VANITY FAIR | NOVEMBER 2017 | BENJAMIN WALLACE | Photographs by GASPER TRINGALE
Still reeling from the Sandusky scandal, Penn State has a new outrage on its hands: members of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity have been charged after the February death of sophomore pledge Tim Piazza. As 14 frat brothers face trial for the horrifying events of that night, BENJAMIN WALLACE investigates the circumstances that led to the tragedy, and its aftermath, yet another black mark for Penn State.
The night leading to his death, Tim Piazza spent the early evening trying to shrink two obstacles standing in his way—a bunch of math homework and a pile of laundry. The mechanical-engineering major was tackling them at the apartment he shared with four friends near the State College campus of Penn State University. A good-looking, flame-haired kid, six feet two inches and 205 gym-honed pounds, Tim had been a football player at Hunterdon Central Regional High School, in New Jersey, where he’d also shown an interest in service to others. He’d worked with Hunterdon Outreach, promoting sports for children with special needs, and it was through his school’s Teen Prevention Education Program, which focused on responsible sexual decision-making, that he’d met Kaitlyn Tempalsky, his high-school sweetheart. For a prom-posal senior year, Tim stood on the roof of his Jeep in front of Kaitlyn’s house, danced to “Shining Star,” ripped open his shirt to reveal PROM? markered on his chest, and handed her a bouquet of pink flowers. Kaitlyn’s dad, a cop, laughed and advised Tim that the stripping better stop at the waist.
When Tim started as a freshman at football-dominant Penn State, in the fall of 2015, his own (average) football playing necessarily came to an end, but he became a regular in the bleachers at Nittany Lions home games, at Beaver Stadium. Even though Kaitlyn was now a student at Susquehanna University, 60 miles away, they FaceTimed regularly and were already talking about marriage, and children, and future shore houses. Tim remained public-spirited. He spent much of his free time on Ayuda, part of P.S.U.’s 15,000-student-strong Thon organization, which raises money for children with cancer. And he already knew what he wanted to do after graduation: having been exposed to 3-D printing, he had decided he wanted to make prosthetic limbs for children and soldiers.
But Tim still yearned for another level of male camaraderie. Two of his roommates were in fraternities, and by spring semester of his sophomore year, Tim had decided he wanted to join one, too. He rushed a bunch of frats this past January and received two “bids,” or offers. Beta Theta Pi told him he was among their top 10 picks, and he liked Beta because a lot of its brothers were engineering and biology majors. “School came first,” Kaitlyn recalls, “and he felt that if these guys could be in a frat and still have good grades, he could do it, too.”
Thursday, February 2, was bid-acceptance night, when Tim was to be initiated into Beta, and he was told to be at the fraternity house at 220 North Burrowes Road at 9:07 P.M., wearing a jacket. A brother named Kordel Davis sent a text that read: “hello pledge … get ready to get fucked up and get ready for a long semester.”
When Tim’s roommate Alex Park left the apartment in the late afternoon, Tim “seemed excited to be going,” Alex recalls. “I can’t imagine he’d have that same enthusiasm if he’d read that” (the get-fucked-up text). “It wasn’t like he was the wild kid at a party. He drank a little bit below average, to be honest.” When Tim set off for Beta, a few hours later, his homework was still on the countertop.
The next morning, Tim’s roommates noticed that he’d never come home. Bennet Brooks thought maybe Tim had just ended up crashing at the Beta house. Alex texted Tim several times that morning to see where he was. By 11, the roommates were worried. Then Kwaku Owusu texted a Beta brother he knew, and he received an alarming response: Tim was at the hospital. The roommates alerted Tim’s older brother, Mike, who was also at P.S.U., and he Uber’d to Mount Nittany Medical Center, where Tim was about to be helivac’d to Hershey Medical Center.
