NEWS

Convicted FAMU hazer crusades against culture of abuse

Karl Etters Democrat staff writer @KarlEtters on Twitter

Before Dante Martin or Caleb Jackson and before Robert Champion became a household name, there was Michael Morton.

In the spring of 2006, Morton had it all.

Weeks from graduating from Florida A&M University with a degree in engineering on a full-ride scholarship. Job offer at Pepsi’s Dallas plant in hand.

That all changed when Morton, then 23, and his fellow Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity brother, Jason Harris, were the first two people sentenced under Florida’s tougher 2005 hazing law after an initiation beating that left a pledge needing surgery from a damaged eardrum.

The stricter law made hazing leading to serious bodily injury a felony regardless of a victim’s consent. The two men, who were regarded by many as models of FAMU’s student success, were each sentenced to two years in prison.

32-year-old Michael Morton is taking his experience of being one of the first people convicted of hazing in Florida and the two years he spent in prison directly to college students during National Hazing Prevention Week.

The law was applied in the case of Champion, who was killed after he reportedly willingly participated in a brutal FAMU Marching 100 beating initiation following the Florida Classic football game aboard the band’s parked bus in November 2011. Jackson was sentenced this month to a four-year prison term for his role in the hazing death of Champion, a FAMU Marching 100 drum major. Martin, the ringleader, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in January. Jesse Baskin served less than a year in county jail after pleading no contest to manslaughter charges.

The Orlando incident exposed a long-standing culture of hazing in the band, which was suspended for nearly two years. Champion’s death led to the resignation of then university president James H. Ammons and sanctions from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

Redemption

Now, almost a decade after his disgrace, the 32-year-old Morton is taking his experience directly to college students during National Hazing Prevention Week to remind them what college is supposed to be about: Education.

Next week, he will speak publicly for the first time about how hazing changed his life at the University of Illinois in Chicago and Dillard University in New Orleans. Later this semester, Morton will return to FAMU to tell this generation of Rattlers about his experience.

“I’m sharing my hazing story, educating them about the dangers of hazing and how it cost me my future, empowering them and encouraging them to stay focused on their future,” said Morton, who completed his degree at FAMU in the spring of 2009 after being released from prison and later earned a master’s degree at Rutgers University.

Morton, a St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, native who was the first in his family to go to college, lost two years of his life, missing the birth and first year in the life of his daughter, Nyla.

“I lost every single thing because I was participating in hazing,” he said.

Peer pressure

It was, and still is, easy to get wrapped up in the social allure and the group-think in fraternities, sororities and other on campus organizations. That fosters peer pressure, which influences otherwise successful students to participate in hazing, Morton said. Sadly, students rarely ever hear the other side of hazing stories like his in which real people do real prison time.

“They don’t have another perspective saying ‘Look guys. You don’t have to do this,’” Morton said. “Young people hear about it and they don’t think it’ll ever happen to them, but parents don’t send kids to college to go to prison and you don’t send them there to die either.”

Morton was hazed when he joined the Kappas. Pledges before him were hazed. A major problem is the tacit complicity of hazing from an organization’s current members and alumni who glorify the “old days” but also aren’t vocal against it.

Morton’s speaking tour comes on the heels of a Sept. 14 announcement by Pennsylvania prosecutors that five fraternity members from New York’s Baruch College in Manhattan would face -third-degree murder charges in the 2013 hazing death of 19-year-old Chun Hsien Deng. Another 32 members face other criminal charges in the freshman’s death.

Setting an example

In total, 15 former FAMU band members were charged in Champions’ death, most of them sentenced to lengthy probation terms or community service. On Friday, the university’s Board of Trustees settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Champion’s family agreeing to a $1.1 million payout plus an apology.

At the time of Morton’s conviction, it served as a national litmus test for charging people in hazing deaths. Florida’s hazing law is seen as one of the toughest in the country.

Almost exactly five years after Florida A&M University drum major Robert Champion died of injuries suffered in a hazing incident, a state appeals court Friday upheld the manslaughter and hazing convictions of another former member of the school's "Marching 100" band.

Then Circuit Judge Kathleen Dekker made it clear at Morton and Harris’ sentencing that she wanted to set an example to discourage the heinous and archaic hazing practices.

