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Fraternities fall to stem tide of binge-drinking deaths, lawsuits claim.

Article Excerpt
Daniel Reardon, a freshman at the University of Maryland, attended a pledge party known as "Bid Night" at the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity house in 2002. While there, he drank enough Jim Beam whiskey to fall unconscious onto the floor, and lay there for several hours. Someone called an ambulance in the early morning, and Reardon, who was 19, was taken to the hospital, where he died a week later. An autopsy showed that his blood-alcohol level was around 5.0; according to standard blood-alcohol charts, 4.0 is the level at which a person can fall into a coma.

Reardon's family filed a wrongful death suit against the fraternity, its chapter president, and its pledge inductor. The case was settled earlier this year.

In February 2004, a Florida jury found the Kappa Sigma fraternity at fault for the death of 18-year-old Chad Meredith, a University of Miami freshman who drowned while attempting a drunken early-morning swim across Lake Osceola during a hurricane as part of a fraternity-initiation stunt, Kappa Sigma had already been cited for violating the school's alcohol and anti-hazing policies just two months before Meredith's death. (Johnston v. Meredith, No. 02-11335CA02 (Fla. Cir. Ct. Feb. 6, 2004).)

And in August, the family of Walter Dean Jennings sued the Psi Epsilon Chi chapter of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. Jennings died in Marcia 2003 of acute water intoxication during a pledge ceremony in which he was forced to drink alcohol and ingest enough water to make his lungs collapse, a condition normally found in drowning victims. (Jennings v. Psi-Epsilon Chi, No. 2004-2100 (N.Y., Saratoga County Sup. Ct. filed Aug. 6, 2004).)

These cases and others around tire country, said Douglas Fierberg, the Reardons' Washington, D.C., lawyer, point to a growing awareness that fraternities have taken advantage oft curious legal limbo that allows them to operate virtually unregulated and unaccountable for the injuries and deaths associated with their members' and pledges'...

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