This past weekend, 20-year-old Dartmouth biomedical engineering student Won Jang went missing after an informal social gathering at a dock off the Connecticut River. Hours later, the police found his body in the river close to the dock where he was last seen. Dartmouth swiftly suspended a fraternity and a sorority in response, albeit declining to comment on the role they might have played in Won’s death.
Won was a member of the fraternity in question, Beta Alpha Omega. According to a Dartmouth spokesperson, the Ivy League school put the fraternity on probation for alcohol violations just last year. The suspended sorority, Alpha Psi, had only recently returned to good standing after probation due to alcohol violations.
We have seen all this before, including at Cornell University, another Ivy League institution where we represented the parents of Antonio Tsialas, who died following a night of alcohol and hazing.
Since 2000, over 80 freshmen have died due to fraternity hazing events driven by the misguided notion that they needed to do what they were told to do, or they could forget about joining the brotherhood of hazers.
What Will It Take to End the Hazing Scourge?
Not too long ago, “hazing season” started on college campuses in September and was usually over by November. That was the time that fraternity chapters typically swung into action with their time-honored traditions of pressuring unsuspecting college freshmen into doing things they would not normally do outside of a fraternity setting. Those traditions, which almost always involved excessive amounts of alcohol, often resulted in horrific injuries or death to those who succumbed to the peer pressure.
This week, however, we learned that hazing season may have started in July at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire—and it may not be limited to pledges.
Our law firm has successfully represented the families and victims of fraternity hazing incidents for more than 25 years, and we have seen first-hand how hazing destroys the lives of the victims, their families, and hazing perpetrators as well. No one has more experience in this field than we do.
If the Dartmouth incident was indeed hazing, we stand ready to help the family get answers to their questions, to thoroughly investigate what happened and why, and to obtain the full measure of justice for the victim’s parents as we have done so many times in the past.
This is who we are, and this is what we do.
Someday, we will stop the scourge of hazing. We are constantly trying to do that—one case at a time.