Hazing death at Chico State

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

CALIFORNIA - Those who descended these steps of a fraternity house entered a world designed to terrify: The floor, damp with sewage and the walls, splattered with taunts. Over a door was written, “In the basement nobody can hear you scream.”

Sometimes secrets can be deadly.

In that basement, just what happened to the young man named Matthew Carrington?

Debbie Smith, Matthew Carrington's mother: You just had to love him.  To know Matt was to love him. 

Debbie Smith is talking about her first-born son, 21-year-old Matthew Carrington. Once, when he was little, it was just the two of them—broke and on their own. 

Smith: I think that’s what helped make him the kind of person that he was.  You know? Because he was really thoughtful, he was really considerate, very smart about money. 

Debbie remarried eventually and the home video made the new family dynamic obvious: a close, caring working class family, struggling to survive in the affluent suburbs east of San Francisco.

Matt was not like some kids who graduate high school eager to start a life away from home. He worked nearby, went to community college, and remained devoted to home, family, and especially his mother.

It was two years before he applied to Chico State university, a rural college about 200 miles north of San Francisco, to study math and accounting.

Smith: Matt was very into his education.  He was career-minded, he wanted to make something out of himself, and that’s what he was going to do.

Keith Morrison, Dateline NBC: Were you surprised to hear he was going to join a fraternity?

Smith: Yeah, I was surprised. And so he was like, “Mom, you know I really think this is going to be good for me.”

The brothers at the Chi Tau house, Matt told his mom, were like him. They weren’t pretentious, they were working-class kids. And she didn’t worry about Matt, because he was hardly an “Animal House”  frat boy. He didn’t use drugs, didn’t even drink beyond an occasional beer. 

Gabe Maestretti, one of Matt's fraternity brothers: Matthew was great kid.  A real good kid. 

Maestretti was one of Matt’s fraternity brothers.

Morrison: Had you got to the stage where you considered him to be your friend?

Maestretti: Absolutely.  Absolutely.  I was at the stage where Matt was my brother. That’s the hardest part. Is the fact that—you know, he was my friend.

And so when the hospital called to say he was desperately ill, Debbie was alarmed, of course, but also baffled.

It was a Wednesday, 6:15 a.m.

Smith: And they said, um, “Matt’s in critical condition, and—you need to speak with the doctor.”  And I said, “Oh my God.”  And then he came on and he said, “you need to get here as soon as you can.” 

Matt had collapsed, they told her, while working out in the basement of the Chi Tau fraternity house.

Matthew’s fraternity brothers said they wondered if he had too much to drink, and the exertion plus alcohol may have been too much for him.

Maestretti: My actual initial thought to the whole thing was that he was intoxicated.

Maestretti was at the house when Matthew collapsed.

Maestretti: It seemed like he was just sleeping. 

Unable to revive Matt, his fraternity brothers began to panic and placed a call to paramedics.

Maestretti: I never prayed so hard in my entire life that anything happened.  I prayed that he was okay harder than I’ve ever prayed in my entire life.

Debbie, was praying, too, on the three hour drive to Chico. Praying, and trying to understand what had happened to her son.  As far as she knew, Matthew kept his distance from  Chico’s notorious party scene. 

As she drove, she talked to a nurse on her cell phone.

Smith: And I said, “Stay with Matt, and is there anybody with him?”  Nobody’s with him, I said, “Why is he alone?  Why was he found in this frat house with all these people, and now he’s alone? Why isn’t there somebody with him?” 

Morrison: And you didn’t know how bad it was.

Smith: I didn’t know how bad.  I just knew it was really, really bad, I just knew it. I said, “We just need to get to him, he can’t be alone, we just have to get to him.” (crying)

Smith: So when she kept calling me on the phone I said, I know it’s bad, I know there’s something wrong, and I know you have got to tell me what’s happening to my son. And she said, “Well we don’t like to tell you this on the phone,” and I said, “Oh God (crying), no don’t let it be that.”  And she said, “Debbie (sniffle), Matt didn’t make it.”  And I just screamed, and screamed, and screamed ... 

Later, at the hospital, doctors seemed to be at a loss.

Smith: At that point they just didn’t know, they had no idea what was wrong with him, they didn’t know why he died.

Confused and heart-broken, Debbie and her family met with Matt’s fraternity brothers hoping they could tell her something — anything — about what happened.

John Fickes, fraternity brother: There was no anger, no hatred, no malice towards us.  They just wanted to know what happened to their kid.

John Paul Fickes was one of Matt’s fraternity brothers.

Fickes: we got just a couple sentences out just before everybody just broke down in tears. 

Smith: They started telling us about Matt and how sorry they were.  And—you know, what a sweet person he was and how much they liked him.

Debbie wasn’t the only one to get a call that morning. So did Chico police detective Greg Keeney.  Why a police detective to investigate Matthew’s death?

It was just a hunch, really, from the ambulance attendants. They weren’t so sure that Gabe Maestretti and the other brothers at the Chi Tau house had been totally honest.

But detective Keeney wasn’t at all sure what he’d find.

Morrison: When you first arrived to talk to these kids, did you have any reason to suspect that they might have been culpable?

Det. Greg Keeney: You know, we just didn’t know.  It was a big unknown is what it was. 

So how did this young man die?

The answer to that question was as bizarre as anything detective Keeney had heard, and it would launch him on an investigation of the very strange practices of the Chi Tau fraternity.

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