What's Happening on Campus- Part 8: The Code of Silence

College Safety
Written by Larry Betz

Hazing as a Culture, Not Just an Incident

By Larry Betz | Prepared Not Paranoid https://www.preparednotparanoid.com/

Updated November 2, 2026


The hazing code of silence is what turns a bad night into a funeral. It's the moment a group decides protecting itself matters more than calling for help. Here's what that looks like, why it keeps happening, and what your family can do about it.

Sixty-Seven Years and Counting

Here's a number I want you to absorb before we go any further. According to Hank Nuwer, the researcher who has tracked hazing deaths in America longer than anyone, at least one student has died from hazing every single year in the United States from 1959 through 2025. Sixty-seven consecutive years. Not sixty-seven incidents. Sixty-seven straight years where at least one family somewhere got the call every parent fears. Nuwer's database, now hosted on HazingInfo.org in partnership with the University of Maine and the University of Washington, documents recorded hazing deaths going back to 1838. This isn't a new problem, and it isn't a rare one. It's a consistent, predictable pattern that's been running for longer than most of today's parents have been alive, which is what makes it a culture, not a series of isolated bad nights.

What Actually Happened to Timothy Piazza

If you want to understand why "culture" is the right word and not "incident," you need to understand what happened to Timothy Piazza at Penn State's Beta Theta Pi chapter on the night of February 2 into February 3, 2017, because it's the clearest documented case we have of what the code of silence actually costs.

Piazza, a 19-year-old sophomore pledge, fell headfirst down a basement stairway at about 10:45 p.m. after a pledge drinking ritual. A forensic pathologist told the grand jury his blood alcohol content could have been as high as 0.36 percent, a life-threatening level. Members carried him upstairs, visibly injured, and laid him on a couch. What happened over the next several hours is documented because the house's security cameras recorded it and because investigators recovered the members' texts.

About half an hour after the fall, a newly initiated member named Kordel Davis saw Piazza on the couch and screamed at the others to call 911. He was shoved into a wall and told they had it under control. When Piazza rolled off the couch, brothers slammed him back onto it, and one struck him in the abdomen. They strapped a backpack on him to keep him from rolling over. In the early morning hours he tried to get up, fell backward, and hit his head on the hardwood floor. Someone shook him, then left the room. Just after 5 a.m., a member stepped over his body twice, on the way to get a drink of water and on the way back.

He wasn't found and brought upstairs again until about 10 a.m., cold, pale, and with blood on his face. Members finally called 911 at 10:48 a.m., more than 11 hours after the first fall, and even then, according to the grand jury, the caller didn't mention the stairway fall from the night before. Piazza died on February 4 from a traumatic brain injury. The grand jury concluded his death wasn't a simple mistake, but the direct result of the extremely reckless conduct of fraternity members operating in a permissive atmosphere. After he was taken to the hospital, members deleted messages and discussed erasing the security video. One brother actually did delete the basement footage just as police were about to take it. The FBI recovered it, and more members were charged. In 2018, Pennsylvania passed the Timothy J. Piazza Antihazing Law, making serious hazing a felony.

That is what a code of silence actually looks like in practice. It's not abstract loyalty. It's a group of young men choosing, in real time, over and over across several hours, to protect the group's secret instead of calling for help for someone who was dying in front of them.

Here's the night, hour by hour.

It Happened in Arizona This Year

If you think this only happens back East, it doesn't. On January 31, 2026, Colin Martinez, an 18-year-old Northern Arizona University student, was found dead in Flagstaff the morning after a Delta Tau Delta rush event where pledges were drinking. The autopsy found he died of alcohol poisoning. The chapter's pledge master was indicted on a felony hazing charge under Arizona's 2022 anti-hazing law, known as Jack's Law, which makes hazing that causes a death a class 4 felony. NAU suspended the chapter, and the national fraternity shut it down. Every state handles hazing differently, so check your state's law. But no state is immune.

This Isn't History. It's Still Happening Right Now.

I want to bring this current, because it would be easy to read the Piazza case and think of it as something that got fixed. It didn't. This fall, a Dartmouth alumnus named Andrew Lohse, who wrote a memoir about the hazing he says he endured in his fraternity, has been speaking out again about what he calls the fraternity "omertà," using the actual Mafia term for a code of silence. His argument is that the loyalty structure inside these organizations works the same way: members are expected to give up their own judgment, and sometimes their own safety, for the group's secret. Lohse has described being forced to swim in a kiddie pool of vomit and being forced to drink vinegar until he threw up. In fairness, his account was disputed at the time, and Dartmouth's charges against the chapter, based largely on his allegations, were later dropped. But his warning about the code of silence is the same one families of hazing victims have been making for decades.

