An Isolated Incident
That’s how officials at Southern Methodist University described the fatal drug overdose of sophomore Jake Stiles, whose body was found in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house in 2006. Then his father stumbled across evidence that campus police had ignored—and learned a painful lesson about the politics of damage control at one of the state’s most exclusive universities.
Jennifer says: Everyone is responsible for their choices, peer pressure or not. Life is full of risks, gambles and outcomes we never see coming. I am sorry of the loss any human life, especially one so young. I was a little sister at one of the "historical drug" houses. I was in an elite sorority at the University of Colorado. I used drugs and am one of the lucky ones to live to talk about it. Please, please, think about it, and build up the strength inside yourself before you are confronted with the "situation". Then it is easier to walk away or grab a bottle of water than go slowly the other way. It’s not easy, but going to parties with another who will support you helps also. Believe me, the money I went through, the unpleasant experiences and health issues, weren’t on my mind at the time either. Wishing you the best. (November 24th, 2009 at 12:36am)
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“Everybody just pounded him, like that was the craziest, dumbest idea ever,” Bechtol said. “It was so disheartening. I wanted to scream, ‘This is bullshit!’”
“Drug use and alcohol abuse was just kind of the culture,” said Britton, who, after getting sober in 2007, now tells his story to youth groups. “Not just at SAE. I can think of four or five other fraternities that were kind of—not priding themselves on taking drugs, but it was part of their culture. It was just known as what they did.” Dealers are drawn to the campus and to the considerable disposable income that not just Greeks but many SMU students have, he said. During the summer after his senior year, Britton, who entered SMU on a prestigious Hunt Leadership Scholarship, was arrested for DWI. His outfit—mint-green pants, a white polo shirt, and boat shoes—stood out in the Dallas County jail, Britton recalled, and an inmate approached and asked if he went to SMU. “He inquired whether I wanted to sell drugs for him there.”
Britton said he often wondered what it would take for SMU administrators to get serious about drug abuse on campus. He and his fellow fraternity brothers would sit around the house at lunchtime, chuckling at the weekly campus police updates in the Daily Campus. “And there’s incident after incident of, you know, ‘Police found baggie and paraphernalia.’ And it’s just like, at some point, don’t these just add up to ‘Look, we have a drug problem’?” Britton said. “You have to imagine R. Gerald Turner putting his head on his pillow and thinking, ‘My God, what do I have as a student body?’”
After Clark got sober, he considered calling SAE’s national offices to let somebody know what was going on at the fraternity house, but he wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do. He felt certain in any case that Jake’s death would bring everything out into the open. But it didn’t, and he couldn’t understand why. At a minimum, he said, SMU should have tried to find the person who provided the fentanyl that killed Jake. “It wasn’t like he was giving him weed or something,” he said. “Fentanyl is a drug that normal people shouldn’t be taking. I mean, he might as well have given him heroin.”
On December 3 I reached Austin Bryan on the phone. After I told him about the text exchange found on Jake’s phone, he agreed to talk to me. Bryan was well-spoken and initially seemed eager to appear helpful. He denied having provided the fentanyl patch to Jake and said he was in New York the weekend that Jake died. The reason Jake texted him about it, he said, was because Jake had found the patch in Bryan’s apartment. “He had told me that he had found some medication in the guest bathroom, and I urged him not to take it,” Bryan said. “He referred to it by some nickname. I didn’t even know what it was, and I said, ‘Jake, I’m worried about you.’ I think at some point I got a text from him saying he had taken this medication.”
Bryan said he couldn’t say who might have left the patch in the bathroom, because he often had friends stay over in his guest room, including many who were having problems with drugs and alcohol. Bryan, who said that he had not used illegal drugs since going through rehab as a teenager, said he had been counseling Jake in the months before his death and that the two had become close friends. “I was very much an advocate of Jake trying to get sober,” Bryan said. “I would never have given him something like that.”
I asked Bryan if he knew anything about the orange pills—the methadone-like drug—that Jake had been taking in the months before he died. Bryan said he had not given them to Jake, but he couldn’t say for certain that they had not come from his apartment as well. “All the people who were staying at my place were trying to get sober,” he said. “So I could see somebody leaving that or taking that.”
