Houstonians call for tougher UT hazing rules
Group denies activities at retreat contributed to crash that killed son
Shawn Cumberland received a call Sept. 30 that changed his life forever.
His son, Nicky, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, had been injured in a car accident on the way home from an initiation retreat hosted by the Texas Cowboys, an all-male honorary organization on campus.
“I didn’t know how severe it was,” Cumberland said.
He would discover that Nicky, 20, was presumed brain dead. Four weeks and four hospitals later, he died from his injuries.
Now Cumberland and his wife Sylvia, of Houston, believe hazing contributed to Nicky’s death, and they have launched an effort to bring stricter hazing rules and repercussions to the university and beyond. In a letter sent to the UT president and dean of students, they are calling for reform of campus hazing rules and the group they hold responsible.
“I naively assumed that the notion of hazing has died out a long time ago,” Cumberland said.
UT President Gregory Fenves and Dean Soncia Reagins-Lilly did not directly respond to the Houston Chronicle’s requests for comment. But university spokesman J.B. Bird has
said both officials received Cumberland’s letter and are working to follow up with him.
“His letter addresses issues of great importance to us and our students,” Bird wrote. “We’re grateful for Mr. Cumberland’s commitment to making our community safer.”
William Furst, a UT student and president of the Texas Cowboys, said the Cowboys’ judiciary board launched a third-party investigation of the crash, concluding that events at the retreat did not contribute.
“No alcohol or any form of hazing contributed in any way to the accident,” Furst wrote in a recent statement. “At the retreat, no member was forced to stay up, nor were they intentionally deprived of sleep. In fact, some members, including New Men, went to bed early, in order to return to campus for other activities the next morning. Many of our members chose to stay up late bonding with one another, as is common at these types of retreats.”
Nicky, a graduate of Memorial High School in Houston, joined the Texas Cowboys as a junior in fall 2018. The organization, established in 1922, is responsible for maintaining and firing off “Smokey the Cannon” after the Longhorns score at home football games.
Calls for change
This isn’t the Cowboys’ first allegation involving hazing.
In 1995, 19-year-old Texas Cowboy pledge Gabe Higgins drowned — fully clothed and still wearing his cowboy boots — at an initiation retreat where hazing was said to have taken place, the Associated Press reported at the time. Higgins’ blood alcohol level was found to be 0.21 percent, more than twice the legal limit for driving in Texas, where the drinking age is 21.
No criminal charges were filed, but the organization was banned from UT-Austin’s campus for five years.
“You can’t be apathetic anymore about it,” Cumberland said. “Parents and alumni need to be active.”
The university prohibits hazing, and its website defines hazing as a behavior that includes but is not limited to physical brutality, sleep deprivation, the forced consumption of any food, liquid, drug or any other substance, and intimidation or any action that violates the university’s code. The website also features a place to report a university hazing incident.
Both UT-Austin’s administration and the University of Texas Police Department are continuing to investigate the allegations into Nicky’s death, according to Bird and UT Police Department spokeswoman Noelle Newton. Both declined to comment further about the ongoing case.
Cumberland commended the university for its commitment so far to the investigation.
“We want to be involved in reform efforts, and we’re engaging with them right now with how to educate and reform,” he said.
In the Jan. 27 letter to Fenves and Reagins-Lilly, Cumberland calls for a new committee that is “not limited to (or dominated) by Cowboy alumni,” and to include Higgins’ mother and a representative for his son.
He also wants an increase in the organization’s current 2.5 GPA minimum, arguing that an honorary organization should have a higher bar for members, and for all members to be required to post any observed cases of hazing. He wants the organization to include women and an oncampus marker to remember people who have died.
And he is asking officials to address a so-called “code of silence” that he believes encourages members not to speak out against their peers.
In a Thursday email to the UT administration, Cumberland suggested a “Declare Your Hand” movement, in which any person active in hazing reform or investigations be questioned about their own history of involvement.
“Being fully transparent will be uncomfortable and painful initially, but it pales in comparison to the lifelong agony of too many grieving parents around the country today,” Cumberland wrote. “Only by being completely open and honest in addressing the past will we be effective at improving the future.”
Cumberland said he will also recommend that Texas law require UT-Austin regents to declare any past involvement with hazing activities. It would not disqualify a regent from serving, he said.
“The approach is to bring everything to the public light; the objective is for campuses to become safer and the harmful effects of hazing averted,” Cumberland said.
Cumberland met with university leaders Friday to discuss his recommendations, but university officials did not comment on the particulars of the meeting.
