Boulder – One woman was passed out over a toilet. Another was unconscious in a sorority house she didn’t belong to.
One by one, 911 operators took calls last weekend for University of Colorado students who left fraternity parties so drunk that they needed medical care.
In all, nine women – each either 18 or 19 – were hospitalized a week after the Greek community marked the first anniversary of a fraternity pledge’s drinking death. The students attended at least one of two parties at the Sigma Pi and Phi Kappa Tau fraternities near the CU campus, police said.
Students who found the women drunk and in distress thought the underage drinkers were victims of date-rape drugs, not binge drinking.
While university officials and Greek leaders remain concerned that such heavy drinking continues a year after Lynn “Gordie” Bailey drank himself to death, they do see a silver lining. This time, students didn’t just let the women sleep it off – a lesson reinforced recently when Greek members rallied with Bailey’s family to push the message “Save a Life. Make the call.”
“I wouldn’t try to defend indefensible behavior,” said Marc Stine, spokesman for the Boulder fraternities. “But if there is a positive in this, it is that we have friends who did the right thing, did exactly what we asked them to do.”
Bailey last September after fraternity members left him on a couch to “sleep it off” after he drank wine and whiskey at a fraternity initiation.
Early Saturday morning, the calls to 911 operators started with a report of a 19-year-old who was “way over drunk.” But as more students passed out, callers reported their friends might have been “roofied” – a reference to the drug Rohypnol
“I have been a house mom for eight years,” Delta Gamma house mother Susan Morgan told an operator as she requested a third ambulance to the sorority house. “… I’ve seen nothing like this at all,” she said, referring to the number of women unable to respond.
It is not clear if the women were drinking in a group or not.
Authorities issued nuisance-party citations to the fraternities. They are not pursuing tests for date-rape drugs because they had no reports of sexual assault and the women showed “excessively high alcohol levels” in their blood, said Boulder police spokeswoman Julie Brooks.
Women who are drugged usually feel very intoxicated but have low levels of alcohol in their system.
“At this point, there is nothing suspicious,” Brooks said.
Calling for help was a positive side of a bad situation, said CU’s vice chancellor for student affairs, Ron Stump, but he voiced concern about the level of consumption.
The women drank anywhere from seven to 13 shots of liquor, said Stump, who reviewed police reports that authorities have not made public. “At that level of consumption, anyone would be in trouble,” he said. “It’s very disturbing.”
Fraternities need more adult supervision, Stump added. CU’s affiliation with fraternities was severed before the school year when the groups refused to sign an agreement that would have required them to have a live-in supervisor and delay recruiting of pledges until spring.
Stump said Sigma Pi’s party was a perfect example of a fraternity needing more supervision: Members told police about their party and gave officers an open invitation to look around. They had armbands for partygoers who could legally drink, and they required people to bring their own alcohol.
But it was there that many of the underage women drank themselves sick, police said.
“Their intentions may be very good,” Stump said of fraternities, “but we hear that over and over again.”
Looking out for friends, Stump said, means more than “taking care of them when they are in dire straits.”
CU president Hank Brown vowed that the students involved will be subject to the school’s two-strike policy. He said CU had been in contact with the national chapters of the fraternities involved to see whether their charters would be revoked.
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 720-929-0893 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.
