‘Someone Is Going to End Up Dead’

The girlfriends were scared, and their warnings were grave.

“Phi Sigma Phi needs to be watched,” a Central Michigan University sophomore wrote to Tom Idema, director of student conduct, in 2006. “Someone is going to end up dead.”

The student described how her boyfriend, among other fraternity pledges, had been forced to chug dangerous quantities of alcohol at a recent event. The men were in such a stupor afterward, she said, that “they could not even talk.”

We’re sorry, something went wrong.

We are unable to fully display the content of this page.

This is most likely due to a content blocker on your computer or network.

Please allow access to our site and then refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account (if you don't already have one), or subscribe.

If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com.

The girlfriends were scared, and their warnings were grave.

“Phi Sigma Phi needs to be watched,” a Central Michigan University sophomore wrote to Tom Idema, director of student conduct, in 2006. “Someone is going to end up dead.”

As Hell Week approached that year, another woman wrote to Idema about a Phi Sigma Phi hazing ritual known as “treeing.” Treeing, she explained, involved tying a pledge to tree and dousing him with rotten cottage cheese, sour milk, and urine — only to be released if his girlfriend kissed him.

Early Warning: In 2006, two women reported to Tom Idema, director of student conduct, that their boyfriends were being hazed by Phi Sigma Phi fraternity.

Little came of the emails. Phi Sigma Phi was put on probation for alcohol-related violations at the pledge event, but there was no penalty for hazing. The university’s own recent review of the case said it was “unknown” if officials had interviewed more than a couple of fraternity members or had looked into all of the hazing allegations. The case was one of numerous incidents over the course of the chapter’s troubled 23-year history, during which Central Michigan’s investigations either ran cold or appear to have scarcely happened at all. Reports that the fraternity’s basement was a haven for sexual assault, that women believed they had been drugged at parties, and that Phi Sigma Phi brothers had secretly photographed or videotaped their sexual conquests all led to the same place: a dead end.

There were never any “proven findings,” according to the university, typically because the victims declined to move forward with investigations.

Then the worst happened. In 2018, after a Phi Sigma Phi “Senior Send Off” event, the police found Kevin Ajluni, a 21-year old member of the fraternity, unresponsive and intoxicated at the bottom of a stairwell. He suffered a skull fracture and brain bleeding, and died two days before his graduation.

Ajluni’s death, the result of a fall down a dark stairwell with no handrails, was an accident at an off-campus residence. That made for a less clear-cut case than the hazing fatalities that often drive universities to crack down on fraternities. But the tragedy proved to be a breaking point for Central Michigan officials, who were fed up with Phi Sigma Phi’s high-risk behavior and finally had the ballast to act. After about two months of deliberations, the university concluded, in October, that the group posed a “significant threat” to student safety and should be stripped “forever” of its status as a registered organization.

Audio: 911 Call

'Barely breathing'

On April 29, 2018, Kevin Ajluni, a member of Central Michigan University’s chapter of Phi Sigma Phi fraternity, was found unresponsive at the bottom of a dark stairwell at an off-campus residence. One of Ajluni’s friends called 911 to report that Ajluni, who had fallen, was “really drunk” and “barely breathing.” Ajluni’s death prompted the university to crack down on Phi Sigma Phi.

Show transcript

Central Michigan’s slow march toward getting tough is laid out in hundreds of pages of emails and other documents, which Central Michigan Life, the university’s student newspaper, first obtained through a public-records request and reported on in April. The documents provide a detailed view of how investigative challenges and simple bureaucracy can keep universities from reining in fraternities that are widely seen as troublesome.

The old bargain with students and families, who have mostly accepted that fraternities are private organizations that colleges have limited powers to regulate, is under increasing national strain. Pressure is mounting on colleges to either make fraternities safe or shut them down — before someone dies.

In February, three women sued Yale University, saying it had failed in its obligation to protect students by ignoring reports of sexual misconduct at fraternity parties.

This month student protesters at Swarthmore College successfully pressured the campus’s only two fraternities to disband, following the publication of leaked documents in which fraternity members appeared to joke about having a “rape attic.” The message of the activists, who at one point occupied a fraternity house, was that if the administration did not act swiftly, the students would take matters into their own hands.

There was similar impatience within Central Michigan’s own administrative ranks. Anthony Voisin, the university’s associate vice president for student affairs, long ago sounded ready to pull the plug on Phi Sigma Phi.

“I am becoming increasingly tired of defending the continued existence” of this fraternity, he wrote in an email to a colleague.

That was in 2007.

