Original subtitles

It's obviously not easy to talk about

everything that happened in the past.

Yeah, a little nervous, a little anxious.

I mean, there's possible backlash for coming on here.

No one in the chapter thought that this would ever happen.

I saw...Danny.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

It's like your absolute worst nightmare.

This is the worst hazing injury ever in the United States.

The whole Mizzou community didn't know what was

really going on inside the Fiji House.

When they say they don't know anything, that's a lie,

They lie for each other. They do know something.

It's the code of silence.

[cheering]

There's no place in the world that is more exciting

or thrilling than sororities and fraternities.

But you don't know what actually goes on behind closed doors.

All of Greek life has some sort of a tradition of secrecy.

This was a powerful organization.

I mean, it was a serious cover-up.

The amount of power that the fraternities have,

it's so thoroughly woven into the nature of the universities.

There is always the same playbook.

Operator: 911. What is the address of your emergency?

They start the cover-up. Nobody talks.

Hazing is a huge problem,

and it's resulted in tragedy.

Someone was burning a cross on the lawn.

They would grab a member, force their face down

and then make them do a line of cocaine.

It felt very sadistic. He wanted me to be hurting.

You send your kid off to college,

and this happens?

Mom: There's Danny.

Dad: He was fast.

Stole a lot of bases,

covered a lot of ground in center field.

-There's Danny again. -Here's number one.

Mary Pat: He always had a big smile when he was playing.

Tom: Yep.

Mary Pat: Danny grew up his whole life

in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

We're a close family.

Danny was the youngest of three,

and he just loved his older siblings, Nick and Meredith.

Nick's 24. I'm 22. Danny's 20.

Me and Danny got very close at a young age,

and we'd hang out over time.

I was Mere-Bear, Danny was Danny Boy.

Everyone just gravitated towards him all the time.

Whenever we're going to family gatherings,

everyone wanted to see Danny.

He's always been a little favorite child.

[laughs]

He's a great athlete too.

Great basketball player.

[cheering]

Once he kinda grew into his own,

he was really excited to have that sense of independence.

He watched his older siblings go on to college

at the University of Missouri.

And it was finally his turn.

I was really excited for Danny to come to college with me.

[music]

Mizzou's in Columbia, Missouri.

It's a college town. It's big.

I mean, there's over 30,000 kids there.

Fraternities and sororities and Greek life

are a huge part of campus life for the University of Missouri.

One-third of all students are involved.

And we have Greek houses on the way to the football stadium,

so tailgates are there every single football game.

[cheering]

My oldest son Nick was in a fraternity,

and he had a good experience.

So I think Danny had-- you know,

"My brother was in one, I'm gonna be in one."

It was early August when a member of the Fiji fraternity

reached out to Danny and just asked him

if he would be interested in joining.

Phi Gamma Delta, which a lot of people call Fiji,

was one of the bigger chapters on campus.

It was well established.

A lot of times these fraternities will reach out

beforehand, even before the start of the semester

to let them know that this house is

recruiting new members in the fall.

Mary Pat: And I read about Fiji,

and they were strongly expressing

that they are a anti-hazing fraternity.

Wow. They're addressing this big topic.

They take hazing seriously.

And I read it and I'm like,

you know, I kinda feel good about it.

Tom and I drove Danny down, moved him into his dorm.

And then the pledging classes for Fiji started right away.

At first I was definitely seeing Danny quite a bit.

You know, I'd go over to his dorm, and we would get lunch.

After a couple weeks, I didn't see him as much.

We just kinda started hearing from him less.

And, like, I would text his roommate at his dorm,

and he's like, "Danny is never here.

"He's always at this house.

They're always making him come there."

Danny never really elaborated when we asked him questions.

It was, "Oh, yeah, it's going good. It's going well."

"All right, tell me more." "No, Dad, it's good."

Okay.

Groups who haze seem to really lean in on secrecy.

"So you can't say anything to anyone

"about what we do here, because that would be

"a violation of the oath that you've taken.

"But really it would be a problem for us

because we would likely get into trouble."

It's brand-new. This is just opportunity.

Enough about it.

Only the guys who've gone through these rituals

and this process know what happened here.

Yeah, a little nervous, a little anxious.

I feel like it'd be better to remain anonymous.

I mean, there's possible backlash for coming on here.

