Hell Week

Fourteen college freshmen, bodies and psyches drained, watch bleary-eyed as an older man dramatically feeds an electric blender the final ingredient of the rancid concoction that will be dinner:

Live goldfish.

After five days of humiliation, interrupted sleep and slavish obedience to the whims of the taunting men who encircle them, the students know better than to protest.

So they down the mysterious mix, chase it with salty, boiled beer - and vomit.

And vomit some more.

By the time the heaves subside, it seems things can hardly get worse. But there is more - 24 hours more, virtually all of it against the law, against University of Washington policies and against the fraternity's own zero-tolerance policy on hazing.

In two days, one of the freshmen will hang himself.

His parents since have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and its alumni association for that January 1998 suicide. The suit, pending in King County Superior Court, provides an unusual window into the secret world of fraternity initiation rites in an age when fraternities insist they have rejected hazing.

Documents and interviews with current and former fraternity members, UW officials and parents also reveal this: Alumni of the "Dekes" participated in this hazing, and one later instructed young members how to hide hazing from police.

The alums are established professionals, some old enough to be the students' grandfathers.

The Dekes are not the only fraternity at the UW that subjects its members to abusive initiation practices. About two fraternities a year are sanctioned by their peers for hazing. Alpha Tau Omega and Delta Tau Delta were placed on probation, and young men at the 29 live-in fraternities around campus can tick off a half-dozen UW organizations - including sports teams - that humiliate members during initiation rituals.

But the extent of the hazing by the Dekes, and the involvement of alumni, put the fraternity in a class by itself, said John Rhodes, adviser and director of the UW's Interfraternity Council (IFC).

"The systematic destruction of a person is what we're talking about," Rhodes said. "We take for granted the fact that the folks in our organizations are good people. It's disturbing that alumni are allowing, or in some cases arguably initiating, outright cruelty."

In Washington - one of 41 states with anti-hazing laws - it is illegal for student organizations or "living groups" to participate in rituals that cause or are likely to cause physical danger or serious mental or emotional harm.

It doesn't matter whether the person being "hazed" is a willing participant. Anyone convicted of hazing, a misdemeanor that can include such seemingly minor things as yelling and forced calisthenics, can be jailed for up to 90 days and fined $1,000.

The law - passed in 1993 - has never been enforced, according to prosecutors and educators.

The head of the for-profit company that licenses the use of the Delta Kappa Epsilon name said older alumni - even those present during the January 1998 initiation - were shocked to learn the extent of the hazing that occurred.

The core ritual, said David Eastlick, executive director of Delta Kappa Epsilon International, can be conducted in four hours with no harm or loss of dignity to anyone.

Eastlick said he doesn't know how things got so out of control. He was certain, though, that the initiation had nothing to do with the suicide of a young man he saw as already troubled.

The young man's parents believe otherwise. They assert in their lawsuit that what their son endured in the weeklong initiation rites directly led him to kill himself.

What follows is the first public recounting of what preceded the death of John LaDuca, 19, who hanged himself from a sprinkler pipe in his cramped room a day after he became an official member of Delta Kappa Epsilon.

The night of his death, he pulled the blankets on his bunk bed over his head, and, in a raspy whisper to a friend on the phone, recounted what he had experienced in the days before. He was naked and exhausted, he said, and just wanted a gun.

Later, his fraternity brothers said that becoming a Deke was probably one of the highlights of LaDuca's life. One pledge brother even speculated that given the significance of the accomplishment, LaDuca may have looked at the rest of his life and asked, "Now what?"

He knew being a Deke takes hard work, his brothers said. It's like forging steel: You need fire. To build a man, you have to break him first.

First days at Deke house

If there was nervous energy in the air in the winter of 1998, it was because newcomers to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity - most of them freshmen - were dreading what lay ahead.

They didn't need a college education to see they were as highly regarded as the garbage they were ordered to pick up at the rambling brick structure in the area north of campus known as "Greek Row."

The three-story building and annex was home to about 55 undergrads. It also was a hangout for upperclassmen living outside the fraternity and alumni who attended meetings in the secret chapter room on Monday nights.

The Deke house became John LaDuca's home in September 1997. A friend from Kentwood High School had decided to join; rather than live in a dorm with someone he didn't know, LaDuca joined, too.