Central Michigan U.’s slow march toward disciplining a fraternity accused of dangerous practices is laid out in hundreds of pages of emails and other documents, which provide a detailed view of how investigative challenges and simple bureaucracy can keep universities from reining in fraternities that are widely seen as troublesome.Chronicle Photo by Julia Schmalz

After Ajluni’s death, on May 3, 2018, Central Michigan suspended the fraternity, which was already under investigation for hosting an unregistered St. Patrick’s Day party. The temporary suspension, which preceded the removal of recognition, was the most severe action that the university had ever taken against Phi Sigma Phi, despite years of misgivings about the chapter.

'Keeps Me Up at Night': In 2018, an alumna reported that Central Michigan had failed to protect whistle-blowers.

For some it was long overdue. An alumna, after hearing about the suspension, filed a report with the Office of Student Conduct, describing how she had been afraid to express her concerns about the fraternity because the university did not adequately protect whistle-blowers.

“They sexually assault and rape women,” wrote the alumna, who said she had been in a sorority at Central Michigan. “I think these women, much like myself, are afraid to come forward for fear of retaliation. Members of Greek Life have retaliated in the past to accusations and CMU failed to intervene.”

These allegations, she continued, were “only the tip of their iceberg; the rest of it is in their basement.”

For Idema, the report conjured up thoughts of Michigan State University, where officials had failed to act on information about Larry Nassar, the former sports doctor who is in prison for sexually assaulting his patients. Forwarding the email to his colleagues, Idema wrote, “This is what keeps me up at night.”

“Please note the lines that mention notifications have been made and CMU failed to intervene,” he wrote. “That makes it sound like we are no different than MSU.”

Case History: Central Michigan reviewed years of allegations against Phi Sigma Phi, concluding that the group was "dangerous" and should be stripped of official recognition.

Idema helped to prepare two internal documents that laid out the case for revoking Phi Sigma Phi’s recognition, summarizing more than a decade’s worth of allegations against the chapter. From 2015 to 2018, one document said, there were 14 incidents involving Phi Sigma Phi, more than three times as many as for any other Greek-letter organization in good standing with the university.

The documents show not only the volume and severity of the charges but also the university’s failure or inability to hold the fraternity accountable. Four reports of possible hazing went nowhere, a summary shows. Three cases of sexual assault or misconduct were referred to university officials, but the student-conduct office — the only unit authorized to discipline a fraternity — either could not make a case or declined to pursue violations, records show.

Dead Ends: Reports of Phi Sigma Phi’s misdeeds poured in year after year, but the student-conduct office either couldn’t make a case or declined to pursue violations.

In response to The Chronicle’s analysis of the records, Central Michigan officials said that the summary “in no way identifies or captures all of the work done by multiple offices throughout campus to investigate these matters.”

“We take extensive measures to create a culture of safety within student organizations and to protect our students,” the university said in a statement.

“When allegations escalated the past few years, the university came to a point where enough was enough,” the statement continued. “The trail of accusations and troubling situations caused us to say we cannot, would not, risk anything further.”

“If CMU was truly concerned with student safety, why wouldn’t they involve us at the local level or the national level?” asks Shawn Head, national director of risk management at Phi Sigma Phi.Brittany Greeson for The Chronicle

Shawn E. Head, Phi Sigma Phi’s national director of risk management, says the fraternity was blindsided by nearly all of the allegations that informed the university’s decision. He says the chapter was denied due process and asked why, if university officials were so concerned for so long, they did not do more to intervene.

“CMU apparently sat impotent on these allegations and never even notified us to assist in any investigation,” says Head, a lawyer who graduated from Central Michigan in 2005. “If CMU was truly concerned with student safety, why wouldn’t they involve us at the local level or the national level?

“The university’s claim that they are now taking action as a result of student-safety concerns is just disingenuous,” Head says. “Their practice shows they didn’t care about student safety. If they did, why not ask us to be an ally in their investigations?”

After the university announced the penalties in a news release, a law firm representing the chapter sent a letter to Central Michigan’s assistant general counsel, threatening a lawsuit if the university did not retract its “defamatory” statement. The university has not removed the statement from its website.

Phi Sigma Phi is a relatively small national fraternity, with just 11 chapters listed on its website. It is also a young fraternity, formed in 1988 by a group that resisted merging with another national fraternity.

Phi Sigma Phi’s national office continues to recognize the Xi chapter, as the Central Michigan group is known, as an organization in good standing. The chapter is poised to live on as an unrecognized student organization that the university cannot regulate.

Many experts argue that such underground fraternities, free of university oversight, are the riskiest of all.

For years, distraught women returned to their dormitories with patchy memories of their nights at the Phi Sigma Phi house.

Several women left the house so sick and disoriented that they suspected they had been drugged. One woman, who drank at the house and vomited for hours after she got home, went to the hospital for a toxicology screening that tested positive for a “date-rape drug,” she told a resident assistant, according to the staff member’s report.

