Fraternity Brothers Acquitted on Most Serious Charges in Student’s Death

When paramedics arrived at Mr. Foltz’s apartment, his roommate was performing CPR, but Mr. Foltz was no longer breathing, they said. He was taken to Wood County Hospital and later transferred to Toledo Hospital, where he died on March 7.

The county coroner ruled his death an accident “as the result of a fatal level of alcohol intoxication during a hazing incident,” according to Mr. Dobson, who said that Mr. Foltz’s blood-alcohol level had been four times the legal limit.

In April 2021, Bowling Green, which is 20 miles south of Toledo, announced that it had expelled the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity after placing it on an interim suspension. That month, eight men, seven of them Bowling Green students, were indicted in connection with Mr. Foltz’s death.

The other six defendants — Canyon Caldwell, Niall Sweeney, Jarrett Prizel, Aaron Lehane, Daylen Dunson and Benjamin Boyers — pleaded guilty to some of the charges, and had other charges dropped.

Mr. Dobson, the prosecutor, said that there were “different plea agreements for different individuals, depending on the information they could provide as well as their culpability.” Some of the men, he added, will be sentenced on June 16.

Mr. Foltz’s death was among the latest to underscore the dangers of initiation rituals into college fraternities and clubs, which often involve excessive drinking and other dangerous activities. Sometimes, these have been fatal.

In 2018, an 18-year-old Ohio University student, Collin Wiant, died after inhaling nitrous oxide at a fraternity event. In 2017, Timothy Piazza, a 19-year-old sophomore at Penn State University, died after drinking large quantities of alcohol while pledging a fraternity. Maxwell Gruver, an 18-year-old student at Louisiana State University, also died that year after aspirating vomit into his lungs following extreme drinking at a fraternity initiation ritual.