Framing the Chad Meredith Act

On November 4, 2001, Chad Meredith had some drinks with members of Kappa Sigma, and then took an intoxicated swim in the campus lake where he drowned to death. Chad was a freshman at Florida State University. He was young, impressionable, and trying to fit in with his future brethren at Kappa Sigma.It was cold, Chad had been drinking, and he got a cramp while swimming across the lake. The three guys with him were completely capable of saving Chad, or even calling the cops, but they didn't.

This story was picked up locally in Florida and across the country in Chad's hometown of Indianapolis. It quickly became a national story. People get hazed all the time in the college Greek system, but this was different because the cute, young, baseball player, far from home, died.  His fellow Kappa Sigma's were taken into a civil lawsuit for the murder of Chad Meredith. The story that the media didn't tell was that these students passed 3 blue call-lights and waited a good 10 minutes before calling someone to retrieve his body. Within 24 hours of Chad's death, the media and the police deemed it an "accident" that could not have been helped. This wasn't the case, though.

Unlike the Matthew Shepard murder, the guilty parties in Chad's story were not scumbags. They were upstanding, educated guys who just screwed up, which is why the Meredith family took action. They struggled in the lawsuit for years until the three men were convicted and the Chad Meredith Act was passed in the state of Florida. It states that any kind of hazing is a third degree felony, and many states followed in Florida's lead. The Chad Meredith Act is still the most harsh hazing law in place in the country.

Chad's story was framed incorrectly by the media until E! Investigates did an exposition of Chad's death in an episode of the show. Even then, details were lost, but the story depicted what really happened: manslaughter. Chad's death was 100% preventable but the three students with him were either too dumb, scared, or just evil to do anything. Now, Chad is a poster child for hazing all over the country and in every Greek house. Chad was a martyr for the cruelties of hazing because somebody had to be. Yeah, he was middle-class, white, and attractive so the media did give notice, but in this case, the media was still protecting the rich, white students who weren't the heroes of this story. Matthew Shepard's audience got the ending they wanted, unlike Chad's, which is why legal action took place. Thank goodness it did, too.