This Is How We Lost Our Charter

A Broad a semester8 years ago

I’m going to lay this all out for you. I’ll tell you how and why it went down. Every detail that I’m privy to, which is quite a few more than our nationals and university had when they shut us down. They threw us off campus and took away our charter. There are some moments in the story that are complicated, dark, and tricky to navigate, but I’ll try to be as candid as possible.

Aiming for the highest peak can distract you from what’s really important: peaking at the right time. Your favorite sports team aims to do it every season and make a run to the championship. Emulating that strategy is key. Peak at the end of your senior year and go out on top like a real champion.

By the end of my college career, I was set up to peak perfectly. Everything was going as well as I could have hoped for. I was skating through my classes, my social clout was more prominent than ever, with few worries anywhere in sight. Our chapter had enjoyed a scandal-free run in my four years and the pinnacle of my college experience was to be my senior formal. I had the right date, our suite had the right roommates, and it was destined to be a textbook senior sendoff.

And then we veered from the norm, just a little bit, right before the finish line. We had a massive paint party planned for a Thursday night, followed by our traditional brotherhood activity on the quad Friday afternoon, and then on Saturday morning everyone would head out of town for formal. This week, however, we decided that we needed the paint party to be a bigger deal than usual. We decided to put the party all over social media, invite anyone (girls) and everyone (girls). Not our usual methodology, it seemed like the fraternities that did that were just asking for trouble, but alas, we wanted it to be huge.

It ended up being our most expensive party of the year, and we paid for it with more than just money.

I honestly can’t remember the party that well, as it didn’t seem like anything too special at the time. I remember that the paint was freezing cold. I mean I wanted to slap the pledges it was so cold. Were they refrigerating this stuff? After maybe five minutes in the basement, I emerged looking like an extra in Apocalypse Now, but all I cared about was fast forwarding to get to Saturday. Looking back, I would rate the party a 6/10. It felt like we definitely could have done better, but that was about to become completely irrelevant.

The next day I skipped my classes and hung out at home until it was time to head to the quad. We were gathering there, waiting for everyone to arrive when our president received a phone call and walked off. I didn’t pay much attention to it, as he was the type of guy that had a resting heartbeat of 120 — everything seemed urgent with him. But as time went by he didn’t reappear and we needed to get the show on the road, so we went through it without him. It was all fine, no trouble, my last lap of that one in the books, and another senior milestone checked off.

We were moments away from doing one our classic douchebag frat cheers when one of the guys said, “[The President] just called me and said we need to get to the main house ASAP – it’s an emergency.”

That put a damper on our cheer and everyone broke out to go get their cars and drive over to the house. On our walk to the parking lot, I heard that the president had called immediately after leaving the police station so maybe this was more serious than we realized. People seemed to start walking more quickly.

The car I was in was one of the first to get to the house, and when I got out I saw our former president (and one of my closest friends) Ben, who was not on the quad with us, waiting on our front porch. I had to talk to him before everyone else arrived, and I had to ask the only question that was on my mind. “Did someone get raped?”

It was my biggest fear. The idea that someone I knew may have done that was terrible. I knew my guys, and I trusted my guys, but I’m sure a lot of people feel that way. And the reality is that sometimes that shit happens. There are monsters among us and we don’t see it coming. With us, though, that’s not what happened. Ben quickly assuaged my fears and told me that it wasn’t a case of any sexual misconduct, but a girl had died.

As everyone else trickled in, the news spread until our president made the official announcement. But we would have known if something terrible had gone down in our house, so how could this have happened? As it turns out, the girl had been found unresponsive in her own room that morning, and all they had to go off of was a picture that she had posted from the previous night with our letters in the background. That’s why our president was called into the police station. He was never under arrest and they sent him out of there when he answered all of their questions. Everything after that was just…very weird.

None of us had ever been in a situation even remotely close to this before. The police had been in contact with the school, who gave us an immediate indefinite suspension. They also contacted our national fraternity who called and told us that they were sending lawyers from HQ. At the time, it was unclear whether they were coming on our behalf or build a case against us to protect themselves. And not a single one of us knew what to do next.

We stood in the parking lot of the house for probably four hours hearing everyone’s opinion. It turns out that zero of us knew the girl, which wasn’t totally unusual, but we had to conclude that maybe blasting out the details of our party over the internet wasn’t the best idea. Some people started yelling at each other, and some people started saying that we needed to lawyer up or that they wanted to get their own attorneys. We were spiraling.

