Hazing Claiming Younger Victims

Oct. 17 -- Eileen Stevens didn't know any of the boys allegedly victimized in a high school football hazing incident this summer, but she still took it personally.

Stevens, of Sayville, N.Y., has spent most of the 25 years since her son, Chuck Stenzel, died in a sports fraternity hazing fighting to bring an end to the practice.

Though she has retired from the activist role she took on after Chuck's death, she couldn't help following the case this summer, in which three athletes from Mepham High School in Bellmore, N.Y., who were attending a summer football camp in Preston Park, Pa., allegedly used broom handles, pine cones and other objects to sodomize younger team members.

"It's disheartening and I'm discouraged," Stevens said of the alleged incident.

One frigid, snowy night in February 1978, her son, a student at Alfred University in upstate New York who was joining an athletic fraternity, died after he was dragged from his bed, locked in the trunk of a car and told to consume a pint of whisky, a six-pack of beer and a bottle of wine before he would be let out, then forced to consume more alcohol at a fraternity party.

When he finally passed out, he was dumped on a bed in the frat house and left. While the party went on, Chuck stopped breathing.

She knew she couldn't bring Chuck back, but she wanted something good to come out of his death so she devoted the next 22 years to what began as virtually a one-woman campaign to end hazing. Her activism helped to get laws passed in 38 states and to convince countless schools, fraternities and sororities to adopt anti-hazing programs.

But the practice of using physical abuse as an initiation goes on, too often with damaging or tragic results.

In the case this summer, three boys, ages 15, 16 and 17 at the time of the incident, face a long list of juvenile court charges, including involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, kidnapping, aggravated assault, unlawful restraint and false imprisonment. Prosecutors have asked that they be allowed to file adult charges against the youths.