A little more than five
years after a ritual hazing took the life of an Aggie freshman, Utah State
University fraternity pledges are moving into the second of their own
eight-week chapter initiation process.
As they do, Friday’s
announcement that homicide charges would be filed in the death of a 19-year-old
fraternity member in New York is giving members of Utah State’s Pi Kappa Alpha,
Sigma Chi and Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternities even more reason to reflect on the
loss of Michael Starks.
Starks, a pledge for the now-defunct
Utah State chapter of Sigma Nu, died of alcohol poisoning in 2008.
“After Michael’s death, the
thought process that went into designing the pledge programming was severely
looked into by each house to ensure that something like that will not happen
again,” Pi Kappa Alpha president Ryan Wray said. “Even now, more than five
years later, we have frequent meetings talking about hazing and making sure
that everything we do has a real purpose and will have a positive effect on the
pledges.”
Starks was reaching the end
of his first semester at Utah State University and coming into the final weeks
of his pledge period with the fraternity Sigma Nu when, on Nov. 20 of that
year, he was taken with another Sigma Nu pledge by Chi Omega sorority members
to an off-campus house. There, he was stripped down to his underwear, painted
Aggie blue and white, and given vodka. An hour later, Starks was taken back to
the Sigma Nu fraternity house and put to bed.
In the early hours of Nov.
21, Starks was found unconscious and not breathing. Paramedics arrived but
failed to resuscitate Starks, who had a blood alcohol level of .373. He was
pronounced dead at the hospital.
There are three different
categories of hazing. "Subtle" hazing is an embarrassing or
humiliating situation. "Harassment" hazing includes physical or
emotional discomfort. "Violent" hazing is most commonly related to
binge drinking like in Stark’s case, or beatings and brandings as in the case
of Chun Deng, the student at New York’s Baruch College who died on Dec. 8.
Seeking to prevent similar
situations, Utah State University’s Campus Policies for Organizations bans “all
forms of hazing, pledge day, and/or pre-initiation activities which are defined
as hazing.”
Steven Whitten, who pledged
Sigma Chi in the fall of 2013, said that when he was going through the pledge
process he never felt pressured or uncomfortable with his soon-to-be fraternity
brothers.
“I wholeheartedly trusted my
pledge brothers to look after me,” Whitten said. “Every activity the actives
put us through was purely constructive, entirely optional and included the
participation of the whole chapter.”
Pi Kappa Alpha recruitment
chairman Nick Lyle said that each fraternity treats its new members in
different ways.
“Michael was a Sigma Nu
pledge. I don’t think it’s fair to pool all the fraternities together because
of that incident,” Lyle said. “When I pledged Pi Kappa Alpha I was never
worried about being hazed because Pike has a no hazing policy. Joining a
fraternity is a fun way to socialize and to give back to the community and I
think a lot of pledges lose sight of that because the first two things they
think of when joining a fraternity is partying and the worry of being hazed.”
Wray agreed.
“Going in I had many
stereotype ideas about fraternities in my head, and I remember thinking that if
anything like that happened to me I would have quit,” he said. “At the end of
the day, we need to accept that bad things can happen. We need to learn from
the mistakes our peers have made and make sure the same things don’t happen
again like in Michael’s case.”
Cailey Chaney, Matthew Thomas, Morgan Pratt,
Cristina Johnson and Kylee Hopkin contributed to this report.
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