I was a pledge with Danny

during the fall pledge class of fall '21.

I think there was 45 of us.

I was having a great time with all my new friends.

And I could just tell that Danny was a good kid.

If that hits, guys...

Booze!

If that hits, ball's going out.

The pledging process is kind of a slow start.

They kinda wanna make everything fun at first

so you don't just drop right away.

It took a couple weeks for those real things to start happening.

We had a fraternity group chat,

and we would get a message and would just be like,

"Every person in this chat come to the house at 9:00 p.m.,

and come in this room," or something.

They could message you whenever, really.

You would have to do tasks for the older guys.

There's some that sleep over at the house.

-[laughing] Frat member: You're on.

Somebody else grab him.

Sometimes for days on end without going home,

without showering,

without being able to go to class.

And I started to notice that Danny wasn't going to class.

And then Danny started to tell me

that he doesn't have any money.

I was like, "You're only not even a month into being

a freshman at Mizzou, like, what..."

This isn't making sense.

They were ordering Danny and the other pledges

to go get alcohol, get marijuana,

and buy food,

and he'd have to pay for it with his own money.

They would make him come over to the fraternity house

and clean their rooms.

They'd tell him to do homework for them.

All of these things were going on, day and night,

seven days a week, while he's brand-new to college

and supposed to be in school.

You're supposed to feel like... almost like a piece of dirt.

In a sense that you're a servant for them.

You're not a person, you're a pledge.

Like, you have to do anything until you're actually initiated.

And then, you know, there's the lineups.

The lineup is usually done somewhere private,

away from windows, other peering eyes.

They would literally lineup the pledge class

and abuse them.

We've seen numerous examples around the country,

from creating concoctions of hot sauces

and onions and other vile liquids for them to consume.

[boys shouting]

Boy: No, no, no, no!

Go, go, go! Drink it! Drink it!

Drink the [indistinct]! Drink the [indistinct]!

Oh, my God!

To have individuals have to do strenuous activities

or stand up at a wall while other members

pound them on their chest.

[shouting, indistinct]

What a pledge is trying to demonstrate is that their tough.

They can handle it.

They're worthy to be a brother.

Danny struggled with the physical things, I think,

because of his, um...

he's just a skinnier, like, smaller kid.

But he seemed like he was a pretty...

tough kid for most of the time.

But a lot of kids had a hard time with it.

There's some kids that drop out.

And after you drop, you're kinda just shunned.

Like, you're not tough enough.

You're not strong enough to be in this group.

I mean, kids leaving, honestly, just fuels the fire.

It makes you just think like, "I'm doing good still.

I don't need to leave at all."

I feel like it almost builds a group sense of strength.

Danny had sent me a text, and he said,

"Hey, Mom. I just wanted to let you know

"that I was walking down the street,

"and I stepped on a piece of glass,

and I had to go to the Emergency Room"

And I'm like, "Oh, my God! Are you okay?"

He's like, "Yeah, I'm fine.

"They bandaged it up, and I had to get stitches."

It just didn't add up.

And I kept asking.

I was like, "Danny, what actually happened?

Like, why weren't you wearing shoes

while you're walking in the middle of the street?"

And...

I never got answers.

Kind of like, why is my brother on crutches,

like, a month into school?

So I called up a kid I knew in the fraternity,

and he's like, "Yeah, this kid, like,

threw him in a dumpster two nights before."

I'm like, what is going on?

Oh, my God! Shaky camera.

It was during homecoming.

We'd been drinking a little bit,

and someone made Danny step into the trash can

and then there's glass shard at the bottom of the trash can

that just went right through his foot.

There was a lot of blood.

Danny wasn't up front with me about it,

but they told him not to tell us what happened.

That guy just was... disgusted

I was like, I really probably should call somebody

and tell them what happened.

But I brought it up to Danny and he just said, "Don't, Mom."

You know...

So we just moved on from it.

The next month, Danny told me that there was

a party going on at the Fiji house.

So I ended up going to the house.

And I was hanging out with Danny,

and he just all of a sudden broke down to me.

He just said, "I can't do it anymore.

My grades are slipping. I'm so tired."

He was clearly distraught.

You know, balling his eyes out.

And then these two members walked in the room

and, you know, they're like,

"Danny, you need to come to this room, like, right now."

I don't know what was gonna go on in that room,

but it seemed like a hazing room.

