Hotmail
Hazing death at Chico State
Most popular Dateline pages |
Sign up for the newsletter |
|
Detective Greg Keeney arrived at the Chi Tau fraternity just after day break on the morning of Matthew Carrington’s death.
Det. Keeney: The one thing that really just stood out to me was the complete lack of any sort of furniture at all.
But the room that most left an impression on detective Keeney was this filth-strewn basement.
Det. Keeney: It was dark. It was it was cold. For me, it was just like one of those medieval dungeons.
A place, you’ll remember, that was meant to terrify. The place where, “nobody can hear you scream.”
Detective Keeney had gathered the fraternity brothers together, and took them downtown. And one by one, alone in these interrogation rooms, they finally admitted Matt had been going through a hazing ritual. Why wouldn’t they have said so earlier? Well, hazing it turns out can be illegal in California.
But this particular hazing, the young men insisted, was all very innocent—there were no beatings. No booze. No drugs. Not really hazing. Simply an initiation.
Jerry Lim, fraternity brother (interrogation): It’s more humiliation than anything else.
Detective: Is this initiation stunt; is this something that you guys have done before?
Lim: Yeah. I did it.
Detective: Other pledges? The same thing?
Lim: It’s always been done this way, as far as I know. It’s more humiliation than anything else.
Elsewhere at the police station, as he was about to undergo questioning, Matt’s friend and pledge partner, Mike Quintana, made a disturbing discovery.
Michael Quintana: His blood is still on my hands.
Det. Keeney: It is? Do you want to clean your hands off?
Quintana: (nods)
Matt had been bleeding from his mouth after he collapsed, Quintana said...
Quintana: He started jolting ...
Det. Keeney: Like a seizure or something?
Quintana: like a seizure, exactly.
They’d reached the end of five months of initiation hijinks, said Quintana: Dressing up like women. Sleeping in the frigid basement.
They were at the peak of “hell week,” the final stretch before acceptance as full members. That night they’d been told to strip to their underwear, drench themselves with water, and stand on a bench while the others peppered them with questions about the fraternity.
Quintana: We basically drank water out of this Alhambra bottle and we passed it back and forth with a leg up. They wouldn’t let you go to the bathroom, so basically you pissed on yourself.
Maestretti, told police, and us, that when Matt collapsed, it didn’t seem that serious.
Maestretti: He wasn’t in like this position that you felt there was a dire emergency. I remember him being almost just like—like really, really tired.
Morrison: So when he laid down on that couch and appeared to be asleep, you said don’t worry about it.
Maestretti: The idea was kind of reached—let’s just kind of watch him. Make sure he was—make sure he was okay.
But Det. Keeney had the uneasy feeling that Maestretti and his fraternity brothers were still hiding something.
Det. Keeney: I think they tried to mislead theinitial responding officers to see if they would get away with it. Because they just told the paramedics that he had been working out and he had a seizure. Although the paramedics knew there was something completely different. And Keeney soon found out why they might have been going to such lengths to be evasive.
Det. Keeney: They had fallen into some problems with the school.
This strange old house, Keeney discovered, was once part of the Delta Sigma Phi organization until its Chico members had one too many brushes with the law. Complaints of everything from striking an officer to giving alcohol to a minor, to sexual battery. So many run-ins with police that college administrators stripped the house of its charter. That’s how this place became Chi Tau. It wasn’t a proper fraternity, no national affiliation, it was just a name they took.
In fact, the established fraternities around Chico seemed to have nothing but contempt for Chi Tau. Still, its members hoped if they just stayed out of trouble, they might soon get their coveted charter back.
Maestretti: We were pretty close. From all of our—
Morrison: To getting back in?
Maestretti: We were pretty close to getting back in. At least recognized by the school.
But certainly not if it was determined they’d been hazing pledges...hazing them so severely that one of them had died. To Det. Keeney it seemed a motive for a cover-up. And the detective had his suspicions there had been a similar death at another fraternity.
Det. Keeney: We had, a few years ago, had another pledge that died of alcohol poisoning. And—
Morrison: I mean that’s kind of what you expect to hear from somebody that age.
Det. Keeney: Sure.
Morrison: Yeah.
Det. Keeney: Sure. And so we expected that something like that was going to turn up at some point. That we were going find something like that out.
But that’s not what happened. The coroner found no drugs or alcohol in Matt’s system. Physical abuse was also ruled out. The cause of Matthew Carrington’s death? Water intoxication.
Morrison: And that’s what killed him.
Det. Keeney: That’s what killed him.
Det. Keeney: It makes your brain swell. It makes your lungs swell. And eventually stop your heart.
All that water diluted Matt’s blood, washed life-sustaining electrolytes right out of his system. His internal organs bloated with fluid.