An early morning crash
Nicky Cumberland was riding in a vehicle with five other Texas Cowboys at 5:43 a.m. on Sept. 30 along U.S. 183 in Lampasas County, 85 miles northwest of Austin, when the vehicle swerved off the road and crashed.
Nicholas Gagnet, now a 20year-old junior business major at UT-Austin and a passenger in the crash, said that one second they were fine and then chaos struck.
“The next second, everybody started to doze a little bit, and then the car was flipping over,” he said.
The driver apparently fell asleep, causing him to swerve out of his lane, according to Texas Department of Transportation records. He then tried to regain control of the car, sending it across the road and rolling into a ditch.
Nicky, who was in the back seat, was ejected from the car. Another student in the back seat with him was treated for “incapacitating injuries,” according to the report. Neither was wearing a seat belt, officials said.
Gagnet, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, refused treatment, as did the driver and two other passengers.
Shawn Cumberland said Nicky’s friends and fellow Cowboys members told him later that his son had been paddled at the retreat and that other hazing activities occurred. Messages found on Nicky’s GroupMe mobile messaging app revealed that the organization had required its new members to bring a “laundry list” of liquor and copious amounts of beer. Cumberland said he also learned from other Cowboys members that while older members had a chartered bus to take them back to Austin from the retreat, new members had to arrange their own way home.
Gagnet, now treasurer and a member of the executive committee for the Texas Cowboys, declined to comment on whether hazing occurred at the retreat. The other students involved in the crash did not respond to email or social media messages requesting comment.
Furst, the Cowboys president, said a few Cowboys members were suspended or expelled from the organization for activities during the retreat that “did not reflect the organization which we strive to be.” He did not specify their behavior and declined to comment further.
“We will continue to aid the university in their investigation and wait patiently for their decision,” Furst wrote. “Until that time, the Texas Cowboys plan to continue living our motto, ‘Give the best you have to Texas,’ while striving to live each day in a way which would make Nicky proud.”
Cumberland called the Cowboys’ response disingenuous.
“Throwing a few of the young men under the bus by dismissing them from the Cowboys creates the deceptive optical illusion that the abhorrent actions were atypical and did not occur in prior years,” he said.
Student safety advocates
Jay Maguire, an Austin resident and former UT student, has been working to end hazing and to fight the perception that alumni of such organizations are enablers or indifferent about hazing. Last
Looking ahead
Cumberland, who has been propelled into activism since his son’s death, said he would be providing testimony at one of the hearings during the current legislative session.
He also plans to work with Jim and Evelyn Piazza, the parents of Timothy Piazza, a Pennsylvania State University student who died in 2017 after drinking excessively and falling down a flight of stairs at a pledging ceremony for the Beta Theta Pi fraternity.
The Piazzas filed a wrongful death lawsuit against 28 former Penn State fraternity members and settled with the university, according to a report by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Piazzas also reached a settlement with Beta Theta Pi late last year, which includes a commitment that the fraternity will require all its 100-plus chapters across the country to be alcohol- and substance-free by August 2020, according to CNN.
But Cumberland said he feels compelled to take his first stand at UT-Austin.
“Here, right at home, to our beloved university, is where my first attention is going to be, and it’s going to be to fix what I want to address now,” he said. “That’s why we’ve engaged with the people responsible for reform.” spring, he founded Parents and Alumni for Student Safety, or PASS, an advocacy group made up of concerned alumni and parents of students who died in hazing accidents.
“We have to speak up about (how) hazing is wrong, and we have to help define what it is because it’s not widely understood,” said Maguire, who is working to support legislation that further defines and raises the criminal penalty for hazing.
“We need cultural and behavioral change,” he said. “This can never happen again.”
State Sens. Judith Zaffirini, DLaredo, and Donna Campbell, RNew Braunfels, filed Senate Bill 38 in the hope of defining modern hazing in its many forms. The bill specifies the conditions for immunity for those who report acts of hazing and would improve the transparency of colleges and universities on hazing activities.
“Other than applying the hazing statute to private schools in 2005, the Legislature has made no other changes to the law since it was written in 1995,” Zaffirini said in a statement.
The bill also includes the definitions of hazing to include coercion to consume alcohol or drugs.
“College campuses have changed in the last 24 years, and our understanding of hazing has improved,” Zaffirini said. “While I recognize hazing is a cultural issue that cannot be solved fully by legislative action, I believe it is incumbent upon the Legislature to clarify the law and create an environment in which hazing can be eradicated in our state.”