Within two months, he was straddling two worlds, spending most weekends with family or high-school friends and weekdays building tentative ties with some of the new guys in his house.

Friendly and handsome, with enormous brown eyes and an easy smile, LaDuca didn't seem to need the instant network of friends the fraternity promised. He was more concerned about getting help with his classes, especially the math and chemistry courses he'd need to pursue a career in medicine or engineering.

As an honors student in high school, he had always cared about grades. Complications related to his premature birth had made him nearly deaf during his elementary school years (operations later corrected the condition), and he'd had to study harder than other kids.

He worked just as hard at sports, and by his junior year in high school was an accomplished rugby player, a competitor unafraid to match his 165-pound body against much stockier players.

Although he played a macho sport, LaDuca's idea of manhood went beyond sports cliches. He bowled with his father, loved spending time with his grandfather and counted two young women among his closest friends.

He also indulged a wild streak, cranking out Stevie Ray Vaughan licks on his prized Fender guitar, and straying from the nest to drink beer and smoke marijuana.

"John was no angel, and we didn't expect him to be," said his mother, Robin LaDuca. "We trusted him to make the right decisions. We were very proud of John, very proud, and I am so grateful I can say that John knew every single day of his life that he was loved."

When he died, more than 1,000 people attended his memorial service and funeral. Among them: Deke freshmen whose heads had been shaved just like his had.

`Pledge, clean my room'

To live at the Deke house, LaDuca and his fellow "pledges" paid $200 a year in dues and $550 a month for room and board. Quickly, the sum seemed excessive, given they were treated as servants for the "actives" who were already full members of the fraternity.

The pledges had merely promised to join the fraternity. They had made their pledge during either spring or late-summer Rush Week - "The Seduction," as one active called the weeklong series of parties to introduce people to fraternity life.

Lowell Roemer, who lived across the hall from LaDuca in the Deke house for about 10 weeks, had never heard the term "pledge" before coming to the UW. But it soon became his first name, barked incessantly along with orders to do something unpleasant.

"Pledge, clean my room." "Pledge, do my laundry." "Pledge, clean the toilet."

Hardly what he expected, given the attention lavished on him during spring Rush, when the Dekes invited him to parties and introduced him to sorority women.

Roemer, who was 19, knew four of the actives from Longview's Mark Morris High School. He knew little about fraternities, but his mother had demanded assurances from two actives recruiting her son that no one would lay a hand on him.

No problem, they told her, the Dekes don't haze.

It is hard, though, to find another name for the humiliations dispensed once the school year started.

Endless chores. Forced runs at odd hours. Group punishments to pay for the sins of any pledge who dared break house rules.

Roemer quit in November 1997, a day after he took a challenge from two actives and chugged a 40-ounce bottle of beer. He did it, he said, so he could get their signatures on a paddle he needed for initiation.

"I thought, `This is crazy,' " he said. "Here I am taking genetics, chemistry, an upper-level math class. I had enough to worry about without spending three hours doing someone else's laundry to get a signature."

Pledge Stacy Bruce of Spokane stayed. He expected some hazing when he signed up, but figured there would be a reason for it. Fraternity members were "very educated people that, I think you know, they wouldn't have done something like that if they felt it was unnecessary."

What he didn't know is that the vice president of the Deke chapter, the young man responsible for perpetuating initiation traditions, thought many of the activities had no purpose except to kill time.

"You're given something purposeless and futile to do," Charles Warren of Kirkland, now 24, explained in his deposition. "I would say that in and of itself has a purpose."

The activities and sleep deprivation also made the pledges very tired, in some cases more tired than they'd ever been in their young lives. That, too, served a purpose, Warren said.

As an active would later testify: A tired pledge is an obedient pledge.

A week of humiliation

It was Sunday, Jan. 11, 1998 - "Hell Week," more than three months after fall Rush. Over the next six days, the pledges would face their final tests before achieving full membership.

They were lined up in the courtyard outside the Deke house. Blindfolded, they were led one by one to the basement, where they took up residence inside 3-foot-by-5-foot areas taped off on the floor.

