Guy Reschenthaler, Wire Service Editor
Campus death haunts family as
drinking
by Amanda Vogt
Chicago Tribune
In the hours before he was found
lying face down in his fraternity
room at Indiana University, Joe
Bisanz, 19, attended a party where
witness said he may have had sev
eral rum drinks but didn’t appear
intoxicated.
He was turning blue and not
breathing when friends found him
in the early hours of Dec. 13,1998.
Frantic efforts to resuscitate the
honor student from Libertyville,
111., failed, and he was pronounced
dead nearly 12 hours later at a hos
pital in Bloomington, Ind.
His blood-alcohol level was
.206 percent, over twice Indiana's
legal limit, yet normally not
enough to kill an otherwise
healthy young man, according to
a pathologist who performed a pri
vate autopsy months later at the
family’s request.
The circumstances of Bisanz’s
death haunt his family, who has
doubts about how campus police,
the county coroner and other offi
cials handled the matter. They also
question whether the university
has done enough to curb excessive
of binge drinking, a problem that
continues unabated on many col
lege campuses.
“There is not a moment when I
don’t wonder how and why Joe
died,” said his father, Gary.
No autopsy was performed at
the rime of theifsdh’s death, even
though the family asked for one,
hospital records show. The death
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certificate, filed on Dec. 22,1998,
indicates Bisanz choked to death
on his own vomit with alcohol a
contributing factor.
The private autopsy proved in
conclusive. Gary Bisanz and
his former wife, Val, don’t
deny that alcohol may have
played a role in their son’s
death. But they wonder what
the university learned from
the incident. Bisanz’s frater-
nity - Pi Kappa Alpha - was
expelled from the university
in October after a pledge
member was hospitalized
with a blood-alcohol level of
“How many students have
to get sick or die before IU
gets serious about making its
campus safer?” asked Gary
Bisanz. “I don’t think the univer
sity recognizes that students are
people entrusted to their care.”
A Harvard University study of
14,000 college students between
1993 and 1999 found that while
the number of students who en
gage in binge drinking remained
steady at 44 percent, they were
doing it more frequently. The
study, published in 2000, defines
binge drinkers as men who con
sume five or more drinks in a row
or women who consume four or
more drinks.
In 1999, 23 percent of the stu
dents reported engaging in fre
quent binge drinking, a 14 percent
increase from 1993, according to
the study.
Before 1999, when the 1990
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Campus Security Act was
amended, the nation’s colleges
made no comprehensive effort to
track off-campus, alcohol-related
arrests or disciplinary referrals, of-
The circumstances of Bisanz’s death haunt
his family, who has doubts about how campus
police, the county coroner and other officials
handled the matter. They also question
whether the university has done enough to
curb excessive of binge drinking, a problem
that continues unabated on many college
campuses.
ficials said. Colleges were required
to report only on-campus, alcohol
related arrests to the U.S. Depart
ment of Education.
Amended in 1999, the Campus
Security Act now requires univer
sities to report all alcohol-related
infractions, both on and off cam
pus.
The change in the law might ac
count in part for the rise in arrests
for campus liquor law violations,
which increased 20 percent from
1997 to 1999, climbing to 37,732
from 31,358, according to the De
partment of Education.
In Bisanz’s case, a 21-year-old
member of Pi Kappa Alpha was ar
rested for allegedly purchasing al
cohol for minors, but the misde
meanor charge was dropped when
the student left the country.
The fraternity, which was on pro
bation for an alcohol-related infrac
tion at the time of Bisanz’s death,
wasn’t suspended until the follow
ing February, according to Richard
McKaig, Indiana University’s dean
of students.
“In retrospect, we didn’t do
enough,” McKaig said. “We were
caught in the middle. There was so
much pressure to hold the students
accountable, yet they acted nobly
and responsibly to try to save Joe.”
Since Bisanz’s death, Indiana
University now notifies parents
when students are arrested or re
ferred to a disciplinary committee
for alcohol-related violations,
McKaig said.
Val Bisanz remains skeptical that
college administrators are sincere.
By trying to write off her son’s
death as merely alcohol-related,
she said, university officials turned
him into just another statistic.
“That makes his death easier to dis
miss,” she said.
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She and Gary Bisanz are left to
wonder to what extent alcohol may
have been to blame for their son’s
death because, they say, crucial evi
dence may have been carelessly dis
carded or overlooked.
As emergency
room doctors struggled
to revive Joe Bisanz,
campus police allowed
fraternity brothers to
clean up his room while
an assistant dean at the
university supervised,
according to a campus
police report.
A drinking mug,
several pieces of broken
furniture and the clothes
Bisanz was wearing
were discarded, the re
port indicated. Val and Gary Bisanz
believe those were possible clues
that might have explained how their
son died.
“Their actions made us cry out,
‘What in the world is going on
here?’” said Val Bisanz. “They were
destroying evidence of what hap
pened to Joe.”
Indiana Universtiy denied any
wrongdoing on its part.
Detective Brooks Wilson of the
Indiana State Police, who reviewed
the university’s investigation at the
request of the Bisanz family, deter
mined that campus police didn’t try
to preserve any evidence - other
than take a bottle of rum from Joe
Bisanz’s refrigerator - because it
initially appeared he would recover.
When the hospital notified uni
versity officials a short time later
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binge
that Joe Bisanz was in critical
condition, police couldn’t se
cure additional evidence be
cause the room already had
been cleaned, Wilson said. Still,
he found no evidence of wrong
doing, writing that Bisanz’s
death, “while certainly a trag
edy, was accidental.”
In their effort to determine ex
actly what happened to their
son, the family had his body ex
humed almost 10 months after
his death so that the Lake
County (111.) coroner's office
could perform an autopsy.
Dr. Mark Witeck, a forensic
pathologist, determined that it
was “unlikely” Joe Bisanz
choked to death. While Witeck
noted Bisanz’s high blood-alco
hol level, he concluded it was
“not enough to normally cause
death by itself in an otherwise
healthy adult.” He said the
cause of death was “undeter
mined.”
George E. Huntington, now
retired coroner who signed
Bisanz’s death certificate, de
fended his decision to foigo an
autopsy. “The death was an ac
cident and state law doesn’t re
quire an autopsy” in such cases,
he said.
Val Bisanz still clings to her
hope that someday she will find
out how her son died. “It’s just
that you raise a child all those
years and try to protect him,
then you don’t even get to say
goodbye,” she said. “That’s the
hardest part.”
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