Fifteen years ago, the hazing death of University of Colorado freshman Gordie Bailey upended the school’s Greek system, forging a rift between the campus and Boulder’s fraternities and leaving diverging views on whether students are any safer.
The fraternities severed ties with the Boulder campus in the wake of the 2004 alcohol-poisoning death rather than accept stricter oversight. Their chief advocate argues fraternity members and their pledges are safer now than they were while affiliated with the university.
“Fifteen years later, we got no dead kids and no badly hurt kids,” said Marc Stine, the independent Greek advocate who works with the student-run Interfraternity Council on the Hill. “I can’t make kids drink less. And when they’re drunk, they do all kinds of things. Sexual harassment and all of that. But I can get a bystander to call 911.”
Bailey’s stepfather, Michael Lanahan, suggests that is not enough.
“They can talk about whatever programs they have, but the environment is screaming, ‘Come here and drink, haze as much as you want, there won’t be any consequences,’ ” he said. “And if you do, the laws are built to protect you. … I think they’re fortunate not to have lost another pledge, but I don’t think anything has changed. A pledge hasn’t died in 15 years. Is that something to celebrate?”
Michael and Leslie Lanahan created the Gordie Foundation — since rechristened The Gordie Center — in their late son’s name, and are fighting to end hazing and substance abuse among college and high school students nationwide.
Lanahan said CU Boulder remains “a poster child for an environment that makes it very dangerous for a freshman to go to college there.”
And now, Colorado lawmakers, prompted by a pair of concerned CU sorority members, plan legislation that would put more teeth in the state’s anti-hazing laws.
No hazing cases have been charged in Colorado since 2001, according to records from the Colorado Judicial Branch.
Despite the rare criminal prosecution, CU Boulder’s administration investigated 15 hazing cases over the last decade in which students were formally charged under the student code of conduct said Melanie Parra, a CU Boulder spokeswoman. CU formally investigated four hazing cases in the 2018-19 school year, according to Parra. One resulted in a student being found responsible for hazing.
CU declined to provide additional details about the results of the campus’s hazing investigations, citing student privacy laws.
The CU student code of conduct’s hazing policy was expanded this academic year to include “any forced violation of university policy, and/or local, state or federal law,” Parra said. The broad language was intended to catch violations that may slip through the cracks.
Tragedy and aftermath
Most of the students currently attending CU Boulder were just kids when Bailey, 18, was found dead on the floor of the Chi Psi fraternity house on the morning of Sept. 17, 2004, with slurs written on his body.
The night before, at a campsite in the Boulder County foothills, Bailey and 26 other Chi Psi pledges had been instructed to down handles of whiskey and bottles of wine in a half hour. Back at the fraternity house, no one called 911 even though Bailey was unconscious. He died of acute alcohol poisoning. His blood-alcohol content was 0.328%.
The reverberations from Bailey’s hazing death soon would reconstruct Greek life in Boulder.
Fraternities broke off from the campus in 2005 after refusing to sign an agreement to delay rush until the spring each year and have live-in house supervisors.
The sororities agreed with the university’s conditions, but saw membership decline drastically three years in, said Stephanie Baldwin, assistant director for fraternity and sorority life at CU.
The sororities asked to prove themselves and created an accreditation program in 2008 to demonstrate they were on the right path, Baldwin said. As a result, the women went back to Greek life pre-2005.
The Boulder fraternities under the IFC on the Hill banner — that’s about 2,100 young men in 21 fraternities — set their own rules through a governing board with the power to expel wrongdoing chapters, Stine said. That has happened to three chapters: Delta Chi, which was closed by their national fraternity, and Sigma Pi and Kappa Sigma, which remain operational in Boulder without any local oversight.
The organization’s attention to safety sets it apart from other fraternity systems across the country, said Adam Wenzlaff, the 22-year-old president of Boulder’s oldest fraternity Sigma Nu.
“IFC on the Hill parties are beyond a doubt, unquestionably the safest parties in Boulder,” Wenzlaff said.
Days before any party, Wenzlaff said, the event is registered with Stine and Boulder police, who are invited to walk through parties at any time. The registration includes a multi-page report detailing what safety precautions are taken, Wenzlaff said. Attendees must prove they are of drinking age, and hard liquor is not allowed.
Stine noted his fraternity members receive anti-hazing training along with informational sessions about alcohol and substance abuse, and directives to call 911 at the first sign of trouble. Soon, 60 IFC on the Hill members will be trained by the Red Cross in CPR, first aid and the use of defibrillators.
A growing disconnect
But autonomy has led to clashes, Stine conceded, describing the relationship between Boulder’s fraternities and CU as “nonexistent.”
In 2017, members of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity felt snubbed after a request for a chapter-wide visit from CU’s mental health provider was denied because student groups not affiliated with the campus don’t receive such services free of charge, the Daily Camera newspaper reported.
And in February, Boulder fraternities were banned from renting campus spaces for a year following a fraternity-hosted football tournament at the college in which some of the men allegedly fought and used racist slurs, according to the Camera.
Since then, Stine said IFC on the Hill has spent tens of thousands of dollars renting venues in the city to hold informative trainings on alcohol abuse, hazing, sexual assault and other topics crucial to campus safety.
“We all want safe undergraduates,” Stine said. “We just have a different idea of how that works best.”
Devin Cramer, CU’s director for student conduct and conflict resolution, worries about the disconnect between the majority of CU’s fraternal organizations and the school’s administration.
