Bowling Green State University Pays $2.9 Million in Stone Foltz Hazing Death
Won by Cooper Elliott.
Bowling Green State University agreed to pay $2.9 million to the family of Stone Foltz, a 20-year-old fraternity pledge who died after being made to drink a full liter of bourbon during an initiation, in what the family's attorneys called the largest hazing settlement paid by an Ohio public university.
What happened
On March 4, 2021, Stone Foltz, a 20-year-old sophomore at Bowling Green State University, attended an off-campus initiation event for the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. As part of the ritual, pledges were handed bottles of liquor and pressured to finish them. Foltz was given a one-liter bottle of bourbon and drank it. Fraternity members then took him back to his apartment and left him there. He was found unresponsive, placed on life support, and died on March 7 from alcohol poisoning.
Foltz, of Delaware, Ohio, was pledging Pi Kappa Alpha as a sophomore. His parents, Cory and Shari Foltz, brought a wrongful death case, represented by Rex Elliott and Sean Alto of Cooper Elliott in Columbus.
The family pursued two sets of defendants. The first group included the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and the individual members who organized and carried out the initiation. Those claims, together with related payments, brought the family more than $7 million. Eight former fraternity members were criminally convicted or pleaded guilty for their roles in the hazing.
The second target was the public university itself. The family argued that Bowling Green knew the chapter was dangerous, failed to enforce its own anti-hazing rules, and let the initiation culture continue. In January 2023, the university agreed to pay $2.9 million to resolve those claims. It did not admit wrongdoing.
The agreement went beyond money. Bowling Green permanently expelled the Pi Kappa Alpha chapter, hired a hazing prevention coordinator, built out an anti-hazing plan, and made it easier for students to report hazing. Rex Elliott described the $2.9 million as the largest settlement a public university has paid to a family in a hazing case, certainly in Ohio. "There is no chance that we are ever going to stop hazing in this country if universities don't take a more proactive stance," he said.
Cory and Shari Foltz said they would direct the settlement funds to a foundation they created in their son's name, which lobbies for stronger anti-hazing laws and teaches students and parents about the dangers of forced drinking. Combined with the earlier payments, the recovery for the family totaled roughly $10 million.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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