Even at a university where many fraternities and sororities have houses off campus, Phi Sigma Phi is considered off the grid. The house, which is located in an apartment complex about two and a half miles from the student center, is isolated enough to be both an alluring and a potentially menacing spot for parties.

Recently the fraternity’s Greek letters were removed from the front of the house. The chapter plans to relocate.

‘They Kept Grabbing Me’: A woman told university officials and state police that she was sexually assaulted by multiple men at the Phi Sigma Phi house. When she declined to participate in an investigation, the case to penalize the fraternity fell apart.

On October 2, 2016, a woman reported to the police and residence-life staff members that she had been sexually assaulted at the Phi Sigma Phi house. She’d gone there the previous day around 6 p.m. for a football party, got drunk on Smirnoff vodka and, once separated from her roommate, was ushered into the basement by several men, she said.

The woman first recounted her experience to a resident assistant at 2:45 a.m. the following morning. She told the staff member that the men had brought her into a laundry room in the basement and placed her on the ground and shut the door. Four men “kept grabbing me” and touched her in a way that she “didn’t like being touched,” she said. The men were “holding her down,” the student said, and she was “unable to move, so I just stayed there.”

The woman, who went to a local hospital to have a rape exam, told a Michigan State Police officer that one of the men had performed oral sex on her in a bathroom “against her will.” She recalled that the man had lifted her, put her on a countertop, and pulled down her pants and underwear. The man “held her down with his hands and arms,” a police report states, as the woman “said ‘Stop’ several times and tried to get up.” This went on for about 20 minutes, she reported.

She told the officer that, while she was heavily intoxicated, “she had sexual intercourse on the basement floor with two different males,” according to the police report. “She thinks she remembers consenting” to those acts, the report states.

The woman discovered after the incident that she had lost her underwear, and police executed a search warrant at the Phi Sigma Phi house. They did not find the evidence.

The woman provided a description of a primary assailant, whom the fraternity identified as a provisional member who had only recently been offered a bid to join Phi Sigma Phi. The chapter cut ties with him after the incident.

“Our thought was that if there was enough probable cause for a search warrant to be issued, then there was enough of a reason for us to rescind his bid until we could learn more about the situation,” a member of the fraternity’s executive board, whose name was redacted from the documents, wrote in an email to Idema. “We have zero tolerance for sexual assault.”

Head, the fraternity’s national risk manager, said the local chapter had taken swift action against the only suspect it knew about. No one told the chapter that the woman had reported multiple assailants, he said, and there is no evidence that the other men were members of Phi Sigma Phi. On the date in question, Head said, the chapter held a four-way social event with another fraternity and two sororities.

Jeffrey Merrill, the State Police officer who investigated the case, told The Chronicle that no charges were filed, because the woman declined to pursue a criminal investigation. That was enough, it turned out, to end the university’s investigation, too.

The 2016 case provides a window into what Central Michigan officials describe as a recurring challenge in investigating fraternities: Peer pressure and fear of retaliation discourage survivors from cooperating. In this case, the woman’s roommate was friendly with members of Phi Sigma Phi and told the survivor that “those guys don’t deserve to get in trouble,” a residence assistant reported. This all happened because the victim had been “hoeing around,” her roommate told her.

Tom Idema, director of student conduct at Central Michigan University

A member of Phi Sigma Phi also attempted to contact her in her dorm, the resident assistant said in an email to a supervisor. She told him never to speak to her again and blocked him on Twitter, according to the email, but university officials worried that the woman had felt pressured to drop the matter.

The survivor had canceled a meeting with Katherine M. Lasher, Title IX coordinator at the time, and Idema, the student-conduct director, seemed concerned that the case was slipping away, documents show.

“It looks like the fraternity was successful in convincing the survivor not to come forward,” he wrote to Lasher, six days after the incident happened.

A year earlier, in 2015, Central Michigan had transferred authority to investigate sexual assaults from Idema’s office to the Office of Civil Rights and Institutional Equity, which Lasher oversaw. This was among several changes that the university made when it created a sexual-misconduct policy. As the Obama-era Education Department scrutinized colleges’ handling of sexual-assault complaints, and campus Title IX offices expanded, many other colleges made similar shifts.

In his email, Idema pointed out steps that his office would have taken, had it been handling the case, to ensure a successful investigation. Among other things, he said, the Office of Student Conduct would have instructed the fraternity that there should be no contact with the survivor. The office would have conducted interviews with members as soon as possible, he wrote, “to minimize information sharing between fraternity members.”

“In order to keep our students safe we need to investigate and find out what happened as soon as possible,” he wrote.

But over time, the woman stopped responding to Lasher’s emails. After five months, the office ended its inquiry.

The university did not make Idema and Lasher available for interviews.

