ON THE EVENING OF FRIDAY, Sept. 26, 1997, Katie Krueger spent 37 minutes on the telephone with her twin brother, Scott. Katie, a freshman at Ithaca College in New York, was frustrated by conflicting medical advice she'd received about a knee injury. Scott, speaking from his MIT fraternity house in Boston, tried to soothe her. ""Katie, I know you're upset,'' he said. ""Forget about it. Go out and have some fun.'' In the background, frat brothers told Scott it was time for an event with his pledge class. ""If you're upset later,'' he said, ""we'll be here drinking. I won't be able to give you logical answers, but I can listen.'' Coming from a kid who hadn't been a big drinker, Scott's words troubled Katie. Be careful, she said. He replied that he would--but, Scott told her, ""the class has to drink a collective amount.''
The call that every parent fears came seven hours later, at 1 a.m. Saturday, to the upscale Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park. An ER nurse in Boston told Darlene Krueger that her son, MIT Class of '01, was in ""very critical condition'' with alcohol poisoning. Darlene frantically dialed Conrail trainmasters across New York State. They managed to pull her husband, Bob, off an overnight coal train he was driving to Syracuse. Around 5 a.m. she called Katie and her older daughter, Kelly, also a student in Ithaca: ""Your brother is dying in a Boston hospital. Your dad is on the road. He'll pick you up in an hour.'' At 7:22, Darlene and a friend boarded a US Airways flight east. Maybe, they prayed, it's not so bad. Maybe we'll find a sheepish Scott, sitting up in bed.
Instead they found a boy in a coma, his hair caked with vomit. A ventilator pumped his breaths, and an IV line pushed fluids. Darlene, devastated, caressed her son. ""My sweetheart, my baby, I'd have done anything to trade places with him,'' she recalls. ""But you can't do a damn thing except pray, and hug him, and kiss him, and tell him you just want him to be Scott again.'' She kept her vigil for 57 hours. On Monday, Scott Steven Krueger died--a victim of ""binge drinking.''
Who's to blame? For eight months, a grand jury in Boston has quietly investigated the case, the most famous example of a troubling national trend. Binge drinking is medically defined as frequently downing five or more drinks at a time. Alcohol and students have always been a combustible mix. But in a number of cases, from MIT to LSU, the collegiate culture of drinking seems to be moving from keg parties to industrial-strength guzzling. Annual casualties include an estimated 50 deaths and hundreds of alcohol poisonings. For university administrators, this is difficult terrain: there is a limit to what schools can do to control excessive student drinking.
The Krueger case, however, could set an unprecedented standard of accountability for college officials across the country. Legal experts say that the grand jury has four basic options, one of which is to conclude there was no crime. But the length of the probe suggests another outcome. The jury could indict members of the fraternity who were present that night. Or it could settle on more removed targets, like the alumni group that owns the house. The most dramatic possibility is that grand jurors could indict MIT officials, or the university itself, for involuntary manslaughter.
A manslaughter charge could rely less on details of the incident than on whether MIT should have done something to avert it. Unlike most schools, which assign freshmen to dormitories, MIT lets incoming students choose dorms or Greek houses within days of their arrival on campus. (About one third of MIT's undergraduates belong to fraternities or sororities.) Campus critics have long warned that it puts freshmen into a Greek system rife with alcohol abuses. ""MIT dropped Scott into a maze that led him and many others to be living in a dangerous place,'' says Leo Boyle, the Krueger family's Boston attorney.
MIT denies that its policies put anyone in danger. Students prize their freedom to choose housing, Rosalind Williams, the school's dean of students and undergraduate education, told NEWSWEEK. Freshmen are guaranteed a dorm room if they want one. ""We simply do not push students into fraternities,'' Williams says. MIT trusts students to intelligently take, or leave, Greek life. Students and faculty have rejected proposals to change its housing system, she says, adding that there is no evidence that doing so would prevent a death. In recent years the school has stepped up efforts to educate students about binge drinking, which Williams says is less prevalent at MIT than elsewhere. After this tragedy--the first such death in the school's history--Williams says that MIT has intensified its campaign to curb alcohol abuses.
Behind the legal turmoil lies the human story of Scott Krueger. His family, which has not previously spoken out, agreed to be interviewed for this NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the case. It's the tale of a promising young man's early death--and of his parents' refusal to let the matter rest. One day after a doctor shut off Scott's ventilator, the Kruegers claimed his body in a casketlike cremation box. But they didn't ship him back to Buffalo. He was still a part of the family. They insisted on driving him home, 465 miles, in the rear of their 1988 Buick station wagon. They arrived, exhausted, too late to stop at a funeral home. Darlene didn't want to leave her son alone. So she crawled in the back of the Buick, beside Scott, and spent the rest of the night.
His funeral four days later drew 400 mourners. Midway through, Pastor Dennis Conrad abruptly called for another refrain of the hymn ""On Eagle's Wings.'' He had just spotted 20 or so of Scott's fraternity brothers, fresh off a bus from Boston, filing into the church. Conrad was stalling, resolute that they hear every word of his sermon. ""We are grieving for a brilliant, beautiful, Christ-centered man who was killed by a system,'' he thundered. ""A system that funnels young men fresh away from home into fraternity houses, that builds manhood and brotherhood through alcohol consumption and parties.''
