state legal age does not make him a true adult nor does it excuse the members of the GLO from what happened does it?

Yes, you are correct, people should take the blame for their actions from both sides of the coin.

Is it a tragidy, hell yes it is. So, whose fault is it.

The mother who sent her son off to college or the members of the GLO that he joined to not be more responsible to protect him from harms way.

Adults, that is a very good question. Legal or maturity is the call it seems here.

From my point of view, he was obviously trying to be a normal pledge and did what the guys wanted him to do. Shit, I was naive as hell when I was a freshman in college. I did just about everything that they told me to do during pledgeship. I definitely knew my limits.......but I definitely wanted to participate in everything I could. I think when you are a pledge you absolutely have the notion that everything you are going through was endured by everyone else that went through before you. In a way, that makes pledgeship easier. I really don't think you can always blame parental upbringing when people our age make bad decisions (in some cases, sure you can. Absolutely)...i'll be the first to admit that. I was raised in a pretty strict household and was taught plenty about personal responsibility, accountability, respect, and all of that good stuff.............and I do dumb shit all of the time. Its college.

I do agree with you though on some points. I think blaming the fraternity from an organizational standpoint is pretty lame. If you want to go after individuals, with a valid reason, I can see that being ok.

The fraternity has the insurance policy, tons of assets, etc. You're more likely to get a big award from a jury against an organization than against an individual. Even though insurance coverage won't be discussed, there's not a juror in the world who is not at least going to let that run through his/her mind.

And then, joint and several liability should be a concept most in this thread are familiar with.

I have to agree with everything that macallan is saying (Don't die of shock, macallan.:D ). I am also getting real tired of organizations getting blamed when an individual/individuals do stupid stuff. There is absolutely no way that IHQs or chapter advisors can keep an eye on every single minute detail of what the members are doing. This isn't a situation like what was happening with the Catholic Diocese ("Oh, this member at State U is hazing pledges. Let's send him to University of Duh and maybe he'll stop hazing."). I do think that the individuals need to held responsible.

Understand. But, doesn't make it right.

I'm betting you were also taught that gentlemen drink responsibly and things of that nature. i.e, you didn't come to college just amazed that if you didn't eat all day and had 5 shots of Jack, you might be a tad-bit buzzed.

I think there are too many parents out there who keep their children shielded from everything, to the point that they don't educate them as to what to expect. (See: don't teach my kids about contraception because if you do, they'll Do It.)

yeah, absolutely. I was definitely taught to drink responsibly. Do I always do..........ummmm, no.

The reported info. in this case makes the group look pretty bad. Letting a guy die of alcohol poisoning isn't brotherly or moral. Period.

Generally, however, I think there ought to be a pretty tight limit on how legally responsible we are for other people.

Yes, we all feel pressured to conform and do what others expect of us when we want to be members of a group. And yes, in the spirit of brotherhood or sisterhood, we ought to take good care of each other.

But, when adults willfully undertake activities that they know contain risks and are injured as a result, then I think the adults alone should be legally responsible.

In almost all of the college hazing cases, though, you have people of legal age to buy and consume alcohol providing it to people not of age, and that illegal act maybe should make them legally responsible for the outcome.

It's a really tough situation, and it's always tragic when a kid dies. But moms need to remember that their kids have free will. Sometimes they are mainly victims of their own bad judgment. The outcomes are sometimes tragic but it shouldn't mean someone else was more responsible for the outcome.

I'm pretty sure no one "let" anyone die. It was a negligent act. To say they "let" it happen makes it sound like they were reckless with regard to the kid's life. That may well be the case, but based on the facts presented in the news article, I'd say there's a definite factual issue there.

That gets to be tough. From the organization's perspective, yeah, we'd love this to happen. On the other hand, if nothing else is going to get the attention of our respective organizations, it'll be huge cash awards to plaintiffs and increased insurance costs. You're already seeing this. There are several examples of chapters being completely shut down just because they violate some hazing protocol whether there's a danger or not. These aren't small chapters either. Sigma Nu, for example recently shut down its MTSU chapter -- easily one of our top 10-15 chapters due to hazing. A few years earlier, it was Vanderbilt. Before that, Arkansas. Not even our old, respected southern chapters are immune where before the age of sky-high insurance, hazing was treated with a nod and a wink.

So these settlements hopefully force us to be safer, or they force the closure of organizations which refuse to hold their members accountable. I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.