As the Piazza family assembled at the hospital in Hershey, they learned just how serious Tim’s injuries were. A surgeon had found four liters of blood, or about 80 percent of a body’s total supply, in Tim’s abdomen. His spleen was shattered. Nearly half of his skull had been removed to accommodate brain swelling. When Kaitlyn arrived at the hospital at 7:30 P.M., she was crying, and Tim’s parents, Jim and Evelyn, were crying, too. The first thing Jim said to Kaitlyn was that Tim had sustained “unsurvivable brain damage.” When she went in to see him, bandaged and intubated and wired to machines, he was unconscious and “barely recognizable,” says Kaitlyn, who is studying for a career in medicine. “I could have walked past the room. They were pumping so much fluid that everything was swollen. He was wrapped up. He had bruises. It did not look like him at all.” She held his hand as she told him, “between the crying, just I love you’s, and I kept saying, ‘Please open your eyes. Just please open your eyes.’ As much as I said, Please open your eyes, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”
Tim was pronounced dead on Saturday morning. He was registered as an organ donor, but his body was so badly damaged that doctors were able to harvest only one kidney. “Then they start talking about skin and bones, and you’re like, Whoa,” Evelyn Piazza told me several months later. “Suddenly it was all too much. Now you’re asking me to chop up my baby. I couldn’t even handle it.”
Even then, his family and friends nursed growing suspicions. According to Tim’s other roommates, when Kwaku had texted the Beta brother with follow-up questions, he didn’t hear back from him. On Saturday, Onward State, an independent, student-run P.S.U. news site, published an article alleging that Tim’s injuries were related to a fall, and police told the Piazzas that the fall had occurred some 12 hours before a call was placed to 911. “For someone to get hurt this bad, or look like he did,” Kaitlyn says, “it just made sense that there was foul play. We just didn’t know to what extent.”
Men of Principle
Greek pride has long been a centerpiece, alongside the football program, of Penn State’s marketing efforts. Though only 17 percent of the 40,000 students at the university’s main campus in State College belong to a fraternity or sorority, Greek organizations have played an outsize role as an intergenerational ark for the school’s social life (i.e., drinking culture; Penn State routinely is a top-ranked party school). “You don’t necessarily have to be part of Greek life there, but you have to have friends in it,” Tim’s roommate Bennet Brooks told me. Jane Arcidiacono, who lived next door to Tim, says, “People will ask what sorority you’re in, and if you say ‘None,’ they look at you weird.”
“We’re never going to bring Tim back,” says Jim Piazza, “so all we have is the ability to try to make a difference for other people.”
To all appearances, before Tim died, Beta Theta Pi was the antithesis of Animal House. In a Greek system that is among the largest in the country (Penn State has 51 fraternities, 30 sororities, and three coed organizations), the local Beta chapter, called Alpha Upsilon, was the second-oldest frat at the university (dating to 1888) and owned one of the most handsome properties, with manicured hedges, an immaculate structure, and an elegant, subdued metal plate announcing its three-letter Greek identity. Unlike most other P.S.U. frats, which are embedded in a residential neighborhood, Beta was one of only a handful of houses seen as being “on campus.” (Technically, it stood on private property across the street from Penn State’s Deike geosciences building, a point the university would repeatedly stress after Tim’s death.)
Alpha Upsilon was considered exemplary in other ways. With Beta’s much-touted brotherhood of Men of Principle, “it was always noted for attracting the best and brightest that you’d find in the Greek system,” Damon Sims, vice president for student affairs, told me. A decade earlier, it had deteriorated into a house plagued by alcohol and hazing, to the point of being disbanded in 2008 and reconstituted with new members as a dry frat. Afterward, Alpha Upsilon made a point of working closely with both the university’s academically elite Schreyer Honors College and with Campus Crusade for Christ, reaching out to students who were serious about studies and willing to live in an alcohol-free house. A wealthy alumnus provided more than $8 million to physically refurbish the property. In the past five years, Alpha Upsilon had won two Chapter of Excellence awards, and it was on track to win a third this year. A Penn State spokesman told me he’d recently met with State College police about Beta, and “this was not a chapter they viewed as problematic, so clearly they did a good job of disguising a set of behaviors.” (State College police did not respond to a request for comment.)
Binge drinking and hazing are hardly unique to Penn State, but the university’s response to Tim Piazza’s death, and the community’s reaction to that response, would be complicated by the university’s recent past. Following the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal and its fallout—with the firing of Joe Paterno and removal of his statue from Beaver Stadium—everything from the insular nature of Happy Valley to the cultic spirit of a place where everyone knows that the only way to respond to the call “WE ARE” is with “PENN STATE” was called into question. “Penn State has become one of the most self-examining educational cultures in the country,” Jason Whitney, who runs a recovery program for P.S.U. students, told me. “We had a Stage 5 hurricane, a full-on assault on our values in every way, and we had to analyze and figure out if we were the university that claims to stand for honor.”