And Danny looks me in the eyes.

I was like, "No. I'm taking him home."

I dropped him off.

And then I go home and...

I'm-I'm freaking out

So then I call my parents first thing in the morning.

That Sunday I talked to him, and I told him

that he didn't have to be in the fraternity

if he didn't want to, if he wanted to drop out.

We're telling him, "Screw this, Danny.

Get out of this fraternity," and he didn't want to do it

'cause he didn't want to get shunned.

He said, "It's done in two weeks. I wanna push through it."

I'm like, "Okay."

"Only got two weeks. I think we can make it.

My family had talked to Danny that Sunday,

and then Tuesday, during the day,

I went to lunch with Danny.

He said, "I have to do study hours."

And so I dropped him off at the Fiji house.

I still didn't have a good feeling.

He has his backpack, and then I see him walking into the house.

And that was the last time I've heard from him.

[phone ringing]

That night, my cellphone rang at 1:27 a.m.

It was the Emergency Room doctor.

And she said, "Do you have a son

at the University of Missouri?" and I said, "Yes."

She said, "Well, we have him here in the Emergency Room."

And at that point, I just-- I just--

I mean, I stopped breathing.

And I called Meredith immediately.

My dad asked, "Do you know that Danny's

in the Emergency Room?"

And I said, "No. What happened?"

They said, "You need to go there right now."

So I got up. I sped to the Emergency Room.

I was living at home, and my dad comes downstairs,

kicks my door and is like, "Nick, we have to go now."

I'm like, "What's going on?"

He's like, "Danny's not good. We have to go."

I'm like, "You go to be kidding me."

So we packed a small bag.

You know, 10-15 minutes, we were on the road.

We drove seven-and-half hours.

We drove through the night to Missouri.

We were just so in shock.

I walked into the Emergency Room.

The ER nurse comes up to me.

She said a member of the fraternity house

had dropped him off in the parking lot

and...left.

They said they don't if Danny's gonna make it through the night.

I'm by myself. I don't know what to do,

and I didn't even know what to say.

I start crying and I was like,

"Well, what happened?"

They said it's from alcohol.

Danny's blood-alcohol reading,

according to the medical records at the hospital, was .468%

Which is incredibly high.

That's four-and-a-half times greater

than the presumed limit for drunk driving.

Most people don't survive.

We're in communication with Meredith along the way.

Mary Pat: Meredith didn't wanna tell us

how bad it actually was.

Tom: She said it was alcohol poisoning.

Alcohol poisoning.

And so when you think that--

You think, "Oh, maybe they'll pump his stomach."

Yeah. 'Cause it's gonna be fine.

We got there probably about 9:30 in the morning,

and I thought when I got there, he would probably have...

woken up.

But he was hooked up to so many different tubes and...

-Machines. -Machines and...

he was on a ventilator and I-I just...

I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

I just...

It was awful.

[sighs]

Just the way he looked, and we just...

just dropped to the floor and like,

"This can't be real."

It's like your absolute worst nightmare

Mary Pat: It's like we don't have good news.

They said there had been lack of oxygen to the brain and...

that's, you know, when it got serious.

They did an MRI and told us

that parts of the brain were damaged,

and they said, you know,

he has so much swelling on his brain.

But I still didn't know what all the damage

actually was at that point.

We all knew right away that it was hazing.

I mean, I didn't even have to question it.

What did they do to him?

I went ballistic, like, that first day,

just trying to get all this information from people.

In the fraternity, no one's talking to me.

Like, what happened? Why is no one talking?

So I broke into the fraternity house.

I'm like, okay, I'm getting in.

I'm like, I'm getting an answer.

Somebody in the fraternity house that can talk to me?

I ran into some random kid. I'm like,

"Who's the president? Call them right now on the phone."

And he called him, and he just wouldn't talk.

He said he already had a lawyer.

Within 12 hours.

We couldn't get any information from him.

I needed to know what happened...

to my son that night.

I was contacted by a member of the Santulli family

who asked if they could talk to me about what happened to Danny.

They explained that Danny had been hazed,

that he was very seriously injured,

and so I agreed to represent them.

Initially, the family wanted to know what happened,

and it took a lot of digging to get the details.

David got right on the investigation.

He was in contact with the Mizzou Police Department.

The Mizzou Police had a search warrant,

and they grabbed the server from the local fraternity.

