Doug Fehrberg
Appearances
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
What happened with the fraternity is they're all bound by oaths of secrecy and brotherhood and commitments to each other of watching your brother's back, don't rat out on your brother. So the brotherhood gathered and came up with a story to tell about how George might have consumed alcohol on his own to such a great extent. And
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
That self-consumption had resulted in his own death, tragic as it was.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
As I was being trained as a trial attorney early on in my career, I picked up two cases for younger people. One was on behalf of a young man who was brutally hazed at the University of Michigan. I learned two things. One, that young people needed very good legal counsel and that in the context of fraternities and sororities, that hazing was extremely widespread.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
It took years of effort to punch through those lies, to get at the truth by virtue of civil litigation so that George's mother could understand the true circumstances that led to the death of her son and to hold them legally responsible for their misconduct.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
Also involved in the case was the retention of a forensic toxicologist and an emergency physician.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And the opinions of the experts in the case were that had anybody properly attended to George and taken him for the medical care he obviously needed, they would have been provided care that would have allowed him to survive unarmed. It has been virtually every parent's wish that a lawsuit not just be about the money.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And we understand that and strive in every one of these lawsuits to compel through the leverage gained in civil litigation reforms, reforms to make the organization safer.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
The problem with that structure is that supreme power for determining decisions is vested in the undergraduate members. In the constitution of SAE and in many other fraternities, significant policy changes in the organization can only be made at what they identify as being a convention.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
But they couldn't make that change unless taking it to the convention and submitting it for a vote. And they did that. It has to have the approval of the undergraduate members or it cannot be implemented. And it was turned down. And they did that two years later. And it was turned down.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
I'm also extremely cynical about fraternities and I would say that that cynicism is just sort of realism because I have been down the road for many, many years and it is disgusting to me that when I have identified for you some of the structural problems in fraternities, that the fraternities have not cleaned their own houses, cleaned their own organizations to make their own operations safe.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
Many of the fraternities are clickety-clacking down the road exactly in the same way that they've been doing it for decades. And what they're most focused on is how to structure the organization so that foreseen and anticipated risk of injury and death does not overtly affect them financially. That's where their focus is, from my view, and not on saving lives.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
What I would say about Cornell is that it was extremely receptive at the highest levels of their legal department. And it seemed to me at the time that they were extremely interested in understanding what some of the shortcomings might be in terms of how universities address the Greek issues.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
You can work out a whole lot of s*** in the hours of Target.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
When I first went to meet Marie in her apartment and where George was raised, it's hard to describe the emotions that come from going into someone's private world where it was evident that her life, George's life, was embedded in that location and unchanged.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
since the time George had left to go to college, embedded in a way that only parents who've suffered the most harm can understand in that taking anything down, changing anything, moving something hurts in a way that's indescribable. And so from a personal experience being taken through someone's apartment,
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And seeing how much George meant and seeing how much of George was still there and wasn't going to change. The bedroom wasn't going to change. I've been into families' houses where the sheets haven't been changed because they still contain the smell of their child. And doing that in the context of meeting with a parent who's been lied to when asking questions in the midst of extreme trauma
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
and who's troubled about what to do and is looking for answers and isn't sure about being strong enough to weather the storm to find those answers, but then commits to doing it. And so that was the circumstance of meeting Marie on her own turf. And that I will never forget.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
The Brotherhood exerts extreme amount of control over the pledges and uses their interest in becoming a member to pressure them to engage in various activities that results in hazing traditions developing and continuing and becoming more and more dangerous.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
18, 19, and 20-year-olds, while they may be technically adults, they're often interested in demonstrating their power or authority over a pledge to see the level of their commitment. And so in many circumstances, we see that chapter members have developed practices that they insist that pledges engage in in order to show their true, deep commitment to becoming a brother.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And when George was a sophomore, the freshman intake class was berated for not turning some of that hazing towards the brotherhood, which apparently was something that was also a tradition whereby the freshman class would mete out some of the same punishment of sorts to the sophomores or the upperclassmen as a means of showing their own power.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And that's the circumstance and the tradition that George got caught up in.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
The pledge class underneath George were called into a lineup at the fraternity house, and many of the upperclassmen berated that pledge class for not striking back or pranking or hazing upperclass members, and were essentially called unworthy for not having done so.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And George called the identified pledge that was responsible for making sure that brothers were transported. Other pledges got in the car, all with the intent on responding to George, but rather than taking him back to the fraternity house to kidnap him and engage in the very thing that they were berated for not having done.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And when the car showed up, George came out of his friend's house, walked to the car and was suddenly surprised because other pledges jumped out of the car, grabbed George and threw him in the back of the car and proceeded to tie his hands behind him and indicate to him that he had been kidnapped. And they blindfolded him and took him to a separate location, an apartment for one of the pledges.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
Took him into the apartment, still blindfolded, still with his wrists bound, sat him on the floor, and then subjected him to a series of questions and rituals that if he answered anything wrong, they had concoctions for him to consume and alcohol that he was supposed to consume.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
So suddenly George was put in a position where he was involved in a ritual that had happened when he was pledging the fraternity, a ritual where there was the pressure of complying to some degree as a brother of the fraternity with a ritual of the fraternity being a good brother.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
Red Solo cups were filled with alcohol, George still being blindfolded, George being ordered to consume what was in the Solo cups.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And at some point in time, given the amount of alcohol that was poured for George and to be consumed, he could not stand up on his own or walk on his own. And the pledges decided then that they would carry George or basically dragging on the ground to get into the car where they were going to take him back to the fraternity house.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And sort of as a memento, a prize, a token of success, dump him in the fraternity house. as evidence that they had in fact followed the orders or the commands or the implications of the Brotherhood as they had been berated with the day or so earlier.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
And they carried George in and dumped him on a couch in the fraternity house, full visibility of others, and left him. From that point forward, no one checked on George, no one stayed with George. No one took any care of George. No one monitored his condition. No one did anything. And it wasn't until the janitor came by in the morning to clean the fraternity house.
Campus Files
The Hazing of George Desdunes
He checked on George and George was dead in the fraternity house.