Three gallons would have been enough to place Matt’s life in danger. But Matt and his pledge partner were given something close to 25 gallons of water—equivalent to five water cooler jugs.
And only then did it dawn on detective Keeney what really happened. Though it seemed Matt’s frat brothers still didn’t get it.
Fickes: You drink, you pee yourself, you throw up, you get tired of it.
Fickes repeated to us, the same story he told police; that Matt’s death was just an unintended consequence of a water-hazing ritual that they had all endured when they were pledges.
Fickes: And every once in awhile somebody will tell you to “pour one for the homies,” which mean you pour the jug of water over your head.
Fickes said the night Matt died, some fraternity members were watching a movie in the basement while others were gambling—a carnival like scene with the hazing of Matt and his pledge partner, the main attraction.
Jerry Lim had been selected to organize the night’s activities.
Morrison: Who was in charge that night?
Lim: That night?
Morrison: Yeah.
Lim: I was in charge. They were instructed to stand on one leg while they drank water and that was about it. That’s how the night goes.
But there was a little more to it than that. It was frigid in that basement room, the temperature in the 30s. The pledges stood on that bench in underwear for hours, holding up the heavy water jug, dousing themselves, and drinking more and more—their wet freezing bodies blasted by house fans. And whenever ordered, they’d drop to a floor, which had recently been flooded with sewage, and do their pushups.
Morrison: How long did you keep it going?
Lim: About an hour to an hour and a half. Somewhere around there.
Morrison: And then what?
Lim: I left a person in charge. I told them that I needed to go to bed so I could go to school. And I told Matt and Mike that it was basically almost over. And I went to bed.
By that time, it was around 1:00am. Both pledges were exhausted, but okay. And then, as most of the members went to bed, a new player joined the game. Gabe Maestretti, who had been asleep on one of the couches.
Fickes: Then Gabe woke up and he assumed position of in charge.
Maestretti: I remember weird pieces.
Maestretti told us he was unable to assemble those pieces into a complete picture, because he was still under the influence of a night of bar-hopping.
Maestretti: I can’t give you like a chronological of what happened. It’s all mixed up.
Morrison: ‘cause you were drunk.
Maestretti: ‘cause I was drunk, absolutely. ‘Cause I was drunk.
Maestretti: I don’t remember. Good or bad, I don’t remember. That’s the thing. I don’t—
Morrison: Do you remember making them stand on one foot from that bench? Drinking gallons and gallons and gallons of water?
Maestretti: I don’t remember making them drink any water.
But Matt’s pledge partner, Mike Quintana remembers Maestretti’s involvement quite clearly. He told Keeney, and later us, that Maestretti’s hazing went on most of the night. They were exhausted, disoriented, and hypothermia was setting in.
Then, around 4:00 a.m…
Quintana: We were working on our sixth bottle and we were about halfway done. And Gabe pulled us off of the bench again. And—had us do this ridiculous amount of push-ups. And Matt actually, you know collapsed. I noticed his tongue was in between his teeth and he started shaking and jerking. And—I’m like—what’s—something’s wrong. He’s having a seizure. You know, call an ambulance, but they didn’t call an ambulance.
Quintana, a trained lifeguard, tried to administer first aid, but had his hand bitten as he pried Matt’s jaws apart.
Quintana: And these guys are like, “It’s okay. It’s no—big deal.” I started balling. I couldn’t stop crying. Because I had just seen one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in my life. In one of the hardest days or nights that I’ve ever had in my life. I was—
Morrison: You were a mess?
Quintana: —I was broken.
In that dark, wet, cold basement, Matthew Carrington was dying. An entire hour slipped by, but no one called 911. Was it because the fraternity’s application for a new charter was at risk?
Morrison: When and how did you understand that this was worse than they said it was?
Quintana: After Matt had a seizure and we got him on the couch. I was sitting next to his head and his breathing got really faint. And it went from faint to nothing within 30 seconds. And that’s when I said, you know, “Oh my God, he stopped breathing.” I said, “Call an ambulance, go, go.” And that’s when the ambulance got called.
Alone, Quintana gave matt CPR as he waited for paramedics to arrive. It didn’t click till after they started strapping Matt up that, “Oh my God, he might actually die.’”
Quintana’s account was the evidence Detective Keeney needed to make the case that Matt Carrington’s death was no accident. For Detective Keeney it was obvious: a crime had been committed. The question was— would Matt’s fraternity brothers get away with it?
- Discuss Story On Newsvine
-
Rate Story:
View popularLowHigh - Instant Message
MORE FROM DATELINE |
 Dateline Section Front |
| Add Dateline headlines to your news reader: |
Sponsored links
Resource guide