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`Neither attendance nor drinking was compulsory.''
Doomsday at Delta House: Student's heroics can't save frat from hazing shutdown
By Franci Richardson
Thursday, April 14, 2005 - Updated: 07:40 AM EST
Fraternity boy Ryan Sopelsa was in his room during a February party when he saw a pledge being carried out of a Delta Tau Delta bedroom, struggling to breathe after a night of hazing.
_____``I told them to lay him on the floor,'' said the 20-year-old Tufts University junior, who works as an emergency medical technician in New Jersey during the summer. ``I checked to make sure he was still breathing. I noticed he wasn't.''
_____Ian McPherran, a mechanical engineering student, had a weak pulse after being hazed with drinking games, where an incorrect trivia answer cost an underage pledge a stiff belt of alcohol.
_____But the freshman had stopped breathing.
_____``I decided to do some rescue breathing,'' Sopelsa said. ``When I'd give him a few breaths, he'd start coughing and then he'd stop breathing again.''
_____Paramedics arrived on the scene after fraternity members called police the night of Feb. 26. McPherran made a full recovery but did not join the fraternity, officials said. He did not respond to a request for an interview.
_____This week, the 116-year-old fraternity was the school's first ever ordered shut down for the following year because of hazing practices. Fraternity members pleaded guilty before a judiciary hearing to five of seven alcohol-related charges, including hazing.
_____``To us, it is dangerous behavior,'' Bruce Reitman, dean of students for arts, science and engineering, said of the hazing. ``There's an atmosphere of encouraged behavior, that if you want to be a member, you ought to do this. In that, people are still going to make foolish decisions that jeopardize their well-being.''
_____DTD's president, who hoped to persuade administrators to punish his members by relegating them to educational anti-alcohol programming, said never was a pledge made to drink excessively.
_____``That characterization is patently false,'' said Noah Ornstein, 20. ``Neither attendance nor drinking was compulsory.''
_____Ornstein said he will appeal the decision to suspend the chapter.
_____DTD had already been on probation for several alcohol incidents, so no alcohol was allowed in the frat house.
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