He's raising this now because of two recent situations. At the University of Mississippi, two students, Robert Strang, a 20-year-old member of Phi Delta Theta, and Aidan Hamilton, an 18-year-old freshman, were found dead on the same day in September in separate locations. Packages of a synthetic kratom-like product called "Smax" were found near both of them. Toxicology results revealed in federal court in October showed both had the same three substances in their blood: mitragynine, the main compound in kratom, and two synthetic compounds that are Schedule I controlled substances. Two workers at a vape shop in Oxford have been charged with selling the pills. Phi Delta Theta isn't accused of any wrongdoing, no hazing has been alleged, and that needs to be said plainly. This case is about how dangerous these products are, and how fast a "legal" product can kill.

If you haven't heard of kratom, you're not alone. Most parents haven't. It's a plant from Southeast Asia, sold legally in most states as a powder, capsule, or extract at gas stations, vape shops, and online, usually marketed as a supplement for energy or pain relief. At low doses it acts like a mild stimulant. At higher doses, it acts on the same opioid receptors in the brain that heroin and fentanyl do, which is why some people in law enforcement call it "gas station heroin." It's largely unregulated, so potency varies wildly from one product to the next. The synthetic versions, like the pills found at Ole Miss, can be far stronger than the natural leaf. Investigators there wrote that synthetic versions can be significantly stronger than morphine.

Separately, in August 2026, Pennsylvania's attorney general charged 14 people, 13 of them current or former Penn State students, with running a cocaine distribution operation out of two off-campus fraternity houses, Delta Upsilon and Sigma Chi. According to the attorney general, cutting and packaging cocaine was, for some pledges, an "indoctrination" into the fraternities. These are charges, not convictions. Two completely different situations, on two different campuses, surfacing within weeks of each other, both pointing at the same underlying structure: closed groups, internal loyalty, and outsiders kept in the dark until something goes catastrophically wrong.

Bringing This Back to Cornell

This is also part of why the Cornell case has been so hard to untangle from the very start. The reflex to protect the group over the individual, and to handle things internally instead of calling for outside help, is the same omertà Lohse is describing. According to the lawsuit, a message sent to the fraternity's "Chi Phi Actives" Snapchat group chat that night pulled more members into the room, instead of anyone using that chat to get her help. According to The Wall Street Journal, Chi Phi was one of the organizations Cornell has found responsible for hazing. None of that tells us what a jury will eventually decide happened that night, and no one has been criminally charged. But it helps explain why, once something like this happens inside a fraternity house, getting a full and honest account of it out into the open is so consistently, predictably difficult. The culture isn't built to produce one. It's built to protect against one.

What the Law Is Finally Catching Up To

The good news, and there is some, is that the federal government has finally built a real reporting requirement around this, through the Stop Campus Hazing Act, which we introduced in Part 2 and want to lay out in full here. It was signed into law on December 23, 2024.

  • January 1, 2025: schools had to begin collecting hazing incident data.

  • June 23, 2025: hazing policies and prevention programs had to be in place.

  • July 1, 2025: schools needed a process for documenting hazing violations.

  • December 23, 2025: the first Campus Hazing Transparency Report was due. It's a public document naming any student organization found responsible for a hazing violation, describing the violation, and noting the dates. It has to be updated at least twice a year.

  • October 1, 2026: hazing statistics appeared in the Annual Security Report for the first time, the same report we've been pulling rape and fondling numbers from throughout this series.

That transparency report is the single most useful new tool a parent has. It's the first time the federal government has required a specific, named, public accounting of which organizations have actually been found responsible for hazing, not just a vague number buried in a larger statistics table.

What This Means for Your Family

The pattern across every case in this piece is the same one running through this entire series: a closed group, a culture that rewards loyalty to the group over honesty to the outside world, and young people making decisions under exactly that pressure, at exactly the age when they're least equipped to push back against it. Timothy Piazza's brothers weren't monsters. They were 19- and 20-year-olds who had been taught, through the culture they'd joined, that protecting the group mattered more than getting help fast enough. That's what a code of silence actually trains people to do, and it's why "just tell your kid not to do anything dangerous" was never going to be enough advice on its own. Your student needs one rule that beats the group every time: if someone is hurt, call 911 first. Many states have medical amnesty or Good Samaritan laws that protect students who call for help in an alcohol or drug emergency, so check yours.