The coroner had ruled Tim Piazza’s death “accidental,” but police shared some of their early investigative findings with Sims, and within two weeks of Tim’s death, Penn State revoked its recognition of Beta Theta Pi for “no less than five years.” At the end of March, after at least nine fraternities and sororities violated rules of the student-run Interfraternity Council (IFC) during Parents Weekend, the university announced a series of further actions: it was permanently banning Beta, disallowing kegs and liquor at parties, deferring recruitment until the spring semester, reducing the number of alcoholic social events each chapter was allowed to host in a semester from 45 to 10, and, in April, suspending another frat for two years.
Defenders of the status quo, seeing a wholesale attack on fraternities and sororities, immediately pushed back. One student organized a Peaceful Protest Against the Restrictions on Greek Life. Mark Bernlohr, a Beta alumnus and lawyer for the nonprofit that owned the Alpha Upsilon house, wrote a letter to fellow Beta alumni suggesting a lawsuit against Penn State and attached a draft for that proposed complaint, which read, in part: “The rush to judgment against Alpha Upsilon for the tragic accidental death of Mr. Piazza was spearheaded by Sims and was an effort by Sims and Penn State to cover up their prior negligence in failing to adequately address the Penn State drinking culture.” A university spokesman disagreed with that characterization. A leader of the IFC e-mailed its member frats suggesting they bypass the “social checkers,” private security professionals hired by the IFC, ostensibly to police under-age drinking, by keeping booze on upper floors. Jason Whitney likens the reaction at Penn State to the debates that follow mass shootings. “There’s this almost hackneyed, empty rehearsing of the same discourse—after each school shooting you can expect certain gun-rights activists to lead with, ‘They’ll use this to try to ban guns.’”
But if one contingent felt that the university was over-reacting, another set of critics saw Tim Piazza’s death as further evidence of a deeply warped culture that put fund-raising above morality. The Penn State administration, in this view, was well aware that the school’s Greek system had a hazing problem. In 2015, a former student named James Vivenzio had sued the university over his experience pledging Kappa Delta Rho in 2012, when, he alleged, he had been forced to drink liquor mixed with vomit, urine, and hot sauce and burned with a cigarette. Also in 2015, the father of a student named Marquise Braham, who’d committed suicide the previous year, filed a wrongful-death suit against the university, arguing that it had known his son was in a precarious mental state after his own experience with hazing, by Phi Sigma Kappa, which allegedly included having to choose between snorting cocaine or being sodomized on video. While Vivenzio’s hazing claims were dismissed by a Pennsylvania judge, a claim made in each lawsuit, and recently cleared to go forward by a Pennsylvania judge hearing both cases, was that the university was liable for fraud, because it had whitewashed the Greek experience, failing to disclose misconduct incidents, pooh-poohing the “many myths” about Greek life, and stating on its Web site that “the reality is that men and women in fraternities and sororities are committed to their academics, volunteer their time in the community, develop and strengthen their leadership skills.”
“In a free market, people are entitled to know the risks of sending their kid to a university,” says Braham-family lawyer Douglas Fierberg, a leading attorney in frat cases. “Why should a university be holding hands with a bad-acting frat by not revealing allegations against it? Penn State has held the hands of the frats forever” by not disclosing the information and “in the same breath telling everyone it’s all a myth.”
Tim was registered as an organ donor, but his body was so badly damaged that doctors were able to harvest only one kidney.
“These are self-governing organizations,” a P.S.U. spokesman says in response. “[They’re] privately owned, managed by external parties, and sanctioned by national organizations and not under the jurisdiction of University Police. The autonomous inter-fraternity councils have had responsibility for monitoring, adjudicating, and sanctioning chapter safety violations. We have decided to take over that responsibility, in addition to our oversight of student conduct cases.”
Fierberg’s “myth” was forever exploded when, on May 5, a grand jury in Centre County, tasked with investigating Tim Piazza’s death, indicted 18 members of Beta Theta Pi on charges ranging from tampering with evidence to involuntary manslaughter, and issued an 81-page presentment that laid out in repugnant detail the events that led to his fatal injuries in the frat house that night. It was able to do so because when Beta was resurrected after its dissolution the fraternity had installed more than a dozen motion-activated video cameras.
