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ATO returning to UGa
Fraternity plans return to UGA after hazing death
The Associated Press
ATHENS — A fraternity is planning to return to the University of Georgia, three years after a hazing death caused the group to be kicked off campus.
Alpha Tau Omega held its first meeting in three years Monday, attracting a handful of men who want to re-start the chapter that was at Georgia from 1878 to 2000.
ATO was disbanded after a hazing prank killed one of its members and placed four others on trial.
Ben Grantham, 20, from St. Simons, died in a car accident near Athens. Police determined he was handcuffed and possibly blindfolded in the back of an SUV. The plan was to drive the student to a nearby county and leave him in the woods to find his own way back.
The car flipped, and Grantham was thrown from the vehicle and killed.
Four fraternity members who were in the car with Grantham faced criminal charges. The driver pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide, and three others pleaded guilty to misdemeanor involuntary manslaughter. All were given probation and community service.
No former members of ATO will be allowed to join the new group at Georgia, school officials said. The new chapter wants to attract 20 men to become an official club, then apply for colony status, where a national fraternity sets up a chapter.
‘‘We want to look forward and not backward,’’ ATO alumnus Huxely Nixon told the campus newspaper, The Red & Black.
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