“I want to save the victims who will quietly go along because they want to belong,” Dekker said at the end of the 2007 trial. “I hope that somebody out there says, ‘Those two guys, they got two years. Oh my God, it’s not worth it.”

That’s the same thing Morton thought. Seeing a death at FAMU a half-dozen years after a hazing scandal was troubling.

“At that point everyone thought we wouldn’t hear about this. And then it happened again,” he said. “I was disappointed because that was ground zero for how Florida said we’re going to treat hazing.”

Persistent problem

According to national statistics, there has been at least one hazing death every year since 1969. Research done by the Novak Institute on Hazing at the University of Kentucky shows more than half of all college students involved in clubs, teams and organizations experience hazing but 95 percent of them don’t report it to campus officials.

In 2013, in the wake of Champion’s death and the university facing scrutiny from accreditation officials, FAMU hired Bryan Smith as director of the university’s anti-hazing initiative and special assistant to the administration. On campus, students and faculty refer to him as the “hazing czar.”

Smith was tasked with addressing hazing within the student body and campus organizations and, since then, has taken a proactive approach. The university rolled out an online course for students, organizations and employees and a reporting hotline that people can send tips to anonymously if they choose.

Smith routinely holds seminars, and new students are required to sign an anti-hazing pledge laying out the state statute prior to being able to register for classes. He has even been to Leon County high schools to address the root of hazing, which often carries over from grade school.

“We found that was important because a lot of students who admitted to hazing knew about it or participated in hazing in high school,” Smith said. “So we wanted to broaden our approach.”

Part of that broad approach also includes letting the school’s zero-tolerance expectations about hazing be known in areas that send large numbers of students to FAMU: Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Miami, Metro Atlanta and Chicago.

Smith, like Morton, said students get deeply wrapped up in the culture of hazing as a way to build camaraderie and maintain traditions without thinking about the serious health or criminal repercussions.

‘No distinction between a hazer or hazee’

Most of the students who were around during Champion’s death and the resulting crisis at FAMU have graduated. Many wanted their association with the university linked to their academic accolades, not with the actions of a few.

While FAMU addressed hazing head on, the message to new generations of students is still just as fresh.

“The entire university suffered and the family suffered,” Smith said. “So we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve learned from that incident and keep pushing and striving to get this message going.

“What we try to emphasize here is we’re zero tolerance and there is no distinction between a hazer or hazee.”

Morton is now a supply chain leader at Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey and was recently appointed to the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering advisory board. He lives with his daughter, who is now 8-years-old.

While he was in prison, one question kept coming to mind. “How did I get here?”

It took years of retrospection for him to realize: “I allowed myself to be hazed and in turn passed the baton and hazed other people and paid the consequences for it.”

Hazing on college campuses is ever present but with a hazing-related death every year since 1969 there is a growing push to stem it.

  • 50 percent of college students involved in clubs, teams and organizations have experienced hazing
  • More than 70 percent of them are involved in athletics and social fraternity or sororities
  • More than 60 percent are involved in campus clubs
  • Most frequently reported hazing behaviors

There are a range of hazing activities students engage in. The most frequent are

  • 26 percent participate in drinking games
  • 17 percent sing or chant in a public setting
  • 12 drink large amounts of alcohol to the point of getting sick or passing out
  • 11 percent are sleep deprived
  • 10 percent are screamed, yelled or cursed at by other members

95 percent of students experiencing hazing do not report it to campus officials for various reasons but 9 of 10 don’t consider themselves the victim of hazing

  • 37 percent don’t want to get the team or group in trouble
  • 20 percent were afraid of negative consequences to them as a group member
  • 14 percent were afraid they would become an outsider if other group members found out
  • 9 percent did not know where to report hazing
  • 8 percent felt they may be hurt by other group members if hazing was reported

Hazing goes beyond just students

  • 25 percent believed coaches and advisors knew hazing was occurring
  • In 25 percent of hazing cases students reported that alumni were present
  • 48 percent speak about hazing to their peers
  • 26 percent speak to their families about it

Source- The Novak Institute on Hazing at the University of Kentucky