After watching movies about suicide and hazing in the Marines, debauchery at a mythic frat house and pornographic sex among dwarf actors, they settled into a routine that remained largely unchanged the first few days: No contact with outsiders, including family. No watches or clocks. No straying outside the taped boundaries without permission.

Do what you're told.

Awakened with a bullhorn before sunrise, they ran without water up and down steep hills until told to stop. After jogging, they lined up for ice-cold showers, rinsing themselves in the seconds alloted them. At one point, two alumni stood in the shower with raincoats and Wiffle bats, swatting the nude pledges on their buttocks to move things along.

The pledges cooked breakfast for the actives, and were given only an apple or orange before being sent off to school. When they weren't in classes, they were under the eye of an active in the library. They reported home for dinner and to clean up messes, many created deliberately.

They were hauled up from their basement bedrolls in the middle of the night to stand before halogen lights for a pop quiz on Deke history. Miss the answer and drop to the floor for push-ups.

They did a lot of push-ups that week. One did about 80 as pledges named prominent Dekes (UW President Richard McCormick, Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush), and recited the Deke ideals ("gentleman, scholar and jolly good fellow").

The pledges bonded over beer, and on Wednesday night, they lost their hair together.

Dustin Crogan of Spokane - "Pledge 6" - suspected a set-up when he walked into the living room and saw two kegs of beer, one for the 14 pledges and one for about 40 actives and alumni. The group who consumed theirs last had to choose between shaving their heads or running across campus in the winter air in their underwear.

The pledges lost, of course, and chose the buzz cuts. When one balked, questions began: Did he think he was better than every other Deke? He eventually succumbed to his pledge brothers, who pleaded: "We've got to show them that we're a group. . . . It looks really bad when one person says no and everybody else says yes."

Alumni assist `initiation'

By Thursday night, the ranks of alumni at the house had swelled to more than a dozen. By Saturday, there would be more of various ages and occupations, including:

-- William Hays, former vice president of Bank of America's international division, who pledged as a Deke more than 40 years ago. A University of Alabama graduate, he contributed so much energy and time to the UW chapter that it named him an honorary member.

-- Tri Tran, who was manager of the computer risk-management group at the Arthur Anderson accounting firm. Tran joined the alumni board and remained active in fraternity events after his graduation in 1995.

-- Anthony Stevens, a 1994 UW graduate, general manager of development for Network Commerce of Seattle.

-- Fred Roberts, a high-tech products salesman and 1994 graduate who reportedly led many of the activities during the '98 initiation.

-- Bruce Harris, a Canadian who helped resurrect the UW's Deke chapter in 1991. A 1985 graduate of the University of British Columbia, Harris taught the first pledges how to be Dekes and remained their adviser through 1996.

The pledges, actives and alumni who have given accounts of the events of initiation week in depositions and interviews describe the activities similarly, but sometimes in different order.

Scott Herzog, who oversaw the activities as "pledge trainer," provided the following sequence of events in the final, intense days of Hell Week. The details come from interviews and testimony by him and others.

Thursday night began at the top of a fire escape, where three men dressed as ghosts blew out candles and told the pledges, "Good-bye and good luck."

From that moment, the pledges spent much of the next two days in blindfolds. They were hit, forced to stand facing a wall with their hands up and legs spread and ordered to prove their worth to the fraternity by enduring various humiliations.

At one point, they were asked individually to give an alumni panel 10 reasons the fraternity should allow them to join. None of the reasons was good enough, and each was sent to a room to ponder while a 100-year-old Deke song blared from speakers.

Forbidden to talk or ask questions, they had no way of comparing notes or knowing what would come next.

After about an hour, they were ordered to strip to their underwear. Two at a time, they were led to the foyer, where actives stood around a rug and brandished makeshift clubs: rolled-up newspapers bound with duct tape. As the pledges crawled under the carpet toward a pile of clothes in the middle, the actives beat them.

After dressing in the dirty, ragged clothes, the pledges began what would be a recurring event: the "work party."

"They would throw eggs at you, or they would throw eggs on the floor, (and you'd) dive on it and clean it with your shirt, and you would be singing really obnoxious songs," recalled Crogan. "Then they would take you into the kitchen and tell you to scrub the floor with a toothbrush and you would keep singing the song, and they wouldn't let you talk to your pledge brothers at all."

