[2818] in APO News
forwards regarding Scott Kruegar
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (lcchang@MIT.EDU)
Mon Sep 29 19:18:58 1997
From: lcchang@MIT.EDU
To: apo-news@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 19:11:31 EDT
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1. statement from president vest
2. today's boston globe news article
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Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 17:19:08 -0400
To: FSILG/IFC-List@MIT.EDU
From: "Neal H. Dorow" <dorow@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Statement From Pres. Vest regarding Scott Krueger
===========================================================================
September 28, 1997
My thoughts and prayers, and those of my wife Becky, go out to Scott
Krueger, his family, and all those touched by this terrible tragedy.
During the past two days, the President and his staff, the Office of the
Dean for Student Services and Undergraduate Education, the Medical
Department, and the Campus Police have worked in an intense and coordinated
manner to provide what assistance we could to the family and to our other
students who were directly affected.
The use of alcohol is a serious problem on virtually every campus in
America, and ours is no exception. On Monday morning, I will initiate a
comprehensive review of our policies and their implementation, and will set
in motion a campus-wide introspective dialogue, and search for more
effective ways to avoid such tragedies in the future.
Charles M. Vest
President, MIT
________________________________________________
Neal Dorow
Assistant Dean for MIT Fraternities, Sororities and ILGs
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Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 17:21:50 -0400
To: AIFC/List@MIT.EDU
From: Lionel Goulet <goulet@tiac.net> (by way of Neal H. Dorow)
Subject: Things are NEVER going to be the same again.
In today's Boston Sunday Globe, September 28, 1997
Metro Region Section, Page 1.
Headline:
MIT FRATERNITY PLEDGE IN COMA AFTER DRINKING
by Francie Latour
Globe Staff
and
Jason Pring
Globe Correspondent
A first-year student and fraternity pledge at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology lay in a coma yesterday, apparently after collapsing from
alcohol poisoning.
Scott Krueger, 18, of Orchard Park, N.Y., was in the intensive care unit of
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center last night. Paramedics revived his
stopped heart shortly after midnight at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity
house at 28 the Fenway, according to police and officials.
The incident comes exactly one month after a Lousiana college student and
member of another fraternity died from alcohol poisoning. And it is the
latest in a series of episodes for Phi Gamma Delta nationally -- resulting
in sanction, suspension, or shutdown of chapters of the fraternity whose
members call themselves the "Phi Gams."
Boston police, fire, and emergency medical technicians went to the
fraternity house at 12:12 a.m., police said. According to an MIT spokesman,
fraternity members called campus police at 11:56 p.m. Friday night, saying
a student had collapsed.
The MIT spokesman said "it appears that alcohol may have been involved in
the incident," which may have occurred during an initiation ritual. Police
said vomit and empty liquor bottles were found in Krueger's basement room
at the fraternity. In the wake of the incident, the MIT spokesman said that
the fraternity had been suspended pending further investigation, meaning
that all social acctivity at the fraternity was barred.
In the intensive care unit of the medical center, Krueger's parents, Robert
and Darlene, said their son's blood alcohol level had soared to .410
percent -- about five times the legal limit for drivers -- when he collapsed.
Darlene Krueger said that doctors were forced to pump charcoal into her
son's stomach through a tube to soak up the near-legthal amount of alcohol
in his sytem, a procedure hospital officials said is common in drug
overdose cases.
Krueger said she was aleep in her home in Orchard Park, a Bufflo suburb,
when she was notified by a nurse that her son had recovered from cardiac
arrest and was breathing again.
"They told me that it was a party where little [fraternity] brothers were
paired off with big brothers. The freshmen had to drink a certain amount of
alcohol collectively," said Darlene Krueger, who added that fraternity
members told her that her son had passed out on a couch after the party and
started to burn blue.
Krueger said her son "never drank" before attending college. Classes at MIT
began on Sept. 3. She said, "Someone had to practiclaly force alcohol down
his throat, for him to have drunk that much alcohol."
Only weeks into the start of the college year for most students, the kind
of drinking Krueger fears her son participated in has taken the life of a
pledge from another fraternity.
Louisiana State University student Benjamin Wynne, 20, of Covington, La.,
had about six times that state's legal limit of alcohol when he died of
acute alcohol poisoning on August 27. Wynne was pledging to join Sigma
Alpha Epsilon, and was drinking heavily at an Off-campus "bid night" party
when he passed out, police there said.
But alcohol- and hazing-related incidents, including a dealy fire, have
plagued Phi Gamma Delta since 1993.
On May 12, 1996, five students died in a fire at the Phi Gamma Delta house
at the Universtiy of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The state medical
exminer in the case said that four of the five victims were intoxicated,
seriously impairing their ability to escape.
And in a 1993 incident that showed the complicity of many pledges in
keeping pledging rituals secret, a student at the Universtiy of
Wisconsin-Madison denied being hazed after police found him bound with
tape, shackled to a bench and covered with shaving cream.
The student, who refused to complain about the incident, said, "it was just
a game."
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