December 30, 2003

Parents of fraternity pledge call for hazing crackdown

Associated Press
November 25, 2003

By LISA FALKENBERG

DALLAS - The parents of a Southern Methodist University student hospitalized after chugging water at a fraternity event said Tuesday that universities and national organizations should be held accountable for accidents at fraternity and sorority events.

Braylon Curry, a 21-year-old finance major, was released from a Dallas hospital Monday evening, more than a week after he was hospitalized after drinking an unknown amount of water at an off-campus Alpha Phi Alpha
fraternity competition.

Curry's parents said they consider the incident illegal hazing and hope it inspires a crackdown.

"I think it's very easy to take an event like that and isolate it and focus on it for a day or two or three and then it goes away and then it would be another group of parents in the ICU," said the student's father, Bishop Curry, a 52-year-old veterinarian in Maryland. "There needs to be a change."

He suggested universities require direct supervision of fraternity and sorority events or lawmakers increase the penalty for hazing from a misdemeanor to a felony.

"This can't be a void or a vacuum that our young people fall into," Bishop Curry said. "If it's highly supervised, that's the only way that you're going to be able to send your sons and daughters to college and they'll come back to you whole."

Jim Caswell, vice president of student affairs at SMU, said the school and other universities try to educate students about hazing but can only do so much.

"The difficulty that we find, quite honestly ... is how do you get at underground, secret activities," Caswell said. "We will continue to try and work at that issue but I must tell you, that's a difficult one."

He suggested parents help by keeping track of their children's activities.

Curry's parents say doctors are expecting a full recovery. Curry, who was unresponsive hours after the water drinking contest and was still listed in critical condition two days later, is now walking, talking and getting his appetite back, his parents said.

Chris Gilliam, a spokesman with the Dallas Police Department, said an investigation is "proceeding slowly." A detective interviewed Curry for the first time Tuesday and no charges have been filed, Gilliam said.He said any
charges won't be limited necessarily to hazing.

Curry's parents said pledges and some fraternity alumni are responsible for hazing.

Curry's mother, Brenda Curry, said her son was seeking a network of friends he could keep long after college, but had been skeptical of the pledging process.

"It was about brotherhood and he hadn't seen any sign of that in the pledging process," she said.

She said the incident prompted her oldest son, 23-year-old Bishop, to tell her that he too had been hospitalized about a year ago after being beaten up while pledging a fraternity at Texas A&M-Commerce. The elder brother decided not to pledge, his mother said.

It will take more than two parents' pleas to stop hazing, says Hank Nuwer, a journalism professor at Franklin College in Indiana and Indiana University at Indianapolis who has written four books on hazing.

"It's a well-meaning gesture," he said, but he added, "It's creating an atmosphere that creates false hopes for a lot of people and in the execution, it never produces social change."

Nuwer said parents such as the Currys should call for more research on hazing rituals rather than tougher laws. He said there has been at least one hazing death every year since 1970, but there is too little reliable information on hazing methods and their prevalence on U.S. campuses.