Mynhardt sued, and Lambda Chi Alpha convinced a judge it had no duty to supervise the chapter. The fraternity’s insurer—Lloyd’s of London—successfully argued the fraternity men weren’t covered because they had violated the fraternity’s “risk-management” policies. Mynhardt reached settlements with six students who were covered under their parents’ homeowners’ insurance, collecting less than $2 million, one-tenth of what his lawsuit had been seeking. Mynhardt moved to a house in Charlotte, near Carolinas Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized. He had one full-time, live-in aide and another who tended to him part-time. He needed help moving to his wheelchair, showering, and getting dressed. In 2012, he enrolled in Charlotte Law School. Because he couldn’t use his fingers, he took notes with a stylus attached to his palm and a touch-pad computer. “As soon as there’s an incident, national fraternities start distancing themselves,” Mynhardt told David Glovin, my colleague at Bloomberg News. “It’s irresponsible.” Even then, Mynhardt wasn’t ready to condemn Greek life. “I believe a lot of positive things can come out of fraternities. But if they’re not run correctly, things are going to get out of control.”
Teenagers probably don’t examine the legal contracts they sign when they are invited to join a fraternity. But new members agree to follow complicated “risk-management” policies; if they don’t, they will void their insurance coverage. Take, for example, SAE’s Minerva’s Shield, the program named after SAE’s patron goddess of wisdom. This contract, which is typical of those at many fraternities, prohibits “open parties,” which means chapters must establish guest lists. The contract also excludes insurance coverage if chapters offer “common source” containers such as kegs, or punches, or liquor of 100 proof or higher. Members are forbidden from playing drinking games or serving a visibly intoxicated guest or, of course, anyone under age twenty-one.
The last requirement for coverage is the ultimate challenge: how to avoid underage drinking when as many as three-fourths of fraternity members and potential guests are underage. To comply with these rules, members have two choices. They can hire a “third-party” establishment such as a bar or banquet hall with a cash bar and a staff responsible for checking IDs. Or they can try “bring your own bottle,” or BYOB, which is more complicated than it sounds. The fraternity must establish a guest list with the birth dates of every member. Those of legal age receive an “event-specific” wristband. Then, legal-age drinkers are allowed to bring in six beers, wine coolers, or malt beverages, which must be deposited at a central distribution center. There, guests must be issued a punch card with six holes corresponding to the drinks they brought, so that each guest’s consumption can be tracked through the night.
This setup looks nothing like actual drinking at fraternities. George Desdunes and other members of SAE certainly didn’t handle alcohol that way at Cornell on the night of February 24, 2011, and into the early hours of the next morning.
AROUND MIDNIGHT, Desdunes caught a “sober ride” to Dino’s in Collegetown. By then, between the Jameson’s whiskey and the rum-and-Pepsis, Desdunes had already had quite a few drinks. On his late-night excursion, Desdunes was the picture of millennial cool in his Cheap Monday designer jeans, gray canvas Vans, and a dark green hoodie. He wore a stud in his right ear and a pink rubber wristband that read: “Preserve the boobies.” The wristband promoted breast cancer research, neatly combining a fraternity man’s concern for the greater good and his focus on the female anatomy. At Dino’s, Desdunes didn’t order anything to drink.
At 12:24 a.m., Desdunes’s roommate, Matthew Picket, texted him that he was locking his bedroom door and would leave the key in Desdunes’s mailbox. Picket wanted to protect himself from a risk all the older fraternity members faced that night: a mock kidnapping. At most chapters, full-fledged members hazed pledges, but at Cornell, the tradition was reversed: Pledges kidnapped full members and quizzed them on their fraternity knowledge, then forced them to drink or do calisthenics if they answered incorrectly. The full members had been chastising freshmen because they hadn’t pulled off a kidnapping lately. In fact, the freshmen had recently been summoned to a late-night “lineup,” where pledges wearing jackets and ties were berated for failing to measure up. “Come capture us,” they were taunted at a lineup. “We’re waiting for you to do it.” In theory, at least, the older brothers could tell the pledges they didn’t want to be captured if, for example, they had a big test the next day. Or they could simply stay inside and lock their doors, which is what Picket told Desdunes he was doing that night.