Worse yet, Crogan said, he was ordered by his cousin to dig through trash with his head and bob for apples in a toilet bowl.

One of the few clear memories anyone had of John LaDuca during the initiation involved the young pledge rolling on the floor at one of the work parties singing, "Pour Some Sugar On Me," while actives did just that.

LaDuca's "big brother" - the active assigned to be his mentor - said the pledge agonized about making it through the week successfully.

"He really wanted in," said Brad Lewis. "He was telling me all quarter how he wanted in, and during the night, he was like, `I don't think I'm going to get in.' He said, `I don't think I deserve to be here.' "

Finally, after another forced run, the pledges were allowed to sleep - for about 30 minutes. After eating their breakfast - again, an apple or orange - they showered off the remains of the "work party" while dodging Wiffle bats wielded by two alumni.

They were then taken to classes by actives, who kept them under constant scrutiny.

"It was just terrible. I hated it," Crogan recalled. "I remember asking . . . `Is that going to happen again?' Everybody was asking that, but they wouldn't tell us."

More `work parties' and `caves'

Early Friday night, the pledges spent time cleaning and painting the house before being paired off to hit each other with rolled-up newspapers. Then, another "work party," where they dodged eggs, cleaned with toothbrushes and mopped up peanut butter and other gunk with their bodies.

Then dinner: a fetid mound of anchovies, burnt English muffin, soy sauce, sauerkraut, raw egg, onion and who-knows-what-else.

When the vomiting was over, they learned how to roar like lions, then dressed in women's nightgowns and dresses to answer Deke history questions for an alumnus perched atop a 6-foot-high "throne."

Later, another alum ordered them to re-enact Princess Diana's death, then JFK's assassination, then Julius Caesar's.

"A lot of this we would do on our knees," Crogan recalled. "I guess it was just to see us tired or something, but we would always be on our knees, and that was a bad part for me, because it hurt my knees a lot."

Sometime during the early evening, the pledges signed a scroll. What they didn't know - and weren't told - was that signing made them official members of Delta Kappa Epsilon.

The rest of Friday night's activities had one purpose, Deke representatives say: to mess with the pledges' minds so they would be jubilant when they finally learned they were in.

Once again, each pledge sat before robed alumni and actives to list 10 qualities he would bring to the fraternity. He received one black marble for each quality accepted. Ten marbles would win entrance. No one got 10.

At about midnight, the pledges changed into white togas and gathered in a semi-circle in front of a table. They took their blindfolds off. They were "Its," an active told them - the lowest form of life.

Ordered to do push-ups on their knuckles, the pledges were already exhausted when they were led through the house into black-draped rooms designated as "caves." Among them:

-- The Egg Cave: Two men in chicken masks sat before a makeshift altar with candles, chalices and eggs with words such as "fire" written on them. The eggs were thrown at the pledges.

"The whole point of this cave, and most caves, is to confuse the pledge," Herzog, the pledge trainer, explained.

-- The Silence Cave: The pledge was supposed to make the silent men watching laugh. One pledge recalled improvising with an inflatable sheep and a hot dog.

-- The Paddle Cave: Wooden paddles the pledges had spent weeks making were ridiculed and smashed. At least that's what each was led to believe; actually, the actives broke pieces of scrap wood.

-- The Rat Cave: A pledge pin was perched on a rat trap that appeared to be real. If the pledge reached for the pin, he was told he was wrong. If he didn't, he was told he was wrong.

`You're not Deke material'

After the caves, each pledge had one last chance to provide 10 reasons he should be admitted.

Crogan was pumped. He had 15 reasons ready, all of them good. As he ticked off four, he got a marble for each. Then, he recalled, the actives and alums turned deaf. Nothing was good enough.

"That was the point I was getting really mad and angry and upset," he said. "And this was the only time I could really show emotion, and I was so tired and they kept denying me and denying me, and I thought it was so real that I wasn't going to get in the house, and I was getting really sad. . . . It was all realistic.

"They denied me the last time. They said: `Get out of my face. You're not Deke material. You're not good enough to be a Deke.' So I started yelling at them a little bit and my big bro dragged me out of there. I was so mad because they told me I wasn't going to make it and I had gone through all of this whole period."

