After months of depositions - and Strong-Fargas sat through every one - the lawsuits against Alpha Kappa Alpha were settled.
WHERE TO FIND KAPPA SAPHIR FULL
The full story from that night may never be told. And I’m wondering what secrets I’ll be willing to share if she comes to me one day and says, “Mom, I’m thinking of pledging a sorority.”
Now, 35 years down the line, I’m no longer courting the respect of would-be sorority sisters. As difficult as it sometimes was, the process gave me confidence, and taught me to draw on an inner strength that’s served me well in adulthood. I’ve always been glad that I pledged and proud I made it through. Then, I believed the party line: Surviving brutality was a badge of honor, keeping secrets a measure of loyalty. The insults, the paddling, the forced exercise routines that I endured went beyond humiliating and veered perilously close to dangerous. Because when I was a college student, I pledged a sorority. I suspected from the first bare-bones account that this was no simple jaunt on the beach. “It forced a lot of people out of denial.”Īs a reporter, I covered the story when they died. “Their deaths were like 9/11 for fraternities and sororities,” said Lawrence Ross Jr., the author of a book on black Greek organizations and an anti-hazing lecturer on campuses. Like every collegiate Greek organization, the sorority has rules against hazing - a “risk management” policy, their website calls it.Īccording to those who track hazing injuries, more than 80 pledges have been killed or injured around the country in the last 15 years during rites that involve binge drinking, beatings or extreme physical exertion.īut the deaths of Kristin and Kenitha had special resonance among Greek-letter organizations. had been suspended for hazing, so the pledging process was unsanctioned. “I’ve had an easier time infiltrating street gangs than penetrating this organization,” Freeman, a former cop, told me not long after the young women died, a few months into his investigation for the family.Īlpha Kappa Alpha leaders said from the start that the group had no role in the deaths. And they couldn’t even look at me in my face.”Īccusations of hazing surfaced almost immediately, but were never proven. They were the only ones who could tell me what happened to my daughter. “These were girls who had spent hours at our home, who had eaten with my family, played with Kristin’s son. “They wanted to just drop the keys and run,” Strong-Fargas said when I interviewed her this week at the small Christian school she runs in South Los Angeles. The next day, when the young women brought Kristin’s car home, her mother said Kristin’s pledge journal was missing and numbers had been deleted from her cellphone. She doesn’t know for sure because the two pledges who survived won’t talk to her. That is what Kristin’s mother believes, based on witness accounts collected by the family’s private investigator, Robert Freeman. Both were dragged by high waves under the water, the lawsuit alleges. Kristin knew Kenitha couldn’t swim, so she went in after her. The night they died, the lawsuit claims, they’d spent hours at the beach doing calisthenics before they were ordered to walk backward into the ocean.
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