News > A Rite Gone Terribly Wrong
Sports Illustrated
Hazing is often winked at as a benign initiation ritual, but it has a tendency to spiral out of control, as it did in the horrific events at Long Island's MEPHAM HIGH
Hard by a lake in rural northeastern Pennsylvania lies a wooded enclave known as Camp Wayne for Girls. But last August, in the dog days before the beginning of a new school year, the grounds were brimming with testosterone. Sixty boys and five coaches from Long Island's Mepham High football team had converged on the property for the Pirates' annual preseason camp. They spent most of their time on a practice field across from a ring of green cabins, running through plays, determining who would be where on the 2003 depth chart.
The members of the jayvee team—freshmen and a few sophomores—expected to be the subject of hazing. It had all but ossified into a Mepham football tradition: The upperclassmen would initiate the new kids. One young player might suffer the indignity of a shaved head, another a conspicuous bruise, maybe an unlucky one would have body hair ripped off with duct tape. It was understood that they would endure their humiliation without complaint, and by the time they returned home to Bellmore, a middle-class town of 16,000 in the heart of New York City's sprawling suburbia, they would have standing as official members of the team. And besides, they could take some comfort in knowing that someday they would be the ones leading the initiation.
...On Sept. 3, a full week after the team had returned to Bellmore, another victim was also in immense pain, unable to stanch the rectal bleeding that for days had soiled his sheets and underwear. Humiliated and frightened, he asked his mother to take him to the doctor. When his pediatrician asked about the source of the injury, the victim finally relented, revealing some of the details of the hellish five days he had spent at camp.
After collecting herself, the victim's mother frantically called Mepham principal John Didden and later brought her son in to meet with him. According to the victim's attorney, Robert P. Kelly, Didden was dispassionate and advised the mother to call the police herself. "From Day One," Kelly says, "the school tried to bury this."
...The identities of the perpetrators were no secret, either. And yet the two ringleaders cut confident figures as they roamed the halls, eagerly anticipating the Pirates' first game on Sept. 20. "It was totally backward," says Michael F. Rubin, an attorney for two of the victims. "These guys—not my clients—should have been the ones to be ostracized, but they were treated like kings of the school." One of the victims was so upset that he stopped attending Mepham and began homeschooling.
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