Before your student joins any organization built around secrecy and loyalty, check that school's Campus Hazing Transparency Report. It's public, it's specific, and now, finally, it exists.

Here are the warning signs to watch for.

The Prepared Protector Makes the Call

The Prepared Protector teaches their student that loyalty never means staying silent while someone is in danger. Kordel Davis tried to make the call that night at Penn State. Nobody listened. Your student needs to know that if they're the one who sees it, they make the call themselves, and you will stand behind them no matter what.


What to Say

Before your student joins anything

  • "If a group asks you to keep secrets about what they do to new members, that's your answer about the group."

  • "Real friends don't make you prove you belong by getting hurt."

About making the call

  • "If someone is hurt or won't wake up, you call 911 first. Not the president, not the group chat. 911. I will never be mad at you for that."

  • "If anyone tells you not to call, that's exactly when you call."

About drugs and pills

  • "Never take a pill, powder, or 'supplement' you didn't get from a pharmacy. Gas station products can kill you."

5 Quick Wins You Can Start Today

  1. Make the "call 911 first" rule out loud, and promise your student they won't be in trouble with you for making the call.

  2. Look up your student's school's Campus Hazing Transparency Report.

  3. Learn the warning signs in Grid 2 and check in if you see them.

  4. Look up your state's hazing law and its medical amnesty or Good Samaritan law.

  5. Read Conversations 2 and 20 in the free College Safety Conversation Guide together.

Ask Yourself

  • Would my student call 911 if someone in their group told them not to?

  • Does my student know they won't get in trouble with me for making that call?

  • Do I know what the groups my student wants to join have been found responsible for?

Remember

Hazing isn't a bad night. It's a culture, and silence is what makes it deadly. Teach your student that the call comes first, every time. Then make sure they know you'll be right behind them.

Get Started Today

Get the free College Safety Conversation Guide. It includes the conversations this post is built around, "Reporting, Silence, and Trust" and "Fentanyl, Pills, and Powders," with the actual words to start each one, plus the rest of the conversations every family should have before move-in day. DM the word [KEYWORD] on Instagram or Facebook and I'll send it to you. [Get it here: LINK]

Go Deeper

Navigating the Red Zone and Beyond. This post shows you how the code of silence works. The book shows your family how to stay safe in the situations where it matters most: party and drink safety, the Designated Steward and group plans, how manipulators use loyalty and pressure, boundary scripts, situational awareness with SCAN, how to support a friend, and what to do if the worst happens. [Get it here: https://link.amazon/B030JRBPp]

Tools I recommend: The dorm and party safety gear I recommend for your student's first year is in my College Dorm Room Essentials Amazon store. https://link.amazon/B061T3Evk


Related reading:

  • What's Happening on Campus, Part 2: Why Reporting Is So Hard [LINK]

  • What's Happening on Campus, Part 3: It's One Big Club [LINK]

  • What's Happening on Campus, Part 6: What the Research Actually Shows About Greek Life [LINK]

  • What's Happening on Campus, Part 7: Follow the Money [LINK]

  • College Safety Resource Center [LINK]

References

Disclaimer

This article is for general informational and educational purposes only and is meant to start conversations in your family. It is not legal or medical advice. Hazing, drug, and medical amnesty laws vary by state and change over time, so check your state and county for the exact laws where your student lives and goes to school. People charged in the cases described here are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court, and no one named in the Cornell case has been charged with a crime as of this update. If you suspect hazing, abuse, or assault, contact a professional or law enforcement immediately. Prepared Not Paranoid and Larry Betz are not responsible for the content of third-party websites or resources linked here. Affiliate disclosure: I've linked to products from my Amazon store that I personally recommend. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work.

If you or someone you love is in danger, or someone is hurt, passed out, or can't be woken, call 911. For poison or overdose questions, call Poison Control at 800-222-1222. For confidential support after a sexual assault, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 (800-656-HOPE), any time, day or night.


Awareness gives you time. Time gives you options.


The Prepared Protector is someone who's decided that loving someone means being ready for them, not just hoping things go fine.


Prepared Not Paranoid. Protecting the Most Vulnerable Among Us.

Larry Betz https://www.sedonastrengthandmobility.com
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What's Happening on Campus- Part 9: Win at All Costs