Meanwhile, Desdunes texted his girlfriend, and they arranged to meet at Collegetown Pizza at 1:00 a.m. after the bars closed. She had been out with friends since 8:00 p.m.—first at Dino’s and then at the Royal Palm Tavern, another dive bar, where undergraduates carved their names on wooden booths and tables. She had enjoyed three or four drinks herself. When she met Desdunes, he didn’t seem at all drunk to her. Around 1:00 a.m., the two walked a half mile back to her apartment, where they listened to music and had sex. Afterward, Desdunes had to decide whether to call for a ride from the sober drivers. If he did, he might be kidnapped. If he were kidnapped, Desdunes worried that he’d be in no shape for a job interview the next morning. He was looking for a finance-related campus position. By coincidence, his girlfriend herself would be the interviewer. Although she recently graduated, she still had a plum campus position at an undergraduate-run student agency. Desdunes asked her for advice about how he should prepare and what he should wear. In the end, he decided to risk calling for a ride on that cold, windy, and icy night.
Around 2:15 a.m., several pledges pulled up in a Honda Pilot SUV, jumped out of the car, and grabbed Desdunes. He resisted, but the pledges overcame him, holding him on the ground and then binding his wrists and ankles with zip ties and duct tape. The kidnapping had begun. One of the pledges would later describe Desdunes’s struggle as half-hearted, a kind of “mock” resistance. It wasn’t like an earlier foiled kidnapping, when an upperclassman had fought back fiercely; he had punched a pledge in the face, breaking his nose. For whatever reason—fatigue, resignation, a tendency to be a team player—Desdunes didn’t go that far. The driver asked Desdunes about the girl he had been with, while the pledges took Desdunes to a freshman dorm, a townhouse in the northern part of the campus. Because his feet were tied, he hopped into the front door. Before the main event, he exchanged texts with his girlfriend:
“I got kidnapped,” Desdunes wrote. “Knew I should’ve walked. See you tomorrow.”
“HaHaHa wow so not surprising, well uh enjoy,” she replied.
“I’ll try but I doubt it. Still have to prep for that interview.”
“Yea, hopefully the person interviewing you will be understanding.”
“Yeah, I really hope she is, Heard she has a nice body.”
“Well thank you, hope your kidnapping doesn’t take to long! See you tomorrow.”
Then, the pledges took Desdunes’s phone, removing his last avenue for escape; under fraternity rules, a kidnapped member would be released if he called a brother and said, “Phi Alpha,” the SAE motto. Desdunes found himself on a couch, next to another fraternity brother, Gregory Wyler, a twenty-year-old sophomore. Wyler had asked for a ride to his girlfriend’s apartment and, like Desdunes, found himself tied-up and blindfolded with a black ski mask.
Everyone knew the drill. The questions would keep coming. When the members botched them, they had to drink vodka. Or do sit-ups and crunches. Or eat or drink something mysterious, maybe disgusting. They had to name the members of the pledge class. They had to recite a poem. They had to sing “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent, which wasn’t easy while drinking: “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes / How do you measure, measure a year?” Wyler and Desdunes sang together. It no doubt helped that they were both musical; Wyler, an accomplished jazz trombonist; Desdunes, a trumpet player in high school who had taken music lessons since he was five. But the men missed plenty of questio
ns, so they had to drink a lot of liquor. Desdunes and Wyler would open their mouths and hope for the best. Wyler wasn’t sure exactly what he was eating, maybe pixie sticks, chocolate powder, strawberry syrup, and pieces of a sandwich. At one point, he felt the sticky, gooey feeling of dishwashing soap on his pants. And there was vodka, cup after cup of vodka. Wyler figured he drank four or five cups—maybe with a shot in each. Then he asked for a pail, so he could vomit. Afterward, the pledges told Wyler to drink two more vodka shots and eat hot sauce. Wyler heaved again. He told his interrogators the eight or nine drinks were enough. He was done.
Wyler felt foggy, and after his blindfold was removed, he saw Desdunes was still being given cups of vodka to drink. One pledge figured Desdunes drank six or seven shots. Finally, Desdunes said he couldn’t drink anymore. He stood up from the couch, around which pledges had formed a semicircle.