The police department told us like,

"Yeah, we got the hard drive."

And they had 25 cameras around the house.

When I found out that there were surveillance cameras

all over the house, I was just shocked

at not only was the hazing horrific,

but they did it with everything being recorded.

Most fraternity houses had security cameras

and security systems and surveillance cameras

in some capacity in some places in the house.

What I didn't expect is that we'd see

how much of what happened that night.

You can see the whole night unfold, on that footage.

Just looking and you're like, "What the hell is going on?"

This is the surveillance footage from that night,

from October 19th.

It just seems surreal to even think about...

Everyone's blindfolded,

and we're getting taken down to the basement.

Watching it is kinda crazy,

reliving the moment of...

going all the way down there.

No one ever thought something like this would happen.

Pledge: It just felt like a normal day.

We got a text saying how we all

had to be at the house that night.

And since it was so close to the end of our pledgeship,

we all just assumed that we were gonna have

a big event, like a Pledge Dad Reveal.

Pledge Father Reveal Night is a big night for fraternities.

It tends to happen near the end of the pledging process.

But there's definitely a pattern

with some of these Pledge Father Reveal Nights

producing injuries or deaths at fraternities around the country

because of how much alcohol is consumed.

There's a case a few years before Danny's

out at Florida State University that was tied

to a Pledge Father Reveal Night.

There have been others just because all the conditions

are sort of in place for this to be

an especially dangerous event.

We all showed up, and they told us

to remove our t-shirts and use them as our blindfolds.

Then they have everyone in one chain.

This part's where you're getting taken down to the basement.

We were all kinda anxious about

what was gonna happen down there.

So this is Danny coming down the stairs,

in the green shirt which is wrapped around his face.

Some of the older guys were messing with you

and had a couple beers poured on you.

It's definitely a scary thing

because they're yelling at you to hurry up,

and you're having to go down the stairs fast,

make sure you're not falling.

It's a frightening thing.

There's no cameras in the basement.

[cheering, yelling]

And then as soon as we got down the stairs,

there's a...

like there's a bunch of loud music and screaming and yelling.

Everyone just gets pushed around the room

with the blindfolds on,

and you find a spot on the wall for the lineups.

There's things being thrown,

and everyone's getting covered in condiments and stuff.

As a pledge, you just have to think everyone that's

doing it to you has been through this exact same thing,

and I'm gonna walk in and get through this night.

Soon as it was over, everyone took off their blindfolds

and you found out who your Pledge Dad is.

That's intended to be a celebratory moment

of "this is the member who's going to be your mentor

for the rest of your time in the fraternity."

Then what is often a tradition that comes with that

is that there's a family bottle of alcohol,

some sort of hard liquor that's been chosen for each pledge

that is taped to your hand until you finish it,

which for Danny was a fifth of vodka.

An awful lot of vodka that he was presented.

This is after everyone's, you know,

first coming up from the basement.

Here we come with the bottles.

The pledges are walking around,

and they're getting drunker and drunker.

They go into the courtyard of the fraternity house.

They start the party,

and there's a lot of pressure on these pledges

to drink the bottle of alcohol they were given.

There's a catchphrase that was being chanted

and yelled at the pledges, that "There's no [bleep]

in the house tonight."

That they weren't worthy of being a member in that chapter

if they couldn't get through this night

and be able to finish that bottle of liquor.

We didn't know if we wanted to see it.

It took a while.

-It's extremely difficult. -That's hard.

Yeah.

Forcing someone to drink that amount of alcohol,

not even knowing how much their tolerance level is.

Most of these kids have never experienced it.

These kids just graduated high school.

They don't know.

When you're a pledge, like, it's hard to say no.

You don't want to be humiliated.

You don't want to be the one pledge that...

doesn't do what these older guys say.

There's definitely an imbalance of power with that.

This is an older member.

We're trying to please that person

and make sure we become members of the organization.

That's a lot pf power put into that person's hand.

And a lot of these pledges are thinking,

"There's only one more of these events.

"I'm tough. I can make this. I can get to the end."

And then something goes wrong.

There was a fraternity member walking around the courtyard

with a beer bong.

You see they put a tube in Danny's mouth

with a funnel at the top,

and beer is being poured down the tube into Danny's throat

after he's already been drinking the vodka.