Further (and I know, I'm getting political here), by setting caps on damage awards as you seem to be suggesting, you are harming parties injured by the negligence of others to protect the people causing the harm. That just ain't right. As for LaneSig, eliminating J&S liability does the same thing. It makes sure that organizations which cause harm to people and the people causing the harm have less liability. How about we just stop doing things which kill people? Is that so hard?

Assumption of risk does not apply to crimes in most cases. Hazing is a crime, serving alcohol to minors is a crime. I'd say this young man would be in the class of persons which those laws are made to protect from harm. The term is negligence per se. At first glance, this definitely looks like a case of negligence per se.

It could probably be shown that in providing alcohol for an organizational function, the officers in charge were in fact agents of the organization. That's just one way I think you could get to the chapter.

Jointly responsible. That means that the plaintiff sues anyone who could be at fault, gets his money from whoever is insured. Then, the insurance company turns around and gets contributions from the other co-defendants for whatever their liability is.

The theory is that the law's goal should be to make the plaintiff whole for the wrong to them. Let the negligent actors sort out the mess later.

While the victim may have been partially at fault here (and that could maybe be a defense), the organization and its officers certainly played a role. They are anything but innocent third parties (from what I've read).

While all may be true to a point, the parents of most kids who can afford to go to college today can also be found at fault.

Parents are one of two ways.

Either coddle kids and give anything they want or do not give nothing to them and the kids are either used to getting their way or are rebelling against them.

When they get to college, they want to do what they want to do. So is it the School or the GLOs responsibility to baby sit over them?

So, where does the problem stem from?

Kids going to school now do not like to live in rooms with one or more people. Kids are used to having cable, phone, and lots of plug ins just like home!

It seems it has become a "ME" attitude society.

Schools are changing dorms, new GLO houses are being built the same way.

Our new house has all of the above with 2 to a room and a common shared bathing area for another room!

Figure the cost of building a new house now!

PSU, KS. not counting the land was 3/4 Million! The New LXA House.

Tom, its 2007......cable, "plug ins" and a phone are pretty much a requirement. I've had plenty of classes that heavily utilized online resources, email, tv programming etc. Utilizing available technology doesn't mean we are a self absorbed "me" society.

Also, I think your discription of parenting today is rather off base. Basically you are saying that parents either give their kids everything or treat them like crap, hence they either get their way all the time or basically hate their parents. Tom........that is absolutely ridiculous and I honestly don't think you would actually believe that that is the way it is.

I was going with the "waited 10 hours" to get the guy help as support for the let him die.

I was really stating what I thought ought to be the case, rather than trying to say anything about what was legally true.

I think we need to go back more to individual responsibility for our actions. As a society, we're letting people shift blame on to others too much.

As a individual member of a GLO, I don't think the members of the group behaved in a moral and ethical way if the account from the paper is accurate. It seems really strange and sad to me that only major lawsuits and criminal charges are considered motivating in keeping groups from acting this way. The main reason that you don't let members drink themselves to death shouldn't be your insurance policy.

On the other hand, this was group that the guy freely chose to be associated with, and I suspect he knew kind of what was going to happen to him that night (except for his death, of course), and he went along with it. My guess is that he took health in high school and may have even had seminars and classes in colleges about the dangers of alcohol. People should have been looking out for him, and one of the people is the guy himself.

There were a lot of things that could have happened differently and the guy would still be alive; one of the most straightforward would have been his choosing not to go or not to drink. He paid for that decision with his life, but I'm still not sure that makes the other guys responsible for his death. (But I'm still thinking it through.)

Tough call here.

Going to college and being independent was the most awesome feeling in my life. That is until I pledged my fraternity. I still care deeply for it, but back then it was perhaps the most important thing to me as a pledge and new active.

With age, even during college, it took its proper place in my life- but I expect for most of us, the pledge period and a bit beyond was a time when fraternity had a value and importance that will rarely happen again in a person's lifetime.

So I do not see it as a matter of why this young man did not resist peer pressure or receive better parenting. If he was drinking in a bar with friends and died- sure, I could buy that.

But this was something different. The purpose of a pledge period and any hazing- and by hazing I do not mean the legal definition which includes criminal activity but also the more common acts which are not strictly illegal but still beyond voluntary- is the same as it in in any ritual in life.

