College audiences that gather to listen to the parents of Timothy Piazza aren’t always prepared for the intensity of what they hear.
“Jim and I tell the story through our son’s eyes,” Evelyn Piazza says of Michael, Tim’s older sibling and their son who is still alive. “I want them to picture their own younger brother lying there in a hospital bed before them, so they can see it and feel it and know how awful it is.”
The Piazzas never imagined they would be faces of a movement to end fraternity hazing. It wasn't the plan when Tim went off to Penn State University to study engineering, his whole life before him.
But the Lebanon, N.J., couple, whose son died at age 19, now are on a journey that Monday night will bring them to Fisher Auditorium, inside the Performing Arts Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. They and other parents who lost children to hazing are crisscrossing the country, having formed a coalition with national Greek Life organizations to convince a generation of college undergraduates that enough is enough.
The campuses that the Piazzas have visited, or soon will, are a wide geographic mix of public and private, large and small, from the University of Idaho to the Ivy League — dozens of them, and counting.
The 7:30 p.m. appearance at IUP is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by IUP’s Interfraternity Council, Panhellenic Association and the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life.
The two years since Timothy’s death, on Feb. 4, 2017, have provided enough time for the Piazzas to form a charitable foundation in their son’s name. It has been more than enough time for them and other parents of hazing victims to speak, night after night, to audiences of varied sizes, enough collectively to fill up a National Football League stadium.
But what those two years do not seem to have given the Piazzas is peace.
“Quite honestly, it’s just as painful now as it was two years ago,” Evelyn Piazza said. “Tim’s room is locked up tight. The door is closed. His things, his dirty laundry are still there from when we brought his belongings home. It's like time stopped.”
She added, “I still catch myself thinking, ‘Oh, my God, it’s been two years without hearing his voice.’”
Adding to the sting was seeing surveillance video from inside the fraternity house that captured their son’s agonizing final hours after a forced drinking ritual he and other pledges were subjected to called “the gauntlet.” The images, and evidence it produced for a grand jury, helped make his death a national cause.
It took nearly 12 hours for someone to call an ambulance, investigators said.
“It eats at us as parents that our baby was alone and hurting, even though there was a bunch of people around,” Evelyn Piazza said.
“And it was all preventable,” her husband, Jim, said.
●●●
The Piazzas, like the other parents of hazing victims, say they want to help families avoid the same horror they experienced.
But they aren’t trying to put fraternities out of business.
“Our view is it’s probably more effective to help create safe environments rather than trying to get rid of the organizations,” Jim Piazza said. “They’ll just go underground.”
He and his wife get upset by word of new hazing cases, like the arrest last week of nine fraternity members at Louisiana State University over recent allegations of pledges being kicked, placed in an ice machine and urinated upon. It comes less than two years after the death of Max Gruver, an 18-year-old fraternity pledge there.
“They cannot say they didn’t know these behaviors were dangerous and reckless,” Jim Piazza said of the latest arrests. “We encourage and hope that law enforcement and the legal system will do its job and hold these individuals fully accountable.”
Nevertheless, he said, he believes that the campaign is making a difference. There have been instances in which students walked away from hazing rituals, he explained.
Each presentation the Piazzas give, when the room goes silent and eyes in the audience tear up, is another chance to reach young minds.
“If people are sitting in rapt attention, not on their cell phones, leaning in, closing their eyes when I tell them to and crying, then I know they can feel it,” Timothy’s mother said. “And if they can feel it, I know they are going to remember it.”
●●●
Timothy Piazza forever will be the strapping young man with red hair, who wore No. 65 on his high school football team, took honors engineering, volunteered as a peer mentor and liked to golf and visit the Jersey shore.
On Feb. 2 of his sophomore year at Penn State, he and 13 other pledges assembled at the Beta Theta Pi house just off campus for a bid acceptance ceremony. The “gauntlet” drinking ritual required pledges to move from one alcohol station to another, downing vodka, “shotgunning” beer and drinking wine, investigators said
Authorities later concluded that Mr. Piazza consumed 18 alcoholic drinks in under 90 minutes.
Barely able to stand, he tumbled down basement stairs inside the fraternity house and came to rest “face down,” a witness would later testify, hemorrhaging from injuries found to include a lacerated spleen and skull fracture.
He was brought back upstairs, put on a sofa and spent the next several hours drifting in and out of consciousness, twitching at times and vomiting as fraternity members showed annoyance at times and panic at others.
He died at Hershey Medical Center on Feb. 4.
The death sparked criminal charges and several guilty pleas by fraternity members, though the most serious charges including manslaughter and felony aggravated assault did not go forward.
Last month, the Piazzas filed a wrongful death lawsuit against 28 former members of Beta Theta Pi. The Piazzas also reached an agreement with Penn State that solidifies reforms in response to the death and includes an unspecified monetary settlement.
A Pennsylvania law passed in response to his death includes tougher penalties and requires schools to post twice-yearly on their websites instances of hazing.
●●●
The Piazzas and other parents of hazing victims have been working with the North American Interfraternity Conference and National Panhellenic Conference to pursue anti-hazing legislation, better disclosure of incidents and education.
At IUP, Noah Schwartz, 20, president of the campus Interfraternity Council, said he sees an even wider problem.
“Hazing in a sense is bullying, and it starts in high school,” he said.
Mr. Schwartz, a criminology major, said he believes his generation is ready to do what previous generations did not.
“I believe there can be a change,” he said.
Bill Schackner: bschackner@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1977 and on Twitter: @Bschackner.
First Published: February 18, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