There was a lot of anger building in the group, which seemed like an obvious symptom of the stress, and like a powder keg, we were ready to blow. We didn’t come to any drastic conclusions, and our only real choice was to sit tight and wait for the guys from nationals to get into town.

When Saturday morning came, however, we decided that going to formal was off the table. We all had to call our dates and let them know, which was pretty easy because the rumors were already flying around campus. Social media wasn’t fun for those first few days, either. People were saying that our president was in jail, or that the young woman had died in our driveway and that we tried to hide the body. It was insane.

To be as respectful as I can about her, I’ll keep any personal details vague, but I will say that the police and university eventually concluded that her death had nothing to do with us, and their investigation led them to a different group on campus. But as far as I know, there was zero foul play involved. Rumors still swirled about us and what had happened for a while, though.

This next part is hard to articulate, so try and stick with me to the end. It sounds strange, but I felt a sense of relief when I heard that it was not a case of sexual assault, but rather what it turned out to be. Logically, that might sound like I’m relieved about there being a death, but obviously I didn’t want that, either.

The fact that we had nothing to do with it was a great ease on my conscience, but for the first day or two we didn’t know that. None of us knew the girl, or what her timeline for the night looked like, and we had to operate thinking that maybe she had been at our house all night and there was something we could have done to prevent it. And when you’re in that position, a lot of things run through your head. We all had to call our parents and give them a heads up in case the story went national and news teams started showing up. We were advised on what to say if members of the press or university reached out in an informal format. It was like nothing in our lives before.

But about that sense of relief I mentioned earlier, it was extremely prevalent. To be frank, my initial fears of being branded a rapist or perpetuator of sexual assault pulled me down with a sort of nagging dread. I had done nothing and I didn’t want to pay for the sins of someone else. We were cleared of any wrongdoing or even suspicion of wrongdoing related to her death and then no one called us murderers or criminals. However, if one person had been accused of sexual assault and later exonerated, we all would have been branded as assailants of sexual violence, regardless of the lack of validity in the claim.

That’s something that doesn’t go away. If this seems tangential in regards to the story, I assure you it isn’t. So many things go through your head when this ball starts rolling. And to be clear, I understand that being a victim of sexual assault and living with that is greater than my fear of being lumped in with a that label — and as a reminder, that’s not what happened or was suggested. These were just my initial fears when hearing that there was trouble.

And to be very clear, I know that being afraid and uncomfortable for a few days is minuscule in comparison to what this girl’s family had to and will have to go through forever. But again, as all the facts emerged we ultimately played no role in it. It was a tragedy, but not one that we were responsible for.

Everything else sort of just happened around us. Formal was canceled so I stayed in my room and watched the end of Neighbors over and over again. You know the part where Efron watches the letters get ripped off the house and then gets arrested? Yeah that. Over and over again. Totally serious.

Senior year kind of just ended and it was fun and cool and all that but FSL left us on indefinite suspension. The next year the guys were placed on some double super extra serious social probation because it turns out we were supposed to have been on a social probation that whole time. Who knew?

They were out of the woods in regards to the controversy, but the fact that we obviously had a party and stirred up some bad PR never sat well with the university. That fall, someone took a picture from across the street during parents’ weekend of the keg in our driveway. And that was that, kicked off campus, probably to be reinstated in four years — when all of the people attached to it at the time were gone. It felt like our school had really had it out for us after the incident, and they were waiting to be able to pull the plug.

It was weird, because it was just over. None of it went how we planned. It felt like no one was on our side when the going got tough, and they were happy to kick us to the curb. You might be thinking that this story got pretty dark and weird for something that opened with me talking about peaking at the right time. Yeah, it happened like that in real life. One minute everything was fine and fun and easy, and the next, nothing was the same. Yes, her untimely death reminds us that losing out on our fun is not the end of the world when there’s real tragedy out there, but it shook the bedrock of what we knew at the time.

So, my chapter is gone now. A group of guys there still persists, underground pirates that refuse to go away. I respect it, I get it, but it’s not the same. Sororities are punished for mixing with them, recruiting new guys means dodging tons of red tape, and maintaining underground fraternities usually seems to be untenable. I’m bummed that they won’t be able to have the experience that I had, because God damn it was a good one.

Trust me, I know what some of these statements sound like out of context or isolated. The reason that I included some of my more controversial thoughts was to express how scared I was at the time when shit hit the fan. I was a terrified kid during a complicated time. When our situation moved away from possibly being involved in a tragedy and just into whether or not we would be allowed to remain a fraternity, I saw us lose the battle and then lose the war. So my advice is to hang in there, boys. Fight to stay together, and enjoy it while it lasts. It’s a hell of a ride..

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