When you start a new job, you get hazed. When I started in public accounting, I got "hazed" a bit. And I passed it on good too. I had an intern call a senior manager at home at 11 PM to get a box of tickmarks Fed-Exed over the next day (a tickmark, for you non-accountants, is just a symbol written next to a number to indicate it was traced to another document, verified etc. There is no such thing as a box of tickmarks.)

The hazing process in all walks of life is, I think, a simple human reaction. It is having a bit of fun, but at the same time encouraging the trust of a newcomer. You have some fun with them, and in the process that person becomes part of the group. It is a basic element of human interaction.

However, the great responsibility lies with the group to ensure that the newcomer is not killed or seriously injured. This is supposed to be fun and games with a real goal.

Assuming the news reports are accurate, this was well beyond what I would consider acceptable.

And while that young man may have been an "adult", it is kind of hard to expect him to act like an adult when he was surrounded by a LOT of other people of similar age who were not acting in any way like adults.

I absolutely deplore hazing incidents involving forced alcohol intake. There is no excuse for it- ever. And in all my experience and observation with hazing incidents, alleged rapes at parties, deaths and other serious accidents- alcohol is the overwhelming common thread in many cases.

Young men and women drinking to excess voluntarily is a fact of life 50 years ago, now and forever- both in and out of fraternities.

But forced drinking is another thing entirely. And while this lawsuit may seem a bit extreme and illogical to some, how logical is it for a young man to be isolated and pushed/forced to drink (we will never know the answer to that) and then left to die when he was obviously in trouble?

While the men charged probably did not fully think out their actions in advance- "not thinking" has never been a valid defense in court for anything to my knowledge.

mac, I respectfully disagee with you.

I see many people daily who are going through the same thing I mentioned. These are people with children so that is why I mentioned it.

Kids today who can afford to go to college are used to many things and expect it. That is why when we just built our new house, it included all of the finer things of life except they are 2 person rooms as far as all of then hook ups..

I have to agree with EE-BO!

They want to be a part of something that are not run by parents and prove that they can make decissions wrong or right, they want to be who they are and follow those they think they may be able to trust.

Now, it is up to those who are supposed to be in that possition to be trusted.

Is that not an act of Faith and Hope or Stupidity?

Wait, what?! I've never been hazed at a job (or anywhere else for that matter). I'm sure it happens, but definitely not everywhere.

Maybe hazing is a basic element of human interaction in some circles -- but not in others. Personally, I think that anything to do with hazing (doing the hazing or being hazed) is a huge sign of weakness and incredibly pathetic -- it's outside my reality sphere, just like it's inside yours.

When you started a new job, did anyone ever play a little joke on you? That would be a form of hazing.

For example, an irate customer calls in and someone forwards it to you on your first day. Or someone hides something of yours and later gives it back.

Granted it does not exist everywhere- all depends on the environment. I have worked at places where I would not even consider kidding around with anyone, and some places we loved to play jokes on each other. A lot of what deemed acceptable depends on the environment and I think people's own behavior will change to adapt (or they will find another environment where they are more comfortable.)

Or when you are the new kid in school and you get picked on- and whether you are later accepted is due in part to how you react to that. Do you shrug it off and go with it, or do you run to teacher and tattle.

Hazing is a part of life. The word hazing has come to be associated with more extreme forms- and the word is most commonly used in association with unacceptable forms or after a tragedy has happened. But that is not its true meaning.

I make that point just because I think it affects any discussion had on this particular board on the forum.

It matters because it explains why some kids can get drunk, and with impaired judgement do something like this. Some people who haze hard may get some sadistic or erotic pleasure out of it, but for the vast majority of people this is simply a natural human behavior.

Alcohol combined with an environment in which more dangerous hazing practices are a norm within that group is where you run into trouble I think.

And that is what I think happened here- and what I think happens in many cases.

Whether the lawsuit is the right move is hard to say- but only because it is so unimaginable that this whole thing happened.

When I was in college, a lot of us pushed our limits- but whether you were a pledge or a brother, there were always people in the room keeping watch and trying to keep things getting out of hand. They would be drunk too sometimes of course, and so that intervention was not what it should have been.

But I was never witness in my Greek life to anything that involved forced alcohol consumption or even anything that could be construed as such. I really mean that. It is hard to know in a he-said, she-said kind of situation, but in this case if the allegations prove true that guys were drinking while blindfolded and/or in a very isolated setting, it is going to be very hard to convince a reasonable person it was voluntary. The first question is, if this was not so bad- why did it have to take place well out of sight of the rest of the world? If the chapter was afraid to do whatever they were doing in the house behind closed doors, just how can they say these charges are not worth exploring in trial?

