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When a Hazing Goes Very Wrong
In his college application, George Desdunes wrote of the sacrifices his mother made "to help me achieve something with my life."
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: April 12, 2012
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IN the early-morning hours of that Friday in February 2011, at around 3 a.m., George Desdunes and another Cornell sophomore were sitting on a couch blindfolded, their wrists and ankles bound with zip ties and duct tape.
Abhishek Shah/Cornell Daily Sun
The Sigma Alpha Epsilon house the morning of Mr. Desdunes's death.
They had been kidnapped and driven to a town house somewhere on campus, one of the annual hazing rites of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. This particular ritual worked in reverse of most hazing. It was the freshman pledges who kidnapped older students.
The two S.A.E. brothers were asked trivia questions about the fraternity. If they gave a wrong answer they were supposed to drink a shot of vodka. As George Desdunes's roommate would later tell the police, "The purpose is to tie up the brother and get him drunk."
The young man sitting on the couch beside Mr. Desdunes recalled downing four or five shots of vodka in 20 minutes and then vomiting into a garbage pail. The two were fed Pixy Stix, chocolate powder, strawberry syrup, a bite of a sandwich, hot sauce. "Something that felt like dish soap was dripped on my face," said the 20-year-old sophomore, whose name was redacted from the police report. He drank more shots and vomited again.
Students later provided differing opinions on how threatening it was to be kidnapped. Some said Mr. Desdunes could have been cut loose at any time just by asking. "It was meant to be fun," Edward Williams, a freshman pledge who was one of the kidnappers, told the police. Others wanted no part of it. Before going to bed, Mr. Desdunes's roommate at the fraternity had locked their door, to guard against being kidnapped.
Eventually, Mr. Desdunes passed out and was loaded into the back seat of a Honda Pilot belonging to one of the brothers. At the fraternity, it took several people to carry him to his room, but when they found it locked, he was brought to the library and left on a leather couch.
They tilted his head, said Mr. Williams, so "he would vomit onto the floor" and not choke. Then they walked downstairs to the kitchen, made themselves something to eat and went to bed.
The S.A.E. house was quiet a few hours later, at 6:45 a.m., when the cleaning man and his father arrived for work. The place was worse than usual. There had been a beer pong tournament that night. Plastic cups were strewn all over. Furniture was broken. The room smelled like stale Keystone Light. After finishing the toilets, the younger cleaner walked by the library and noticed a student in a brown hoodie lying still. "I could see what looked like vomit or mucous on his mouth," he told the police. "I tried to wake him by grabbing his foot to make sure he was O.K. There was no response." Mr. Desdunes's right pant leg was rolled up. One of the zip ties was around his ankle; a second zip tie with duct tape lay on the floor beside the couch.
The cleaners called 911.
When the police and firefighters arrived, they found an unresponsive male. He was not breathing, had no pulse and was cold to the touch. They laid him on the floor, cut off his sweatshirt, suctioned his throat and applied CPR. He was put on a stretcher and taken to a hospital in an ambulance.
The rescue workers remarked later that there was not a single fraternity brother in sight, just the cleaners, who told the police what they knew, then went downstairs to finish the kitchen.
HAZING is common on American campuses. A 2008 University of Maine study concluded that 55 percent of students who join fraternities, sororities, sports teams or other student groups experience it. On Wednesday night, officials at Binghamton University of the State University of New York, citing "an alarmingly high number of serious hazing complaints this spring," halted all recruiting and pledging for the rest of the semester while it investigates. Binghamton has more than 50 fraternity and sorority chapters.
Hank Nuwer, a professor at Franklin College in Indiana who has written four books on the subject, says that as long as there have been universities, there has been hazing: in 1657, two Harvard upperclassmen were fined and suspended for hazing. Mr. Nuwer has counted 104 deaths involving hazing since 1970. In one high-profile case, a drum major in Florida A&M's Marching 100 was beaten to death in November during a hazing on the band bus. While no arrests were made in that case, seven band members have been arrested since then in two other hazing incidents. At Cornell, four students have been charged with hazing in connection with the Desdunes case and are scheduled to go on trial May 21.
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Michael Winerip writes the On Education column for The Times.
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