A Permissive Atmosphere
The events of that night and the morning after, as detailed in the grand-jury presentment, were both horrific and disturbing. The heart of the bid-acceptance event for Tim Piazza’s pledge class was a drinking gauntlet, a series of stations—including a Crown Russe vodka handle swig, a Natty Lite beer shotgun, a Franzia bag-wine chug, and a round of beer pong—each pledge had to complete, cheered on like runners rounding bases by the frat brothers, who occasionally poured beer on them. According to the presentment, Tim Piazza entered the gauntlet at 9:21 P.M., camera time (which was in fact 37 minutes behind actual time). By 10:31, a number of the pledges were visibly drunk. A social with a female group named Trilogy (an underground remnant of the Tri Delta sorority, which had been banned in 2009 for hazing violations) commenced. At 10:40 P.M., a brother named Lars Kenyon walked Tim, visibly impaired, to a couch in the Great Hall, the fraternity’s main public room. Soon after, another brother walked Tim to another room. He was staggering with great difficulty. Around 10:45 P.M., when Tim moved out of camera range, he fell down the stairs to the basement. Less than a minute later, a brother was seen on-camera gesturing toward the steps, and a minute after that he and three other brothers were seen retrieving Tim’s limp and apparently unconscious body and putting him on a couch in the Great Hall. A bruise had bloomed on his left abdomen.
Part of the horror of the presentment is its sheer length and specificity, the relentless accretion of shocking, time-stamped moments a summary can only partially convey. There was the seemingly callous handling of Tim Piazza’s body, as when a brother lifted Tim’s arm and it thudded back onto his chest, or when another brother poured liquid on his face, or when a brother slapped his face three times, or when a brother tackled someone onto him, or when Tim kept rolling off the couch but his body showed no reflex reactions, or when another brother struck his discolored abdomen with an open hand. Then there was the response to his condition: Beta brothers strapped a heavy book bag on Tim’s unconscious body to keep him from rolling onto his back and aspirating on his own vomit, a phenomenon with which they were sufficiently familiar to have a name for it: “backpacking.” There were intermittent signs of animation: Tim twitching, Tim vomiting, Tim bare-chested and moving his legs, the backpack affixed to his body. There was the brothers’ disconcerting failure to seek help. When brother Kordel Davis arrived, 28 minutes after Tim’s fall, he looked at Tim’s head and began pointing at it agitatedly and arguing to his fellow Betas, according to interviews conducted by police, that they needed to call 911. A brother was then seen on the video shoving Davis across the room.
After Beta’s brothers and pledges had headed off, Tim Piazza was seen alone in the video, at times on all fours and clutching his abdomen, at times managing to stand and stagger, only to fall again, repeatedly, sometimes face-first onto the hard floor or into sharp objects (a table corner, a banister finial). At 6:49 A.M., a pledge named Qobi Quainoo sat on a sofa opposite Tim and watched him groan, fall off the sofa, and get to his knees and bend forward, rocking and clutching his head. Quainoo began to record a video of this on his cell phone, according to the presentment, and left the house at 7:12 A.M. (Quainoo did not respond to a request for comment.)
Around 10 A.M., two brothers found Tim’s shoes and started looking for him. They found him in the basement, breathing heavily, bare-chested, his hands clenched, his skin cold, blood on his face, his eyes half open. They took him upstairs. For the next 42 minutes, a shifting assortment of brothers stood around, shaking Tim, attempting to put a shirt on him, trying to prop him up on the couch. Police recovered browser histories from various brothers’ cell phones during this period, including searches for “falling asleep after head injury” and “cold extremities in drunk person.” Finally, at 10:48 brother Ryan McCann called 911 to say “a friend” was unresponsive; he acknowledged that alcohol was involved.