Camping out and partying is fun- been there done that. But all the allegations in this case point to something far beyond a situation where people had the voluntary ability to do themselves an injury.

I am a lot more open-minded about "hazing" than many on this forum, but forced drinking is one place where I draw a very hard line. In the long run, the kind of environment that permits that is headed for disaster.

And not just for the victim. What about the guys charged? I am willing to bet they meant no real harm- but even if no charges were filed they have to live with this for the rest of their lives. And so do their fraternity brothers who will wonder "what could I have done to stop this?"

Laws and IHQ regulations are somewhat vague for good reason in my opinion. But there are very clear boundaries beyond which nobody wins or has any real reason to cross the line, and this incident crossed a big one.

I realize that this may reflect a deep flaw in my thinking, but some of what you are saying is why I think that it might not have gone down exactly as described. The fact that nobody else died also works against the idea that all new members were forced to drink.

I can see the setting out in the wood as some kind of bonding thing, weird as it might be; I can even think of the blindfolds as a test of trust or some junk like that, but I can't really wrap my head around the idea that you could force a bunch of guys to drink that much and only one guy would get hurt.

It also blows my mind that anyone could come of age today and not know that drinking too much can kill you.

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That is a fair point. The actual truth of these kinds of things can never really be known just by the nature of the event- a bunch of people, most of them presumably somewhat intoxicated, in a highly isolated environment.

As for the one guy getting hurt- have you ever read "Wrongs of Passage"? An interesting book- biased in my view against Greeks- but the stories of actual hazing deaths are an important reference.

A lot of people have minor health irregularities that are never detected. And sometimes in a stressful situation that most people can handle, those problems become apparent and manifest themselves in very bad ways. Pledges have died doing basic calisthenics.

My stance on this case is based in part on the appearance that there seems to be quite a lot of information about the actual event that could only have come from people who were there. So unless this is another Duke rape case situation- there were people present who gave out a lot of information that they knew would be very damaging to their fraternity's position.

As for heavy drinking, you would be amazed what some people try. Once in college I did, voluntarily, consume an amount of alcohol that was theoretically lethal. I was sick for 3 days, but I was ok. If I had consumed it a lot faster, then I might not be here writing this. Who knows?

This is the nature of kids experimenting.

But I think when a fraternity takes pledges into an unfamiliar environment, they take on an added responsibility to keep things from getting out of hand and to keep young men from pushing those kinds of limits.

Even if noone actually force-fed him alcohol, he was put into an environment in which he was, essentially, trapped. Blindfolded and taken out into the middle of nowhere- so how could he leave if he wanted to. And then the group pressure to drink.

The latter in and of itself is no excuse for anyone to overindulge, but when you add in the former it becomes a bit different.

How different is impossible to say in real terms.

But in practical legal terms, how different is pretty clear- the fraternity will be presumed to have exercised undue influence that contributed to or directly led to the death of a pledge.

And hence the absolute boundary I speak of. I do not wish these guys ill- in fact I feel pretty bad for the 7 being charged because they surely did not want this to happen and now have to face the guilt of it plus potentially criminal penalties. All this with few people thinking much about their own torment over this (and it is cool to see many in this thread do care about their fate.)

The bottom line is that to a reasonable person (and most people are not Greek and don't even understand how campouts can be an awesome part of the experience) this appears to be a situation where young men in a position subordinate to others were intentionally taken into deep isolation so that no one else would be aware of what happened. It just flat out sounds like bad things were planned- even if they were not.

So when someone dies, there is going to be legal trouble- whether it is fair and reasonable, or not.

And this is why there have to be some set clear boundaries that are never crossed. And one of those boundaries is to neither force people to drink large amounts of booze, nor create an environment in which a sense of "force" can be discerned or implied.

Sounds good to me. As I suggested before I think the rules of group behavior should exceed those required by law.

There's no reason why a group should ever be doing stuff that could be harmful to its members really, whether they should be legally responsible or not.

Typical for your type of posting.:(

Wishing bad upon people as you do will be paid back. Sounds like one of your bestest of cronies.:eek:

You could be a great Greek Member of Greek Organizations---!