In early September, Maxwell Raymond Gruver, an 18-year-old freshman student at LSU, died in a possible fraternity hazing incident. Now, police reports are indicating that a “Bible Study” drinking game may have led to Gruver’s untimely death.
Gruver, an 18-year-old LSU freshman from Roswell, Georgia, died on Thursday, September 14, after he was taken to a Baton Rouge hospital to be treated for an unspecified “medical emergency.” Gruver was also “highly intoxicated” the night before he died.
According to the New York Daily News, several other young men looking to pledge to the Phi Delta Theta chapter at the university told investigators that they were called to “Bible Study” at 10 PM on September 13.
The drinking game allegedly involved answering trivia questions about the chapter, with wrong answers leading to punishment in the form of drinking.
via The Advocate:
Gruver and other Phi Delta Theta pledges received a group text message Sept. 13 that “Bible Study” would take place that night at 10 p.m. at the chapter house, an exercise where pledges were asked questions about the fraternity and forced to drink if they answered incorrectly, according to LSU police, who are conducting the investigation. LSU police said that several other interviews of witnesses “indicated that the pledges were forced to drink in excess.”
A witness to the drinking game at the fraternity house told police that a group of members and pledges were drinking in several upstairs bedrooms the night of Sept. 13. Most people were drinking hard liquor, police said, including Gruver. At some point early Sept. 14, the witness said, Gruver became “highly intoxicated.” The witness, who is not identified, and several other fraternity members put Gruver on a couch for the night, police said.
The witness said that around 11 a.m. Sept. 14 he returned to the fraternity house where he and others found Gruver still on the couch with a weak pulse, and they “could not tell if he was breathing,” police said. At that time two people took him in a private vehicle to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
After a search of the Phi Delta Theta house, police reportedly seized multiple bottles of hard liquor, a glass smoking pipe, pain relievers, security cameras, a GoPro camera, beer cans, a pledge test and various biological samples.
