Court Orders $6.525 Million Against the Former Fraternity President in Stone Foltz's Hazing Death
Won by Cooper Elliott.
Cooper Elliott won a $6.525 million judgment against the former Pi Kappa Alpha president whose chapter hazed Bowling Green State University student Stone Foltz to death in 2021.
What happened
On March 4, 2021, Stone Foltz, a 20-year-old sophomore at Bowling Green State University, went to a Pi Kappa Alpha 'big little' event tied to his pledgeship. Pledges were blindfolded, taken to a basement, and each handed a full bottle of liquor by an assigned 'big brother' with the expectation that they would empty it. Foltz drank a one-liter bottle of 86-proof bourbon in roughly 18 minutes.
No one called for help as he lost consciousness. Fraternity members drove him back to his apartment and left him there. He was found unresponsive hours later. His blood alcohol content measured 0.394, close to five times the limit for driving. He died on March 7, 2021, three days after the event.
His parents, Shari and Cory Foltz, filed a wrongful death suit in Franklin County Court of Common Pleas. Cooper Elliott represented the family, with Rex Elliott among the attorneys handling the case. The university and several fraternity members settled earlier. The last defendant was Daylen Dunson, the chapter president who had pleaded guilty in 2022 to reckless homicide and hazing. Dunson never responded to the civil complaint and did not appear to defend himself.
With Dunson absent, the family moved for a default judgment and a hearing on damages. Magistrate Jennifer Hunt weighed the evidence and recommended the award in a decision dated December 12, 2024. Franklin County Judge Julie Lynch adopted that recommendation.
Dunson was ordered to pay $6.525 million. The award breaks down to $175,000 for survivorship, $6 million for wrongful death (divided among Foltz's parents and siblings), and $350,000 in punitive damages, the most Ohio law permits. That total is a small fraction of the $225 million the family had requested, with the punitive figure held down by the state's statutory cap.
Months after Foltz died, Ohio enacted Collin's Law, which strengthened the state's criminal penalties for hazing and made the most serious cases a felony. The civil judgment came more than three years later, after the criminal cases against the chapter's members had already run their course.
'This has never been about money to the Foltz family,' Rex Elliott said. 'This has been about stopping hazing in this country.' The judgment was entered against Dunson individually, leaving him personally liable for the full $6.525 million.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
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