Fatal Fraternity Bunk Tumble a Mystery

Aaron Miller died three weeks after he was injured in a fall from a loft bed.

ByABC News
May 20, 2008, 4:47 PM

May 21, 2008 — -- Aaron Miller was a typical college student winding down the academic year at Miami University in Ohio.

The 20-year-old seemingly healthy junior had a girlfriend, was a finance major in good standing and a member of the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity house, where he lived among his collegiate brothers.

Miller was critically injured after falling out of his fraternity house bunk bed April 27. He died this weekend at a hospice after he stopped breathing. He was buried Tuesday.

One day after Miller was laid to rest, the circumstances surrounding the death remains a mystery and has left his family, friends and fraternity brothers stunned.

"Everybody has had some kind of accident and can picture it happening, but cannot picture this result," Claire Wagner, a spokesman for Miami University, told ABC News.

The Montgomery County Coroner's Office told ABC News that it could not provide a specific cause of death, citing toxicology reports that will take six weeks to complete.

But from the start, authorities have said that they do not suspect foul play. Miller, they say, who had been sleeping with his girlfriend, may have been drunk or high before his fatal tumble from the 6-foot-high bed. There was a party going on inside the fraternity house that night, but Miller also may have simply died from a one-in-a-million accident.

He was buried at the Calvary Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio.

A few hours after the funeral, the Oxford Police Department released an incident report that provides some detail -- but raises many questions -- about what happened that night.

Authorities responded to the fraternity house at 1:27 a.m. April 27. A male student had fallen from his loft bed and suffered a head injury, according to the report.

An Oxford police officer was led through the house to a back bedroom, where Miller was laying on his right side, bleeding from either his nose or mouth.

"Miller was unconscious but was breathing at the time, with his face starting to turn blue," the officer wrote in his report.

Rescue personnel arrived at the house with a backboard and gurney. The police officer overheard someone say that Miller had stopped breathing, the narrative said.