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Article snippet: READINGTON, N.J. — Timothy Piazza started out a shy high school student in New Jersey who flushed so deeply scarlet when speaking to a girl that some called him Barney after the purple dinosaur. A growth spurt turned him into a gentle giant, keen to protect more vulnerable peers. He fell in love, became gregarious. By the time he enrolled at Pennsylvania State University two years ago, he was truly, friends and family said, coming into his own. But all that ended in February, when Mr. Piazza died at Penn State after a fraternity hazing ritual in which he was instructed to drink large amounts of alcohol and fell numerous times, injuring his brain and rupturing his spleen. He was 19. Eighteen young men involved with the fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, have been charged with a variety of crimes, eight of them with involuntary manslaughter, the most serious charge. Prosecutors will seek to show that the conduct that night in February, when Timothy was induced to drink dangerous levels of alcohol and left unaided and injured, was not just fraternity high jinks gone terribly wrong, but rose to criminal behavior. The episode reflects a new push to more stringently prosecute fraternity-linked deaths — there have been more than 60 in the past eight years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. In early May, four members of a fraternity at Baruch College in New York, Pi Delta Psi, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of a pledge during a hazing ritual in... Link to the full article to read more