Bryan said the last time he saw Jake, he had seemed troubled. “The night before I left [for New York], he came over and we were talking, and I really should have paid more attention to him. I was kind of just packing my bags, and he was talking about how he was depressed. I really regret not giving him maybe ten or fifteen more minutes just to kind of talk with him and just listen to him,” he said.
Bryan did not seem to share his friends’ sense, however, that the environment at the SAE house had become dangerous in the fall of 2006, despite Jake’s death and the close calls suffered by Jack Britton and Clark Scott. “I can assume that people were doing a lot of drugs there. I can’t really say whether or not I have any specific memories of so-and-so doing cocaine,” he said. “I think that when Jake passed away, then people kind of said, ‘All right, we’ve lost a good friend of ours, and we need to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.’ But I don’t see it as a string of three events, where someone should have been more concerned.” Bryan said the SMU police had never contacted him about Jake. “I don’t see why they would have,” he said. “I think it was pretty obvious that I was on their side. I was trying to help the poor guy out.”
When we spoke again a few days later, Bryan said he had thought carefully about our conversation and that he wanted to clarify something. “To me there’s a big difference between feeling bad about my close friend passing away and feeling guilty,” he said. “I feel bad about it, but I don’t feel a sense of guilt. I can make the assumption after having read articles online that what Jake took from my apartment contributed to his death, but I can’t know that for sure.”
When I told Bryan that the SMU police said he had refused to cooperate with the investigation, he continued to maintain that he had not spoken with them, or that if he had, he could not remember having done so, even though the conversation, according to the police, had taken place only a few weeks prior. I asked why he had not come forward with what he knew in the days and weeks after Jake’s body was found, when police were still trying to determine the cause of death. Bryan would not concede that the information he had at the time—that Jake had taken a morph patch the night he died—might have been useful to investigators.
“It sounds to me like you’re going up against kind of a hard situation here,” Bryan said. “The only person who knows exactly what happened is no longer with us. You know?”
Tom and Rhonda Stiles live in a two-story bungalow on a wooded street in an older neighborhood not far from downtown Kansas City. After lunch on a large, sunny screened-in porch, Tom pulled Jake’s cell phone out of his pocket, set it carefully on the table, and began scrolling through what for him had become a familiar set of menus as Rhonda quietly looked on. There were the eighteen messages forwarded to Snellgrove’s e-mail, including the exchanges with Austin Bryan, just as Tom had said. Tom handled the phone, which he normally kept in his personal safe, with care. It was more than a connection to Jake: It had become a kind of talisman against the idea that he and Rhonda had been bad parents, that, blinded by grief, the two of them were unfairly impugning SMU’s reputation.
Rhonda, who has soft blue eyes and a quiet voice, said she felt naive for trusting SMU to do a proper investigation of Jake’s death. “I think a homicide investigation needs to go to the Dallas police,” she said. “That should not be Leon Bennett’s decision to make.” Still, she said, her and Tom’s goal had never been to make anybody pay for what had happened to Jake. “We know Jake made bad decisions,” she said. Reading the police report, in which one of Jake’s friends had said he was using drugs almost every day, had been difficult, but they had come to accept the truth of it. What they could not accept was the idea that Jake was a bad seed, that somehow his death didn’t mean as much—didn’t mean that SMU has a problem that is not being dealt with—because he had brought it on himself.
“You can’t write it off to bad kid, bad family,” Tom said. “Now they want to have their presidential task force and all that, but the problem is the accessibility of drugs, and in this case you don’t go after the source. They were just trying to sweep it under the rug to protect their reputation. And I feel like, whether consciously or unconsciously, they threw Jake—and us—under the bus to do that.”
Rhonda recalled how she had felt when she and Jake first looked at an admissions brochure from SMU. “Everything that comes out of that school is so glossy and so perfect, and we were so excited,” she said. But that was all before. “I don’t think any institution has the right to do to a family what they did to our family. Losing a child is just so . . . you don’t put that into words. And when there are those who are making that harder, that’s almost inhumane.”
What bothers her the most, she said, is the idea that somebody like her son is pledging SAE, or some other fraternity at SMU, today. “We want to know that that environment has changed.”
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