His big brother said he would do what he could to get Crogan back in the house. Meanwhile, he told Crogan, try to sleep.

"I couldn't really because I was too busy thinking about what my mom was going to think because I couldn't get into the house," Crogan recalled. "I was going to have to move out the next day and where was I going to go?"

Eventually, he fell asleep, only to be awakened by two actives who promised to help him get back in. It was getting close to noon on Saturday, but the windows were blacked out and Crogan saw only darkness.

Men in black robes stood in judgment. A hood covered the lead judge's head. Crogan didn't know his name, but it was alumnus Hays.

Hays announced: "I'm here to initiate Brother Dustin Crogan." Finally, Crogan had made it.

"I'm really excited, and he's about to hand me my pin, and everybody is shaking my hand and stuff, and these two guys bust through the door and they're like, `I can't allow this. This guy does not deserve to be in the house.' I don't know what's going on at this point. Everybody is yelling and talking, and I'm standing there and these guys are getting in my face."

He doesn't belong, they said. Hays all but shrugged, reportedly telling Crogan: "I have to have a consensus vote. Everybody has to vote yes on whether or not you're allowed into this house, so I can't have you here."

Crogan says they blindfolded him, ripped the member pin from his chest and took him back to his room. There, he drifted in and out of sleep until the fraternity president entered the room apologetically to return his dues check.

Crogan was invited downstairs for "a final apology." There, he found his fellow pledges in a darkened room and joined them in a semicircle.

The fraternity president greeted them. He told them: "You all did very well, except for one of you didn't make it. Will that person please step forward?"

"And we all step forward," Crogan said. "Then they turn the lights on and everybody cheers and stuff, and basically that's it."

They hugged. Some sobbed. They celebrated over dinner.

"It was a seriously great moment when we actually got in," Crogan said. "Regardless of all the bad stuff, I was very excited. It was the most important thing."

Some Deke alumni talk about that experience as the most significant moment in their lives.

Tran, the computer manager from Seattle, said that when life gets tough, he reminds himself that he made it through initiation, so he can make it through anything.

A suicide

After the celebration, Crogan said, "all of the pledges were kind of silent. I seriously can't describe how tired we were."

Crogan sat on a couch next to John LaDuca. He said he hoped to catch up with his new brother the next day.

When Crogan awoke Sunday at 2 p.m., he went to LaDuca's room. The door was locked.

LaDuca's father telephoned that afternoon and found his son distressed and questioning whether he should be at the UW. College had been tougher than he expected.

Come home, his father told him. No, the son said; he wasn't a quitter.

"I told him I admired him for it," Joe LaDuca recalled, the words choking in his throat. Nineteen years of love and nurturing forgotten, his self-assessment as a father now hinges on his decision not to drive from Kent to Seattle to visit his son that day, but to see him the following day.

Hours later, Brian Northcott, a friend from Kent, called LaDuca to see how he was faring. When he heard LaDuca's raspy voice, Northcott announced he was coming up.

No, LaDuca said, he didn't want visitors. And he described what he had been through over the past week. It was the last time anyone talked with him.

Sometime that night, the King County medical examiner said, LaDuca bound his ankles with a string from his prized electric guitar, wrapped the wire from a stereo headset around his left wrist and climbed on a chair. No one knows where he got the rope.

His roommate, whose influence had brought him to Delta Kappa Epsilon to begin with, found him the following day.

`Something didn't smell right'

News of the death exploded like a scream through the fraternity. When a policewoman and paramedics arrived, Warren, the vice president, ushered them past a crying, clinging throng in the living room to LaDuca's second-floor room.

The medical examiner ruled the death a suicide. Tests showed LaDuca had taken no alcohol or drugs.

Speculation among the Dekes began: Was it the letter LaDuca's ex-girlfriend sent him during Hell Week, in which she returned the Christmas present he had sent her? Was he genetically inclined toward depression? Was it his poor grades?

Some of the members who arrived after the body was found screamed at fraternity brothers when they heard the news.

"There was just outright aggression, people yelling at each other, which was very unusual for that situation," Rhodes, the UW's IFC adviser, said. "I thought then that something didn't smell right."