You can see Danny is now very intoxicated.

Pledge: I was probably just... some other room,

drinking with my Pledge Dad.

This is Danny right here, yeah.

It looks like he's just having a conversation,

and then you can notice him wobbling.

He's crossed a line into severe intoxication by this point.

Then you see him falling backwards.

They're kinda just making fun of him, laughing at him.

Imitating him.

You can see some members, you know, trying to carry him.

It's clear in that moment,

you know Danny is not doing well.

That's when they picked him up and put him on the couch.

They basically, like, threw him on there, like a rag doll.

Tom: On his back. And he threw up--

Mary Pat: Very, like, disorientated.

Nobody seems to be particularly concerned for Danny.

It seems like this is maybe something that

often happens at parties where someone is very intoxicated.

So it seems like nothing is too out of control,

at least as far as the fraternity members are concerned

at this point in time.

By that point in the night, I head on home,

and everyone that's here has just had so much to drink

that they're starting to get, like, blackout drunk

and everyone's kinda just passing out.

The other kids on the couches are pledges.

Some of the guys are going out to the bars

and leaving the house.

And, um, Danny's just got kinda forgotten and left behind.

Now Danny's so drunk,

he cannot even sit up on the couch.

And he's sliding off of the couch.

You just realize that, you know,

this is a life-altering moment for Danny.

It's probably 12:30, and Danny was just already so drunk

that his body kinda--

I mean, he's going to sleep, you know.

He's shutting down.

Everyone has left the living room.

Saddest part is, we're not there to help him.

We were not there to help him.

Eventually some fraternity members come up,

and they find Danny and realize that he's not just passed out,

he's not just sleeping this off.

Something worse has happened.

Someone's putting him back up on the couch,

and the other guys coming in realize that he's...he's limp.

And they're taking his pulse right now.

It looked like he wasn't breathing.

But no one called 911.

Their first instinct is to protect themselves

and the fraternity.

Nobody wanted to be the person blamed

for what was going on here.

Instead, they got one of the fraternity members

who had a car to agree to drive him to the hospital.

They carried him out of the room

and down the hallway of the fraternity.

At one point, as they're getting close to the exit door,

they're holding him upside down by his ankles,

and they drop him on his head.

They then pick him back up, and they carry him outside,

and they put him into the car.

It was a block-and-a-half away,

from the fraternity house to the hospital

A block-and-a-half.

The kid actually did call 911 but for directions,

not paramedics.

Medical personnel were brought out to a car

where in the back seat was Danny.

At this point is when his lips were blue,

his heart had stopped beating,

and the hospital staff had to perform CPR on him

in the back seat of a car.

They then bring him inside, they get the heart restarted,

but by then, it's too late

because he's sustained significant...

significant brain damage.

When you lose oxygen in your brain, every second counts.

If you call 911 right away,

they'll walk you through what to do.

But having them carry him to the car

and drive around, trying to find a hospital,

that's 20 minutes that we needed, obviously.

But they're not thinking like that.

Until the next morning, I didn't even know

that anything was wrong with Danny.

I just--I woke up and I didn't remember much

from the last night.

But finding out, you know, 20 minutes after waking up

from my phone, via text, that Danny was hospitalized

was just kinda crazy.

The University of Missouri has stopped all fraternity activity

after a freshman is found unresponsive

in the Phi Gamma Delta house.

The University of Missouri reached out to us right away,

and, um, they just expressed how...

how sorry they were and that they were gonna support us

in any way they could.

The University realized there needed to be

some sort of immediate response to what happened to Danny.

So the University of Missouri Fiji Chapter was shut down.

That was a joint decision by both the University

and the national chapter of the fraternity.

It was gone the next morning.

And a really strong condemnation of Fiji on campus.

Within a couple nights, there was a protest

that drew probably 200-300 people

outside the Fiji house chanting.

Man: Shut down the [bleep].

[bleep].

[bleep].

A lot of people were just incredulous that

something like this could happen in an organization

that brains itself on brotherhood.

As a pledge, we didn't really care about

what happened with the fraternity.

All we cared about was Danny.

We were all just kinda praying, and it was, uh...

It was devastating.

At the hospital, it was just a roller coaster of news.

Like, we were told by one nurse that he's completely brain dead.

And then 30 minutes later, they come back with positive news.

A couple weeks later, it was like

"Oh, there's a lot of damage."