Who was Scott Krueger? A young man both breezy and complicated, aware of his uncommon talent but, unlike so many other smart kids, never crippled by it. The Kruegers' four-bedroom colonial, purchased from one of the Buffalo Bills, is on the modest side--fitting for a railroad engineer and his wife, a former math teacher who runs a small computer business. The Kruegers' four kids attended Orchard Park High, a first-tier public school. All were top students, gifted in math and sciences; teachers murmured that it was always good to find a Krueger on next year's class list.
Scott was a star at OPHS. He got into so many advanced courses that friends called him ""Skippy.'' Eager for a special chem class the school didn't offer, he recruited enough kids to justify the course--and then made them promise not to drop it. His writing style was complex, so much so that he was accused of plagiarism. ""That would happen the first couple of papers each year,'' says Jon Wolf, an OPHS guidance counselor. ""Then the teachers would realize what they had here.'' Pressed by one instructor to write conversationally, Scott refused to ""dumb down'' his work. Wolf and others warned Krueger that his stubbornness was hurting his grades. He wouldn't buckle. Even so, he finished seventh in a class of 339. Grade-point average: 97.644.
In his senior year, Scott hung a list of top engineering schools on his family's refrigerator. He applied to six: Penn, Cornell, Rochester, Rensselaer, Michigan and MIT. As the acceptances rolled in, he narrowed his choices to Cornell, where he'd be near his sisters, and MIT. In April 1997 he rode with a friend, John Bevilacqua III, to see the MIT campus. ""He knew MIT was the best,'' Katie says. ""But he worried it was too nerdy.'' The students were a pleasant surprise. ""They weren't all geeks,'' Bevilacqua says. The boys walked the fabled ""Infinite Corridor'' and eavesdropped on a class about fracture points in stress analysis. They also accepted an offer from Alpha Tau Omega to spend a night in a frat house. Frat life appealed to Krueger. The older brothers could help him negotiate MIT.
He decided to head to Boston. MIT answered his acceptance with the usual volley of literature, some of it laying out housing options. Soon the frats began recruiting Scott--dozens of phone calls, with tempting offers of trips and parties. The sales pitches were clear: dorms are for girls and dorks, frats are for athletes. Scott, who planned to join the crew and lacrosse teams, studied the housing info during a camping trip to the Adirondacks. Next to the blurbs on each frat, he jotted his impressions in the tight print of an architect: ""Not bad,'' ""Kinda dorky,'' ""Doesn't sound like me.'' Beneath the blurb for Phi Gamma Delta--Fiji, as it's known on campuses nationwide--he wrote, ""More than half varsity. Sounds good!''
Summer brought the usual rites: artfully dodging hard labor and partying with friends. Working as a golf-course groundskeeper, he and a friend mounted weed-whacker wars that left his thighs covered with slashes. The parties sometimes included beer-drinking. Scott's parents didn't know about that, but Kelly saw him once when he'd clearly been drinking.
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, THOUGH, HE grew up on the dry side of average. In Orchard Park, ""the big drinkers identify themselves in a lot of different ways,'' says Wolf. In the months since Scott's death, no other kids have confided that Scott drank regularly. Krueger's friends say that's because he didn't. ""Scott wasn't prepared for a big drinking experience,'' Wolf says. Kelly agrees: ""He had very little, if any, experience with hard liquor before he went to school.'' Scott's parents didn't think they needed to warn him about new risks he might encounter. ""I didn't go to college,'' Bob says. ""There weren't fraternities at Darlene's state teachers college.'' Mostly, he trusted his son's judgment. ""We'd had no trouble with Scott,'' he says. ""My big worry was that he was colorblind--I thought he'd go through a stop sign and hit a tree . . . I wasn't well versed on college life. I didn't think I had to be, with my son going to a place like MIT.''
Scott's family drove him to MIT on Wednesday, Aug. 20. He wasn't required to report until Thursday, but he wanted extra time to look for housing. Fraternity rush began Friday night. That Sunday, he called home to say he wanted to pledge Fiji. ""Whoa! I want to see what this place is like,'' Darlene told him. Scott said there was no time: ""If I don't take the room, someone else will.'' He quickly moved into the house. When his parents visited him the next weekend, they were surprised that Fiji was a 25-minute walk south of MIT's campus.
Fiji had a reputation as one of the hardest-partying fraternities at MIT. In prior school years, Boston police had been called to quell loud bashes, one of them involving a crowd estimated at up to 2,000. (Williams, the MIT dean, says the school temporarily banned alcohol and social activities at Fiji for those offenses: ""It was not a situation that was at all neglected.'' Bill Martin, executive director of Fiji's national headquarters in Lexington, Ky., says he can't respond to allegations until Fiji can complete its own investigation.) There is no evidence that Scott was unhappy with his choice of MIT or Fiji. ""Scott was excited by everything going on at MIT,'' says Kelly. He told Denise Jewell, a friend at Boston University, that Fiji was ""the best fraternity, the best guys.''