Within days, he said, the IFC and the university's Office of Student Affairs began receiving reports of hazing at the house.

Rhodes and Rick Galindez, who was the UW's liaison with fraternities and sororities, met with two senior alumni from the Dekes.

"At first they said, `They're not doing anything we didn't do when we were in school,' " Rhodes said. "The next time we met it was, `This kid's got a mental weakness.' The third time it was, `Nothing happened.'

"At that point I said, `Wait a minute. You said in the first meeting that something did happen.' "

Relations between the Dekes and the IFC cooled. The Dekes tried to rally other fraternity alumni to their cause, meeting at the Seattle Yacht Club to complain about unfair treatment by the IFC. Soon, other fraternity leaders were calling the IFC to ask what was going on.

The experience, Rhodes said recently, "was by far the worst thing I've ever encountered."

The reports of hazing began to spread among LaDuca's friends and family in Kent. In early February, his parents contracted attorney John Tomlinson Jr. to find out what had happened to their son in the days and hours before his death.

On Feb. 11, Ernest Morris, the UW's vice president of student affairs, told Tomlinson his office was investigating.

The university has no authority to regulate off-campus groups, but it exercises some control through voluntary contracts called "recognition agreements." In exchange for perks such as access to lists of incoming freshmen, the fraternities agree to hold alcohol-education and acquaintance-rape classes - and to ban hazing.

Having recognition withdrawn or being put on probation theoretically cuts a fraternity off from prospective recruits, and, Morris said, also signals to parents that they might want to ask questions to determine whether a house is being run safely.

Although the allegations involved a possible violation of law, Morris did not contact police, and does not as a matter of practice. People who want to call police, he said, can do so themselves. Otherwise, he leaves matters largely up to the fraternities.

"Dr. Morris has expressed a willingness to let us deal with our problems," said Doug Luetjen, a former president of the alumni arm of the IFC.

`We can get nasty, too'

The extent of the UW's investigation is unknown. School officials have refused to release scores of relevant documents.

What is known is that by April, the university asked the fraternity by letter to formally explain what had happened and what it was going to do about it.

Hays and other senior alumni considered the letter a form of hardball, and talked about how they might fight back.

"If it gets too ugly," Hays wrote in an e-mail to the international Delta Kappa Epsilon director, "we'll have to roll out the big money men. . . . Greeks account for 80 percent of alumni giving at the U, so we can get nasty, too."

By May, the fraternity still had not directly addressed the allegations. The university canceled the Dekes' recognition contract and the IFC followed by suspending the fraternity's membership.

The Deke alums lobbied for reinstatement from the IFC, and got it last year.

In August 1998, John LaDuca's parents sued.

No substantial changes

Since LaDuca's death, the Dekes have made some changes to their initiation.

According to alumnus Tran, there is less running and less alcohol. Others said alcohol has been banned entirely.

However, said Tran, "the events from Thursday afternoon to Saturday morning have not substantially changed."

In one meeting the fraternity held to discuss changes, alumnus Fred Roberts advised actives to hide future hazing from police by stalling them at the door, ripping down the black fabric and putting the pledges to bed, according to testimony from a fraternity member who was there.

Roberts said he has not yet been deposed and could not address any aspect of the LaDuca initiation or what followed it. However, he said he was concerned that by focusing on a single aspect of Deke life, people would get a warped view of what the fraternity is about.

Being a Deke, he said, is being part of a great tradition. He keeps a picture of Teddy Roosevelt, a Deke, hanging near his desk, he said, to remind him that because he is part of something great, he must try to be a better person.

"Little Fred Roberts of Portland, Oregon, is associated with four presidents, 153 years or more even of rich, rich tradition, a nationwide network of people who all believe in this tradition," Roberts said.

As for the initiation rites, Roberts said they have a purpose not easily explained to outsiders.

John LaDuca's father, Joe, is one who doesn't understand.

"Think of what that week could have been if it were about leadership instead of beating you down," he said.

"I want them to admit there's a better way to foster camaraderie and fellowship than the barbaric ways of the past."

Seattle Times researcher Sandy Freeman contributed to this report.

Susan Kelleher's phone message number is 206-464-2508. Her e-mail address is skelleher@seattletimes.com.