“We were kidnapped the wrong way,” Desdunes said, once on his feet. It wasn’t clear what he meant because he was slurring his words. It seemed like he expected more questions about the history of SAE. Then, it looked like he passed out—while standing.
“George, George, are you all right?” Wyler asked. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” he heard Desdunes say. Wyler figured he’d be fine. It was now after 3:30 a.m. Desdunes had trouble walking and could barely speak. Arms around his shoulders, several members guided Desdunes, hands still bound, back to the Honda Pilot. They lifted Desdunes into the back seat, where one pledge could hear him mumbling. Around 4:00 a.m., pledges took Desdunes into the SAE house through the back door. The door of Desdunes’s room, of course, had been locked by his roommate. So the pledge brothers carried Desdunes into the library, laying him on the leather couch. They made sure he was on his side. It was the least they could do. No one wanted a brother to choke on his own vomit.
AT 6:45 A.M., on Friday, February 25, George Ramstead arrived at Hillcrest, as he did most days, to clean up the sour smell of the morning after. In the dining hall, Ramstead, who worked for a custodial service, found the remains of the beer-pong tournament: a dining room littered with plastic cups, broken furniture, cans of Keystone beer. At first, Ramstead didn’t take much notice of the young man lying on the couch in the library. It wasn’t unusual at the SAE house, a frat boy sleeping it off, unable to make it back to his room, or maybe a friend crashing there after a long night. Around 7:45 a.m., Ramstead, rounding up all the garbage, took a closer look at the student on the couch. He could tell something was wrong. Desdunes was on his back, one arm hanging off the side, head to the left, vomit or mucous on the side of his mouth, his eyes rolled back. One of his pant legs was rolled up, a zip tie around his ankle. Another zip tie with duct tape around it lay on the floor nearby. His pants were down by his mid-thighs, his shirt halfway to his stomach. Ramstead yelled, trying to wake him. He grabbed Desdunes’s feet and gave them a shake. No response. When Ramstead called 911 on his cell phone, the operator asked if he could sense any breathing. Ramstead couldn’t tell. He also couldn’t feel a pulse, and Desdunes’s hand was cool to the touch. Upon arrival, emergency workers tried CPR, then drove Desdunes to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The cause was alcohol poisoning; his blood alcohol level was almost .40, or five times the legal limit for driving.
It took five hours to drive Desdunes’s body from the medical examiner in Binghamton, New York to his hometown, New York City. Marie Lourdes Andre, Desdunes’s mother, was at work. She got a call from the human resources department at Brooklyn’s SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where she counseled AIDS patients, according to an account in the New York Times. She worried she was about to lose her job. Andre, a former nanny whose husband died of lung cancer, had worked hard to get this far. She had a good job and a son at an Ivy League school, on his way to be like the doctors she saw every day at the hospital. When she arrived at the human resources office, she found a police officer waiting to see her.
“Do you have a son named George at Cornell?”
Andre walked down the hall to an examining room, where her son was lying face up on a gurney. A sheet covered his body, but she could see his face. She screamed.
FOR THE NEXT few days, the Ithaca and Cornell police investigated Desdunes’s death, questioning the fraternity’s officers, his friends, and all the pledge brothers who drove him, tied him up, and fed him liquor. Ithaca police lieutenant Christopher Townsend noted the uncooperativeness of Desdunes’s fraternity brothers. It was a conscious decision, the brotherhood closing ranks against the authorities. Eric Barnum, the president, texted all the members, telling them the chapter had hired an attorney, and no one should talk with police.
One pledge went even further. He tried to cover his tracks. At 1:15 p.m. that day, he sent a panicked text to his roommate.
“I need you to do me a favor. It’s extremely urgent. Throw out all zip ties and duct tape in the room, please. ASAP.”
“Is everything all right?”
“No, I can’t really talk right now. Please, get rid of it.”
His roommate reported the text to the police, who collected the duct tape and zip ties as evidence.
Wyler, Desdunes’s fellow kidnapping victim, was the most forthright. He described the night in great detail, giving the clearest picture of what it was like to be blindfolded on the couch. “Where do you want me to begin?” he asked a Cornell police investigator. “Hopefully, this won’t happen again.”