That was tough.

No one truly knew what his condition was like at that time.

The older guys were just telling us to keep it quiet.

We were just told to politely decline any media interviews,

told not to talk too much about it with

family and friends or anything at all.

It was damage control, 24/7, by Fiji members...right away.

But the police got the fraternity members' phones.

And we saw a lot of group chats.

They had a lot of group chats.

Tom: And the police pretty much shared everything with us.

What we uncovered when we were reading

all the communication going back and forth is,

"You gotta keep your mouth shut.

"What happens in the house stays in the house.

"You gotta stick to a code of silence or else...

there's consequences."

The more I saw, the more infuriated I got.

Because not only did they work so hard

to put on this illegal and dangerous hazing event,

but then they worked hard to try and cover up what they did.

The police investigation was led

by the University Police Department.

And when we got the police file,

there were copies of all of the text messages and group chats

from the fraternity members' cellphones.

That was enormously helpful.

Because it told us who did what and when they did it.

We saw that on Pledge Father Reveal Nigh

when Danny was brought to the couch and he's laid down,

and his Pledge Father, who is this new mentor

who he had just been assigned, he sent a text to someone,

jokingly referring to Danny as dead at this point.

Meaning that Danny passed out.

The Pledge Dad was supposed to just

be there with you the whole night,

and Danny's Pledge Dad just said, "Screw it.

Danny's drunk. I'm gonna leave."

And he want to a bar in Columbia...

and just left him.

The following day, after it was clear

that Danny was so seriously injured,

you can see in the text messages

they were doing all sorts of things

to try to cover their tracks.

There was a meeting.

A whole bunch of fraternity members, off campus,

where they got together to discuss

the fact that there was now a police investigation

into what was going on,

and they all got together to try to get their stories straight.

Meredith: Instead of them, you know,

being concerned for Danny,

they were focused on deleting all the text messages

and evidence that occurred in the house.

And they knew they were in big trouble

because they were strictly forbidden

to have any alcohol in the house.

We found out that the university had already put Fiji

on probation as a result of prior hazing and alcohol events.

And just 13 days before Danny Santulli was hazed,

this chapter was placed on disciplinary probation

for the second time.

So that on the night that this event happened to Danny,

they were on double probation,

and all the fraternity members knew it.

-We had no idea. -No idea.

The officer of the local chapter

were discussing, "Hey, you know, we're on probation.

"We really can't have it at the house.

Maybe we should just take them to a bar."

The other Fiji members said,

"No, no, we're all gonna be hammered."

Mary Pat: He said there are gonna be

too many that are disabled that night.

From booze.

Mary Pat: They just decided they're gonna

have it at the house.

It's like fraternities and sororities,

if you wanna have an event at the house,

you need to register it with the school.

But since Mizzou put the Fiji house on probation,

they went behind, you know, the school's back

and did it privately.

And they basically thumb their nose at the university rules.

We were at the ICU in Columbia from October 19th

till December 8th.

I was just crashing at my sister's apartment.

My parents were staying in a dorm.

It was just a long, exhausting...journey.

Finally got him stable enough where he was in

a minimally conscious state,

and he was able to move on to rehab.

In Colorado.

Mary Pat: They specialize in brain and spinal cord.

Once we got there, they were doing special tests

to-to, um, test his vision and his hearing.

And his hearing was good, but the vision was gone.

That was--That was very difficult.

And then we just had to, um...

continue on with rehab for six months

before he could come home.

Danny's condition remains as it was

shortly after this incident happened.

He's blind, he cannot speak,

he cannot walk, cannot care for himself,

he cannot feed himself,

and he will need 24-hour care every single day

for the rest of his life.

We wanted the fraternity to be held accountable,

and we were all wondering when they're gonna be charged.

The family wanted to see charges. Because in Missouri,

life-endangering hazing is a crime.

It's a Class-D felony in Missouri.

There's already a law in place for that.

But it's up to the prosecutor as to whether or not

you're gonna enforce the hazing laws in your state.

People warned us, saying, "Tom, you know,

nothing may happen out of this, just so you know."

Yeah. I mean, the lead detective said don't--

Don't count on it.

Don't be surprised, but none of these kids will go to jail.

I can't believe that this is happening.

We knew that Danny's injuries were horrific.

