Part 8- What's Happening on Campus: The Code of Silence: Hazing as a Culture, Not Just an Incident
Sixty-Seven Years and Counting
Here's a number I want you to actually 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 going back to 1959. 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 maintained 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 exactly 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 sophomore pledge, fell down a basement stairway around 11 p.m. after a night of forced heavy drinking as part of the pledge ritual. His blood alcohol content later measured between 0.28 and 0.36 percent, several times the legal driving limit. Members carried him upstairs, visibly injured and unresponsive, and laid him on a couch. What happened over the next several hours is documented because a fraternity member texted about it in real time and because basement security footage survived: liquid was poured on his face twice to try to wake him, with no response. A newly initiated member who suggested calling for medical help was shoved into a wall. The pledge master slapped Piazza across the face three times. Someone tackled another brother onto the couch, landing on top of Piazza's injured body. Between 1 a.m. and 5:26 a.m., members put a backpack full of books on him to stop him from rolling over, and he repeatedly fell and struck his head on the hardwood floor and an iron stair railing, unattended. At 5:26 a.m., he was walked to another room, fell down three more steps, and was left on the floor.
He wasn't found and brought upstairs again until 10 a.m. the next morning, with blood visibly on his face. Members finally called 911 at 10:48 a.m., nearly twelve hours after the original fall, and even then, according to the grand jury, they didn't mention the stairway fall from the night before. Piazza died in the early hours of February 4 from a traumatic brain injury. The grand jury's own conclusion was direct: the delay and the neglect directly contributed to his death. Members later discussed erasing the security footage and deleted text messages documenting the night.
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.
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. As of this month, a Dartmouth alumnus named Andrew Lohse, who survived hazing at his own fraternity and has written publicly about it, has been speaking out again about what he calls the fraternity "omertà," using the actual Mafia term for a code of silence, arguing that the loyalty structure inside these organizations functions the same way: members are expected to compromise their own judgment, and sometimes their own safety, for the collective secret. Lohse has described his own hazing experience, including being forced to swim in a kiddie pool of vomit while being urinated on, and being forced to drink vinegar and milk until he threw up.
He's raising this now specifically because of two current, active situations. At the University of Mississippi, two students, Robert Strang, a 20-year-old member of Phi Delta Theta, and Aidan Hamilton, were both found dead within a short window of each other, with packages of kratom recovered at both scenes. Toxicology results were still pending at the time of this writing to determine what role kratom or fentanyl may have played, and officials have noted the results could even trigger Mississippi's anti-fentanyl law if fentanyl turns up mixed into what was sold as kratom. Phi Delta Theta has stated its fraternity is not accused of wrongdoing in those deaths, and that needs to be said plainly, this is still unfolding and unproven.
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 exactly why some people in law enforcement have started calling it "gas station heroin." It's largely unregulated, so potency varies wildly from one product to the next, and there's a real, documented risk of it being contaminated or cut with something far more dangerous, which is exactly the possibility investigators in this case are now checking for.
Separately, prosecutors in Pennsylvania have alleged that a group of 14 men, including a former Sigma Chi member, ran an organized cocaine distribution operation, with court documents claiming that pledges were coerced into cutting and packaging cocaine as part of what's alleged to be an "indoctrination ritual." Two completely different situations, on two completely different campuses, surfacing in the same month, 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, I think, the missing piece in understanding why the Cornell case has been so difficult from the very start. Everything we've laid out in this part, the reflex to protect the group over the individual, the instinct to handle it internally rather than call for outside help, the willingness to delete evidence rather than let outsiders see what actually happened, is the same omertà Andrew Lohse is describing, and according to the lawsuit, it shows up almost exactly the same way in the Chi Phi case. A private Snapchat group chat, "Chi Phi Actives," used to pull more members into the situation rather than to get her help. Seven men investigated, and according to the complaint, a closing of ranks around the incident rather than anyone stepping outside that circle to intervene. It's the same basement stairs, the same backpack of books, the same 12-hour delay in spirit if not in exact form. It doesn't tell us what a jury will eventually decide happened that night. But it does help 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. Starting January 1, 2025, schools had to begin actually collecting hazing incident data. Hazing prevention policies had to be finalized by June 23, 2025. Documentation processes for handling violations had to be in place by July 1, 2025. The first standalone Campus Hazing Transparency Report, a public document naming any student organization found responsible for a hazing violation, describing the violation, and noting the investigation dates, was due by December 23, 2025, and has to be updated twice a year going forward. Hazing statistics will show up inside the standard Annual Security Report for the first time starting with the reports due October 1, 2026, 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 forced 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. 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.
Sources
Timeline of details in horrific Penn State student death during fraternity pledging, ABC7 New York
Ole Miss students found dead identified as Aidan Hamilton, Robert Strang, CNN
The Stop Campus Hazing Act: What You Need to Know, The Clery Center
Prepared, Not Paranoid. Protecting the Most Vulnerable Among Us.