Before the paramedics arrived, frat president Brendan Young walked in. Young, according to the presentment, immediately put his head in his hands and sat down on an adjacent couch. Later that day, Young would text his girlfriend: “I don’t think you fully comprehend the situation; he looked fucking dead. At the end of the day, I’m accountable for it all, I’ll be the one going to court, paying for attorney, and maybe put in jail.” Police recovered voluminous evidence of what prosecutors claim is a concerted cover-up, including a text from Young to pledge master Daniel Casey to “make sure the pledges clean the basement and get rid of any evidence of alcohol,” and one from Casey to Kenyon to “end that groupme so there’s no evidence on tims phone.” (Legal representatives for Brendan Young, Daniel Casey, and Lars Kenyon did not respond to a request for comment.)
The presentment also included an instruction, near the end, that Penn State itself should perhaps be investigated for fostering within the university’s Interfraternity Council a “permissive atmosphere,” and the release of the report caused a shift in the conversation at the school. On June 2, P.S.U. announced more planned changes, the broadest of which was a shift from the self-governance model to one where the university would exercise more oversight. Critics were unimpressed. “The university has always managed and supervised and monitored Greek life on campus,” says Aaron Freiwald, the lawyer representing James Vivenzio. “They just did a terrible job of it. And then someone died. And they step forward and say, ‘We have to get involved.’ ” Penn State calls Freiwald’s accusation “untrue and irresponsible,” pointing both to the complexities of frat oversight, such as privately owned houses not under the jurisdiction of University Police, and the university’s past support for self-governance. “After all, our students are adults and must accept responsibilities for their actions.”
“Live Like Tim”
On June 12, a preliminary hearing began in the Centre County Court of Common Pleas, in Bellefonte, a picturesque river town that earns its name. A small media encampment—TV vans and satellite dishes and interview tents—had been erected in front of the courthouse. District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller, pursuing an accomplice theory of liability—the idea that everything that happened to Tim Piazza was the collective and individual responsibility of any brother who’d played any role in the evening—had chosen to group all 18 cases together, resulting in a lopsided spectacle inside the second-floor courtroom: Miller and a few deputies on one side, 18 youthful defendants and at least two dozen defense lawyers on the other. The public pews had a similar asymmetry: Jim and Evelyn Piazza sat in the front row beside Tom Kline, a Philadelphia plaintiffs lawyer with a towering frame and a sweep of pewter hair, who will represent them in a civil suit that will almost certainly target Penn State, among others. (He had previously represented a victim of Jerry Sandusky’s and was already deeming Tim Piazza’s death “the next Penn State tragedy.”) They were greatly outnumbered by the defendants’ families, who filled many of the other benches in the room.
The core of the prosecution’s case was the video, which Miller described to the judge in excruciating detail. At 11:05 A.M., as Miller prepared to show the video, Tim Piazza’s parents, both wearing blue rubber “Live Like Tim” bracelets, left the room. “We were advised never to see it by Tom [Kline] and the counselor we’ve been seeing,” Evelyn Piazza told me later, “because that would definitely trigger PTSD. How do you unburn those images from your mind?”
Out of roughly 13 hours of footage, the prosecution screened around 3 hours for the court. As Miller walked her lead witness, Detective David Scicchitano, through the maddening 42 minutes of dithering, when the frat brothers failed to seek help, she kept asking questions to which she knew the answers: “Has anyone tried to do CPR? Has anyone checked his pulse? Has anyone called 911?” “No,” the detective replied. “No. No.” Around the ninth time Miller asked the detective, “What about now? Has anyone called 911?,” a defendant’s mother, sitting behind me, exclaimed, “God, this is ridiculous!”
Preliminary hearings typically take hours, but this one would last eight days, spread out over four months, and as each defendant’s lawyer began to cross-examine Detective Scicchitano, the broad outlines of a defense hove into view. If the commonwealth’s argument was that each defendant shared in a collective guilt, the defense case was the obverse: that this was a tragedy of the commons. While a terrible thing had happened, no one defendant had caused it, so no one defendant could be responsible. A widely held belief on the defense side was that Miller had overplayed her hand. Given that, according to the presentment, 50 other pledges had gone through a similar gauntlet over the past three semesters, and none of them had been seriously harmed, a charge like “reckless endangerment,” which requires proof of conduct “which places or may place another person in danger of death or serious bodily injury,” was a high standard to meet. William Brennan, one of the defense lawyers, told me—echoing a common defense refrain—that the brothers were acting on the assumption that Tim was just really drunk, not fatally injured. “Knowing now that Mr. Piazza was in mortal distress, it’s offensive to toss shoes on the sofa, but in real time he looked like any other drunken frat kid, and the shoes were tossed on the sofa, I’d think, so they stuck with him and didn’t disappear.”
