Following the hazing death of a Penn State sophomore, the student's family is calling the death "murder" and "torture," and said the fraternity brothers involved "treated our son as roadkill."
"This wasn’t boys being boys," dad Jim Piazza told CBS. "This was murder of our son. They tortured him for 12 hours."
"What happened throughout the night was just careless disregard for human life," Piazza said on NBC's "Today" show. “They basically treated our son as roadkill and a ragdoll.”
Timothy Piazza, 19, died in February after two falls down stairs 12 hours apart, and brothers at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity who noticed him injured failed to get help until after the second fall. Hazing requirements forced Piazza and other pledges to drink large amounts of alcohol to enter the fraternity, NBC said.
Eight fraternity members were charged with manslaughter as a result of Piazza’s death, and the university has permanently closed the fraternity chapter there. The school is also more closely monitoring social activities on campus and has banned alcohol from all campus social activities for the remainder of the school year.
A total of 18 fraternity members face some kind of charges in connection with Piazza’s death, CBS reported. None have yet been expelled, but the university president said that could still happen as the investigation continues.
Twitter highlighted the fact that Piazza’s funeral was not attended by anyone from the university administration or the fraternity.