This is evidenced in emails between CU officials and Sigma Pi’s national chapter, a Tennessee-based organization serving as the only form of chapter oversight since the fraternity was expelled from IFC on the Hill in 2013.
Last year, Sigma Pi’s national office ordered its Boulder chapter to “cease operations” after five women who attended CU told police they believed they were drugged at parties on the Hill.
“This is the 2nd report we have received regarding Sigma Pi and the fifth allegation this year (at minimum) regarding alleging drugging incidents,” an employee from CU’s Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance wrote in an Oct. 18, 2018, email. “Have you all been receiving many allegations of people being drugged?”
Boulder police ultimately closed the criminal investigation because blood samples taken in the case had been botched. Last November, the national office of the Sigma Pi fraternity said they were trying to determine whether their Boulder chapter violated the order to cease operations after social media posts emerged suggesting the local members held a formal in Aspen.
Sigma Pi’s national chapter did not respond to a request for comment
“If there’s something happening like hazing allegations and a group is affiliated with campus, we can hold those groups accountable through campus processes,” Cramer said. “If a group is not affiliated with campus, that poses problems.”
To regain some of that control, CU started its own Interfraternity Council in 2015. Four years later, five fraternities have joined. The most recent addition, Sigma Phi Epsilon, jumped ship from IFC on the Hill in September after getting booted from a Winter Park hotel during its April spring formal for alleged violent and destructive behavior.
Stine said he was disappointed to see the fraternity — which was teetering on the edge of expulsion from IFC on the HIll — turn to CU.
“At the end of the day, all our students affiliated with unaffiliated fraternities are still our students,” Baldwin said. “If they’re affiliated with us, we can provide supports to the chapters like academic excellence and making sure we can respond to needs in the moment.”
A challenging prosecution
University of Colorado students Katelyn Alpiner Geddes, 21, and Jana Frantz, 20, want to prevent Bailey’s fate from befalling another Coloradan.
The two women, who hold leadership positions in CU’s sorority system, were inspired to advocate for stronger hazing laws in Colorado after hearing the parents of Timothy Piazza — a 19-year-old who died in a 2017 Penn State hazing incident — speak at a Greek life conference in January.
“Our goal in this is ensuring we do everything in our power to make sure nothing like this ever happens again,” Alpiner Geddes said.
Under Colorado law, hazing includes “forced and prolonged physical activity; forced consumption of any food, beverage, medication or controlled substance, whether or not prescribed, in excess of the usual amounts for human consumption or forced consumption of any substance not generally intended for human consumption; prolonged deprivation of sleep, food or drink.”
The charge can be a tough one to nail down, said Boulder police Detective Sgt. Barry Hartkopp.
Hartkopp investigated hazing allegations surrounding the Sigma Pi fraternity last year. Parents whose students were pledging the CU fraternity gave police text-message chains from their children, worried the messages indicated their kids were being hazed, according to Hartkopp and CU.
The texts “indicated a possibility of hazing actions where a member or members of a group took actions that could subject someone to humiliation or could endanger the health, safety or welfare of individuals,” Parra said.
CU declined to share additional information about its own investigation, including the results, citing student privacy laws.
Ultimately, Hartkopp determined the situation did not meet Colorado’s hazing statute.
“As a parent, a lot of the things we see every once in a while make me very angry,” Hartkopp said. “But when you look at this and compared it to the statute — we have to follow the statute. We can’t deviate and try to apply our own belief system.”
One struggle when investigating hazing lies in a lack of compliance from those potentially involved, Hartkopp said, echoing a concern aired by CU officials. “You’re dealing with organizations that tend not to want to disclose information,” he said.
Another snag: proving people were forced into harmful action.
“We do end up with kids trying to get into different organizations that do end up drinking to excess and end up going to the alcohol recovery center,” Hartkopp said. “Are we able to say definitively that they were told they had to drink this alcohol at this function if they wanted to be a part of this group? That’s hard to do.”
Strengthening laws
Alpiner Geddes and Frantz started doing their own work on the issue, contacting state Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet, D-Commerce City, and state Sen. Steve Fenberg, D-Boulder, to help draft legislation to make hazing laws more stringent.
Since Bailey’s death, 66 American families have endured hazing-related death of a loved one, according to statistics from The Gordie Center.
Some of those deaths, like Piazza’s, spurred stronger state hazing laws. Pennsylvania’s Timothy J. Piazza Antihazing Law makes hazing a third-degree felony in cases of serious injury or death and requires universities and high schools to disclose any reports of hazing.
Colorado’s proposed legislation hasn’t been written yet, but Doug Fierberg — the attorney who represented Bailey’s family and others in hazing cases nationwide — said the state’s current hazing law, just a misdemeanor, is not adequate.
Fierberg said other state statutes require fraternities and universities to publicly disclose hazing incidents or dangerous misconduct on the university website or elsewhere.
For Michael Lanahan, the 15th anniversary of his stepson’s death was difficult to talk about, dredging up the anger he felt toward the institutions he found accountable.
“The boys that were in Gordie’s fraternity are around 35 now, and I imagine some of them have had children by now and some of them have had boys,” he said. “Give them 16, 18 years to send their kids off to college and what would they tell them if they said they wanted to join a fraternity? Will they be proud thinking back to the ceremony that they were responsible for where they killed a pledge?”