“Really what this case is about is a civil wrongful-death case that’s masquerading as a criminal prosecution,” echoes another lawyer involved in the case.
Ultimately, the magistrate did throw out the most serious charges—involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault—and dismissed charges against four of the defendants altogether. Miller announced that she’d refile the involuntary-manslaughter charges, at a minimum. But several defense lawyers tried to suggest, in and out of the courtroom, that the buck really ought to stop with Tim Bream, a 58-year-old former head trainer for the Chicago Bears and Penn State’s head of athletic training as well as a Beta alumnus, who lived in the Beta house and served as its resident adviser. According to the presentment, a text between two Beta brothers after Tim Piazza’s death had read, referring to Tim Bream, that they should delete a GroupMe thread “so people don’t get screen shots or anything that could leak to the media. Tim’s idea, as a precaution.” By implication, this argument targeted the university itself. “Penn State has taken so much shit because of the Paterno-Sandusky debacle,” Leonard Ambrose, a lawyer for one of the defendants, Joseph Sala, told me. “Penn State is going to do anything to protect their flank. They know what’s coming.”
Gone but Not Forgotten
On a Friday afternoon in July, a few weeks after the first day of the preliminary hearing, I visited the Piazzas at their beach house in Spring Lake, New Jersey. Tim had loved coming down with his friends and going to the local trampoline park. “What I’m going to miss,” Jim Piazza said, his eyes misting and his voice husky, “is he used to play catch with me with the football a lot. That’s like the one thing when I go on the beach now that I think about. I just miss that. He liked that.”
The Piazzas have been unimpressed with Penn State’s response. First, no one representing the university had attended Tim’s funeral. (The administrator designated to do so had needed to back out due to a personal emergency, and no one attended in his place.) “Just like the preliminary hearing,” Jim Piazza said, sitting on a couch beside his wife. “You can’t tell me President Barron had something more important to do that day than be at that hearing.” Penn State says that university representatives were present at the hearing.
That morning, Jim had spoken with Eric Barron. “The university needs to lead,” Jim said. “I told Barron that again today: ‘You guys need to lead—other universities will follow.’ ” While Beta had been banned, none of the individual students have, as yet, been expelled. (The university notes it put the graduations of the handful of seniors in the frat on hold, that 35 students have gone through initial disciplinary hearings, and that “many” of them “have taken disciplinary withdrawals from Penn State.”) And then there was Bream, the 58-year-old university employee living among frat boys. Beta was a supposedly dry house where pallets of alcohol had been delivered and which had two bars. “That’s one of the most incredibly offensive things,” Jim said, “that he is still employed. He lived in the house, and if he’d have reported them to the university just one time, Tim would be alive right now. I brought it up to the president today. He said, ‘I can’t discuss employment matters.’” (The university argues that it doesn’t control or monitor the non-criminal outside activities of its employees.) Bream, who declined to be interviewed for this article, and who hasn’t been charged in any crimes in connection with Tim’s death, was eventually compelled to testify at the preliminary hearing and told the court that he was a teetotaler who “wasn’t in charge of discipline” at the frat house, but “would in no way, shape, or form give permission” for alcohol abuse or hazing.
Evelyn Piazza, who was wearing a necklace with Tim’s thumbprint and another with an EKG of his heartbeat, said, “They can’t hide behind ‘They’re off-site, we don’t have a say.’ No, they’re your students. You should have a say.” Jim added, “ ‘You want your fraternity to be sanctioned by the university, here’s the rule book. You break it, you’re out.’ ”
The Piazzas were planning a golf fundraiser for a foundation they’d started in Tim’s memory, to help people who need prosthetic limbs and to provide academic scholarships. “Obviously we’re never going to bring Tim back,” Jim said, “so all we have is the ability to try to make a difference for other people. Tim was the kind of person who wanted to help people. He just did. I personally believe, if he is in fact looking down on us—if that’s reality or not I don’t know, but if he is looking down on us, he’s sad that he left us, but I also know he’s glad that we’re trying to carry this cause, because that’s what he would want.”