Heather L. Smith, a spokeswoman for Central Michigan, says the email exchanges between the two officials illustrated “the depth of discussion that occurred as numerous offices assessed the available information and explored possible actions.”

The alleged sexual assault at the Phi Sigma Phi house is among a litany of incidents of sexual misconduct that the university learned about in recent years — none of which prompted broader action against the fraternity. Other allegations include:

Shaming Photo: After a sexual encounter with two men, a woman reported to police that a photo of her performing oral sex had been shared among Phi Sigma Phi members.

In 2017, a woman told the university police that a photograph of her performing oral sex had been taken without her permission and shared among Phi Sigma Phi members. It was taken during a consensual sexual encounter that she had with a member of the fraternity and his roommate. The photo did not show the woman’s face, but she recognized herself and the man, who was wearing a red Make America Great Again hat, according to a police report.

The police referred the case to county prosecutors, but charges were not filed. A university police officer, in an email to Idema, said the prosecutor did not feel the woman had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the common area of a dormitory where the encounter occurred.

In 2014, a woman told a resident assistant that she had been “blacked out” drunk when she was sexually assaulted at the Phi Sigma Phi house. The following morning, after she told the assailant that she had no memory of the encounter, he showed her a used condom as proof.

The resident assistant reported the matter to the Office of Civil Rights and Institutional Equity, and the woman agreed to see a counselor.

In 2009, a Phi Sigma Phi member admitted to a residence-life staff member that he had videotaped a sexual encounter with a woman without her permission and shown it to his fraternity brothers. He denied that he had sexually assaulted the woman, which her friends had alleged in a conversation with the staff member.

There is no record of the university’s trying to contact the alleged victim or the fraternity, according to the university’s incident summary.

Asked about the university’s handling of those cases, Voisin, the associate vice president for student affairs, says Central Michigan had done all that it could.

“We’re at the mercy of whether people want to talk to us,” he says. “We did not ignore. We pursued every lead we could, and unfortunately, as all the documents show, most of those didn’t go anywhere.”

By the time Central Michigan stripped Phi Sigma Phi of recognition, last year, plenty of people at the university had reason to be concerned.

Brooke Oliver-Hempenstall, director of sexual-aggression services, described the ultimate penalty as too long in coming.

“They should have been kicked out a long time ago,” she wrote in an email to Idema.

But students and their parents had no way of knowing that campus officials harbored such deep misgivings. The allegations that the university reviewed were buried in internal files. Central Michigan’s website lists the names of organizations that it no longer recognizes, but there is no public archive of past sanctions against fraternities or detailed information about why specific chapters have been suspended.

Douglas E. Fierberg, a lawyer who specializes in fraternity litigation and often represents sexual-assault victims, calls such a lack of disclosure about fraternities a national problem. In effect, he argues, colleges are endorsing a product that they know to be dangerous, and denying consumers pertinent information about the risks.

“The red flags are really only known by the university, which has decided to withhold the truth from its student population,” Fierberg says. “No public information is provided to any of the students as to what any specific fraternity has done wrong, so students can’t make informed decisions about whether they want to join or not.”

As Central Michigan officials point out, a number of investigations of Phi Sigma Phi ended when victims decided not to move forward. In other cases, however, records provide little indication that the university followed up at all.

In 2015, for example, the Office of Student Conduct was notified that 11 students had dropped out of the chapter’s new-member process, raising concerns about hazing. But no one ever looked into it.

“We believe we forgot about this case,” the incident summary states.

After The Chronicle asked about the case, Central Michigan reviewed it and said that the attrition was not as significant or unusual as university officials had initially believed.

On another occasion, during the 2008-9 academic year, a Phi Sigma Phi pledge told a resident assistant that members of the fraternity had “held down his arms, put a tube in his mouth, and made him drink alcohol.” The university has no record of any follow-up with the fraternity.

In 2016, a student’s mother told Idema that her son, whom she would not identify, was being hazed by Phi Sigma Phi and “dreaded coming back to campus.” Idema, whose office did not contact the fraternity about the report, told the woman that her son “should quit PSP if he felt he was danger.”

Judy Ajluni, whose son died after falling down the stairs, had questions about hazing, too. In a phone call to Idema, which he described in an email to his colleagues, she asked whether he thought Phi Sigma Phi had “hurt her son.” He couldn’t say.

Had he heard that the seniors “could hit whoever they wanted” during the send-off ceremony?

Had he heard “about the guys hitting their heads into the drywall?”

Idema said he had not heard about those things.

By that point, however, Central Michigan had heard a lot.

‘Someone Is Going to End Up Dead’

The story of a rogue fraternity and the university that couldn’t — or wouldn’t — rein it in.

We’re sorry, something went wrong.

Audio: 911 Call

'Barely breathing'