The Kruegers don't know what, precisely, happened to their son on Sept. 26. His blood-alcohol level was .41--five times the drunken-driving standard in Massachusetts. A reading that high suggests a rapid infusion of alcohol in toxic quantities that can overwhelm the central nervous system. Richard Schwartzstein, the doctor who oversaw his treatment at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, believes Scott drank beer, Scotch and rum. Attorneys for several fraternity members have declined comment on what happened to Krueger.
Darlene didn't learn much when she called Fiji 90 minutes after the ambulance departed. She says one member told her, ""You have to understand--this was a very big night at our fraternity house.'' Another said that Scott fell asleep while drinking and then got sick, so the brothers moved him to a couch in his basement room. ""You left my son passed out and throwing up?'' she shot back. The young man's answer: ""We weren't gone long, Mrs. Krueger. We just went up to have another drink.''
According to notes Darlene scribbled during the call, the Fijis returned to find Scott ""turning purple.'' Vomit, including pieces of pizza, blocked his windpipe. At some point, his heart quit beating. The Fijis had called MIT police, who alerted Boston 911. Schwartzstein says ER personnel managed to restart his heart. But an infuriated Darlene couldn't learn how long it might have stopped--a clue to how damaged his brain and organs would be.
When she reached Boston, Darlene got her first briefing in a tiny hospital waiting room. Outside were three Fijis who'd spent the night there. Scott was unchanged. Inhaling his own vomit had seriously damaged his lungs. A CT scan detected swelling of the brain. A neurologist who examined him said little but looked worried. ""When will he come out of this?'' Darlene asked. The answer: ""We don't know if he will.'' Darlene begged: ""Just fix my kid!''
Bob and the couple's three other children--Kelly, Katie and younger brother Jeff--arrived in midafternoon. By Saturday night the Kruegers had been visited by an MIT dean--and by Boston homicide detectives who had learned that Scott might not survive. Sunday brought better news: the doctor was guardedly optimistic. But by midafternoon Scott's pupils had grown large and fixed. His cortex pushed down on his brain stem. More tests confirmed that Scott would not survive. Late Sunday, the Kruegers concluded that their son would die the next day.
Scott's kidneys were shutting down, his face was puffy, his pupils wildly dilated. It was time for his family to make the call. His siblings argued that if he could, Scott would sit up and say, ""Get this junk off me.'' Darlene resisted. She wouldn't relent until everything that would happen after Scott's death--the autopsy, the embalming--had been planned. The last detail was making sure everyone knew the family would be taking Scott home. ""He's going in our car,'' Darlene announced. ""No questions asked.''
A NURSE WASHED SCOTT'S HAIR. His family gathered around, parents on one side of his bed, siblings on the other. Final tests confirmed no brain-stem function. At 6:40 p.m., Schwartzstein announced, ""I'm pronouncing him dead at this time.'' He detached the ventilator tube from a shorter endotrachial tube sticking out of Scott's mouth, and switched off the respiration, heartbeat and blood-pressure alarms that otherwise would quickly sound. Twenty minutes later, a computer monitor over Scott's bed signaled that his vitals had flat-lined.
The next morning, a family friend named Bob Clement took Scott's siblings to the Fiji house. The frat brothers had Scott's belongings boxed and waiting. The Fijis looked chastened--and anxious. A few stepped forward to apologize. They carried the boxes to two cars and helped fend off TV crews.
The Kruegers' chance to help Scott select a college, and a place to live, is long past. But if they could, Darlene says, they would put to use all they've learned. They would visit hospital emergency rooms near campuses. They'd chat up the nurses and ask how often kids arrive with alcohol poisoning. Next stop: the local police, for a fill on what the night shift has to deal with. Then they'd quiz the admissions office on what is often an afterthought: the details of student housing.
The Kruegers now live amid the relics of Scott's life. His school awards fill a Compaq computer box. In the dining room sits a huge plant from the president of the Fiji house, with a card inscribed, ""My warmest and deepest sympathy.'' The Kruegers keep it as a bitter remembrance. John Bevilacqua remembers Scott talking about why he chose the Massachusetts school. ""If I go to Cornell,'' he told Bevilacqua, ""I'll always wonder what would have happened if I'd gone to MIT.'' Now those who knew Scott Krueger are left to wonder just the opposite.
OUT OF CONTROL: THE BINGEING PHENOMENONMany college students, particularly white athletes who join fraternities or sororities, drink heavily. Below, the percentage of students in each category who binge:
Age Under 21 45% 21-23 48 24+ 28 College residences Fraternity/sorority 84% Coed dorm 52 Off-campus housing 40 Single-sex dorm 38 Race White 48% Hispanic 38 Nat. Amer./Nat. Alask. 34 Asian/Pacific islander 21 African-American 16 Gender Male 50% Female 39 Participation in sports Nonparticipant 36% Participant 54 Team leader 58 Attitude Frequent bingers who think they drink lightly/moderately Male 91% Female 78 SOURCES: HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, JOURNAL OF AMERICAN COLLEGE HEALTH