He was gonna require a lifetime of care,

which was gonna be hugely expensive.

The tally of Danny's medical expenses

went up pretty quickly.

It cost about $2 million within those first few months.

The family was under such stress,

they didn't need the financial stress

of millions of dollars.

So we pursued the civil case.

Danny's family filed against an initial 23 defendants,

and that included the national fraternity itself,

it included the student leaders of the chapter,

and a few specific students who were involved

in the incident itself.

I said to the family, I said,

"It's not gonna be his word against his word

"in terms of what happened.

It's all gonna be right there on video."

And there was no getting around it for these guys,

and they knew it.

The family of a teen hospitalized

after a night of drinking

at a University of Missouri fraternity

has settled a lawsuit with all 23 people that were sued.

We don't celebrate these settlements,

although we're very pleased with the settlements.

We're just happy to take care of Danny,

and that's all that matters.

And when the family settled the civil case,

they were really adamant at what they wanted to see was

criminal charges pressed in the case.

Boone County stepped up to the plate.

Charges have been issued today in connection with

a hazing incident at the University of Missouri.

And June 3rd of 2022,

the first criminal charges were filed against Fiji members.

Reporter: In total, there were 11 members

criminally charged in the incident,

10 of which have been indicted by a grand jury for hazing.

We saw through the spring of 2023,

some of the first defendants pleading guilty.

Tom: I wouldn't wanna be in their shoes, but...

-Their lives will go on. -Their lives will go on.

But they, you know...

They can do a lot more than Danny can.

Hopefully, they'll...

they'll do something good in their life.

But they also have to live with what they did.

And I think that's a heavy burden to carry.

All the pledges, we still love Danny

We still care for him.

We're all wishing that he can be better

and wish that he could still be with us.

Even though... we're all pledges,

I mean, we still, you know, have that sense of guilt and regret.

And everyone just feels like there's something

that we could have done to help him out.

Since the incident,

Greek like at Mizzou is a bit different now.

A lot of people have been playing it safe,

and a lot of the culture around hazing

has just declined since what happened at Fiji.

The University of Missouri has rolled out

some new trainings for members of Greek life around hazing.

But at the same time,

things rebounded fairly quickly.

A new fraternity has moved into the old Fiji house.

You can go by that house and you would have

no way of knowing that anything ever happened there.

It all seems normal there.

And that's kind of the nature of these things,

that Greek life and fraternities,

they find a way to bounce back from these incidents.

But for Danny and his family, life is far from normal.

We live a different life,

and we're....adapting to this new life.

You know, it's never easy.

It doesn't get easier.

But it's made us stronger.

I did decide to do my last semester online.

And it's been nice to be home and be with Danny.

My mom's the main caregiver.

I'm also, like, helping too.

We're all, like, pretty much medically trained now.

So I guess I can put "nurse" or something on my resume.

[laughs]

He definitely is aware of who's coming in the room

and who's talking to him, and he hears us very well.

I mean, he's alert, he's, you know,

he responds to us.

You know, we've noticed some improvements, definitely,

over the past 12 months, for sure.

But we really don't know what the outcome's gonna be like.

We're gonna do whatever we can to get him

a better quality if life.

That's just that way it is.

If it takes two years, if it takes 10 years,

you know, we're just...

we're in it for the long haul.

Captioning provided by A&E Networks.

The problem with fraternities

is fraternities wield a lot of power.

Members are instructed to stay silent.

Do not disclose the secrets of the organization.

She said, "Do you wanna pledge?"

She didn't ask me, "Do you want to be hazed?"

I'm in the South now, [bleep]!

[shouting, indistinct]

Segregation allegations at the University of Alabama campus.

Do you believe that if I was White,

we wouldn't have had the same issue.

We endure the abuse.

Being hit, being punched, being paddled,

being humiliated.

I see Tim on the couch.

I'm advocating, we need to get him to the hospital.

One of the brothers wanders up.

He's throwing me against the wall.

All the bruises on his body.

Like, what the heck was going on at that house?

This operation resulted in the arrest

of a hundred individuals

involving distribution of cocaine.

I think Ciaccio and the others

felt like they were untouchable.

This is not a brotherhood.

This is not a place where there'll be growth and honor.

Rumor was that it was sexual assault expected.

Men: No means yes. Yes means anal.

What happened?

I wanna know the truth.

Not on the record.