Dying For A Drink

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.