19 and coming into his own, until a fatal night of hazing
READINGTON, N.J. — Timothy Piazza started out a shy high school student in New Jersey who flushed so deeply scarlet when speaking to a girl that some called him Barney after the purple dinosaur. A growth spurt turned him into a gentle giant, keen to protect more vulnerable peers. He fell in love, became gregarious.
By the time he enrolled at Pennsylvania State University two years ago, he was truly, friends and family said, coming into his own.
But all that ended in February, when Piazza died at Penn State after a fraternity hazing ritual in which he was instructed to drink large amounts of alcohol and then fell numerous times, injuring his brain and rupturing his spleen. He was 19.
Eighteen young men involved with the fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, have been charged with a variety of crimes, eight of them with involuntary manslaughter, the most serious charge.
Prosecutors will seek to show that the conduct that night in February, when Timothy was induced to drink dangerous levels of alcohol and left unaided and injured, was not just fraternity high jinks gone terribly wrong but rose to criminal behavior.
Prosecuting deaths
The episode reflects a new push to more stringently prosecute fraternity-linked deaths — there have been more than 60 in the past eight years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. In early May, four members of a fraternity at Baruch College in New York, Pi Delta Psi, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of a pledge during a hazing ritual in 2013. More than 30 other people have been charged with lesser crimes in the case.
On a recent night in the Piazzas’ cream-carpeted home in Readington, a town where horse farms are interspersed with stately suburban homes, Timothy’s mother, Evelyn, scrolled through Facebook posts in which a national conversation rages about what transpired and whether the charges in the case of her son’s death were fair. Since Piazza’s death, the family has been outspoken about ending hazing, which is a crime in all but six states, according to Hazing Prevention, an organization that seeks to prevent the practice.
A grand jury report, released this month, relied on extensive closed circuit camera recordings of the night Piazza died.
It captures in granular detail Piazza’s ordeal, lying injured for more than 12 hours while none of the many people around him sought help. One of them searched on his phone for what it meant when an intoxicated person’s limbs grew cold.
The boy at the center
But lost in the swirling debate over what happened in the Beta Theta Pi house, a red brick mansion on Burrowes Street in State College, Pa., is something essential, said Piazza’s father, James, who also works in accounting: the boy at the center of it, the young man they loved.
He was devotedly goofy, said his brother, Mike, who is a 21-year-old rising senior at Penn State, his hands trembling as he recalled his brother.
At random, Timothy would choose a foreign accent while playing a board game and never break character. A tempestuous toddler, he insisted to anyone who would listen that his red hair was brown.
He embraced his flamecolored curls as he grew older and looked forward to when he might be old enough to grow his version of a salt-and-pepper beard: “Salt-and-paprika,” his brother said with a laugh. He stopped. “I’m never going to see it,” he said.
After rapidly growing several inches as a teenager, Timothy took on a role of protector of more vulnerable peers in high school, said his friend Dan Prager, 20, perhaps recognizing in them the social awkwardness that he was growing out of.
The boy who had once delighted in making Italian dressing-flavored Jell-O as a prank to dish up to unsuspecting friends, stepped into leadership roles in school.
He played football with developmentally disabled children and, as a high school senior, became an instructor in a peer-to-peer drug and safe-sex education program.