The case was, of course, a national media sensation. It had all the elements: drinking, privilege, the Ivy League, a young promising life cut short. There was also the racial angle, a young African American man kidnapped at a historically white fraternity. Later, after the racist chant in Oklahoma became public, Desdunes’s death would be cited as an example of the treatment of blacks at SAE. In this case, though, for all the chapter’s other flaws, Desdunes seemed to be welcome in a chapter that prided itself on its diversity. Another member, Svante Myrick, who graduated in 2009, has since become the City of Ithaca’s first African American mayor, as well as its youngest.
SAE, which said it had a “zero tolerance policy” for violations of its alcohol and hazing policies, suspended the chapter. In March 2011, Cornell said SAE would lose its recognition for at least five years. The public viewed Desdunes’s death as primarily about hazing. In fact, it might not have met the legal definition in most states. Usually, older fraternity brothers haze freshmen, and the younger students risk injury—or worse—as a condition of joining an organization. In this case, the victim was already a member. Some called it reverse hazing. In a way, it more resembled a twisted drinking game—Trivial Pursuit, alcohol edition. But New York State has a broad definition of hazing—conduct that risks injury “in the course of another person’s initiation into or affiliation with any organization.”
In May, a grand jury charged three pledges with first-degree hazing and an offense related to providing alcohol to a minor: E. J. Williams, the wide receiver; Max Haskin, the varsity tennis player; and Benjamin Mann—who like Desdunes, was from Brooklyn. Investigators said Haskin, Mann, and Williams had been among those in the Honda Pilot who picked up Desdunes, tied him up, and took him to the house for the interrogation. The students faced misdemeanor charges, carrying a maximum penalty of a year in jail. A fourth student—the pledge who sent his roommate the message asking him to dispose of the zip ties—was charged with evidence tampering, as well as hazing. The court sealed the proceeding because that student was eighteen at the time and considered a juvenile. The grand jury indicted SAE, as an organization, too. A month later, Desdunes’s mother, seeking $25 million in damages, sued the fraternity and many of its members. Her civil suit attacked the entire culture of the chapter, including its underage alcohol bingeing and hazing.
On May 21, 2012, fifteen months after Desdunes died, the pledges faced the criminal charges at the Tompkins County Courthouse, just half a mile from Cornell. The men waived their right to a jury trial and put their fates in the hands of a judge.
Whereas the prosecutor argued that the events met New York State’s broad definition of hazing, Raymond Schlather, one of the defense lawyers, said the pledges themselves were a kind of victim, bullied into kidnapping: “These seniors, juniors and sophomore brothers of SAE were adamant, and, in fact, called these young pledges sissies, and what have you, for not having engaged in what they considered a time-honored ritual.” In fact, he said, the grand jury indicted the entire fraternity not only for underage drinking, but for hazing because the “entire chapter is an accomplice in this case.”
The defense focused on how much Desdunes drank from 10:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m.—by Schlather’s count, twelve to eighteen ounces of liquor, equivalent to eight to twelve 1.5-ounce shots. The lawyers said that’s likely why Desdunes died. They also said the drinking was voluntary. Testifying for the prosecution, Desdunes’s girlfriend said he didn’t show evidence of impairment when they were together: “I mean the text messages I was receiving afterwards, which were perfectly coherent, better than most I receive sometimes, not really a sign of a very drunk person.” Many of the fraternity brothers who appeared in court were vague in their recollections or said they couldn’t recall key moments, exasperating the prosecutor, who told the judge: “I am asking the Court at this point to allow me to treat them as a hostile witness on the basis that these questions and answers are evasive. These are college-educated students, and they cannot remember anything about this night.”
The judge found the three fraternity pledges not guilty of all charges; after the acquittals, the court sealed the proceeding, and the judge’s reasoning is no longer public. Schlather told a reporter that the court had “determined without any hesitation or equivocation that these guys are innocent.” But, he added: “Having said that, I emphasize that there are no winners, because someone is dead and the family is in pain, and frankly, the lives of three young men are irrevocably harmed.” SAE didn’t defend itself, so it was found guilty of misdemeanor hazing-related charges and levied a $12,000 fine.
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