Dying For A Drink

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.