Fraternity Hazing Lawyers

The Chad Meredith Act

After getting justice, the Meredith family wanted to make sure what happened to their son would never happen again. At the time, Florida law made it exceedingly difficult for any fraternity or fraternity officer to be held criminally accountable for hazing; even if they did, hazing charges were a misdemeanor—an insultingly low-level charge, given the loss of life that hazing can cause.

The Meredith family asked us to try changing existing law on this, and we promised we would do our best to help. The first thing we did was contact Representative Adam Hasner, who was working on legislation that would make causing injury or death via hazing a third-degree felony. We partnered with Rep. Hasner to write the Chad Meredith Act—the first anti-hazing law in Florida to charge hazing as a felony. David and Mr. Meredith testified before the Florida legislature in support of the bill, and it passed without a single “no” vote. Governor Jeb Bush subsequently signed the Chad Meredith Act into law in 2004 at the University of Miami, where Chad died. It was a very emotional moment to see that happen. Chad would have been very proud.

That was the first time David Bianchi forayed into anti-hazing legislation, but it would not be the last. There was still work to be done to make the good law even better, and he would be back at the Florida legislature years later to champion the cause once again.

The Last Straw—Andrew Coffey's Death

The Chad Meredith Act solved the first problem with preventing fraternity hazing: ensuring that the punishment for death or serious injury caused by hazing was appropriately harsh. However, the second fundamental problem with preventing hazing is penetrating the secrecy that shrouds fraternity life, which enables the abuse to continue. Uncovering what happened in a hazing event is key to prosecution, but fraternity culture makes it difficult for investigators to do their jobs. Fraternity members may even coordinate their answers (as one grand jury found in a previous case). 

However, few understood the extent to which a fraternity's toxic culture would lead to someone's death.

Until, that is, the death of Andrew Coffey.

Andrew Coffey was a Florida State University student who died during a Pi Kappa Phi “Big Brother Night” tradition where he was told to drink an entire bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon in a ritual called " passing the family bottle." Andrew drank an enormous amount of high-proof liquor that night at the urging of his “brothers” and fell unconscious. For hours he lay dying on the couch in the Pi Kappa Phi house while no one did anything to help.

Andrew died from alcohol poisoning, but he might have lived had any one of the dozens of people around him that evening checked on him or stopped the ritual before it became deadly. Even when fraternity members eventually found him—his lips blue and his skin pale—they spent 11 minutes texting one another before they called 911. By then, however, it was too late. The Coffey family called on STFBC to get justice for their son, and we fought to make sure the fraternity officers and members were held criminally and financially liable for what they did.