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.
Tom Stiles, photographed at his home in Kansas City, Missouri, on December 19, 2008.
Photograph by Bear Guerra
On New Year’s Day 2007, Tom Stiles resolved to do something he had been putting off. He climbed the stairs of his two-story house in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, where he worked in sales for a company that made identification card systems, and entered his office. On his desk was a box full of possessions that had belonged to his son, Jake, a sophomore at Southern Methodist University who had died from a drug overdose after a party celebrating the end of the fall semester. The weeks since his death had gone by in a fog of tearful phone calls and visits from relatives. Friends from church had persuaded Tom and his wife, Rhonda, to get out of the house and go to Honduras for Christmas to participate in a charity mission. Now they were home and still numb. Jake had grown up here with his older sister, Amelia; the closet of his old room was still full of the polo shirts he had worn—two at a time, for some reason—to high school every day, like a uniform. A number of mothers who had known Jake as a lifeguard at the neighborhood pool had come to his memorial service. He had taught their kids to swim.
Jake had been found lying on his couch in his room at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house by friends the afternoon after the party. The medical examiner discovered alcohol and cocaine in his system, along with something more unusual: fentanyl, a prescription painkiller similar to morphine but much more powerful. Used to treat patients who have already developed a tolerance to opiates, it is typically administered through a slow-release skin patch to avoid the risk of overdose. Abusers of the drug often cut a thin strip off the patch and take it orally, which gives a quick and potent high. Tom was surprised to learn that Jake used cocaine, but it was the fentanyl—something he had never even heard of—that he could not get his head around. Where on earth, Tom wondered, had his son found something like that?
Jake had seemed to love college life. With his curly hair and pudgy frame, he resembled the actor Seth Rogen, and he had the same gift for self-deprecating humor. A month before his death, he had won the title Mr. University in a sorority-sponsored talent contest in which he read aloud an essay on how to date SMU girls. “Keep in mind these key topics that are always on the minds of SMU students,” he wrote. “Any sort of gossip (especially Greek related), luxury fashion, luxury automobiles, lavish vacations, one of your multiple homes, your parents’ professions, and any other materialistic part of your life that is easy to embellish.” Jake’s grades had been poor the previous spring, but Tom and Rhonda, a social worker, had attributed the decline to the distraction of Jake’s pledgeship in SAE.
At Jake’s memorial service in Naperville, a man who introduced himself as a representative of SAE’s national office, located in nearby Evanston, had approached Rhonda and offered his condolences. Then he said something that left her humiliated. “There’s not much we can do with kids who already have a problem,” he told her. Rhonda’s pastor, overhearing the exchange, quickly steered her away from the conversation. A couple weeks later, however, Tom found himself reading something similar in the Dallas Morning News. “Some students come here with these problems,” Jim Caswell, SMU’s vice president for student affairs, told the News on December 21. Caswell also said that drug abuse at SAE was “isolated and not a chapter-wide problem,” a comment that echoed the findings of fraternity officials, who had told the Daily Campus, the SMU student newspaper, on December 8 that Jake’s death appeared to have been an “individual isolated incident” and that there was “no reason to believe the chapter or chapter members were involved.” With the medical examiner’s finding of death by accidental overdose, Caswell told the News, the investigation had now been “resolved to our satisfaction.”
Tom was not the type to pick up the phone and chew somebody out, but the implication that his son had been an addict was infuriating. He and Rhonda considered themselves strict parents. When Jake came home inebriated one night the summer after his freshman year, they had made him write out a plan for how he was going to bring up his grades the next fall. He had seemed okay when they saw him over the Thanksgiving break. But he’d also been upset over something that had happened at a fraternity party just before the holiday, an incident that, looking back on it, was portentous. Jake’s close friend and roommate at the SAE house, Clark Scott, had overdosed on alcohol and drugs at a fraternity party and nearly died. Jake had insisted that he was not using drugs himself, but he was clearly shaken and seemed almost reluctant to go back to SMU to finish the semester. Jake had a tendency, as Rhonda would say, to get “overwhelmed” by things; he had taken the antidepressant Zoloft for years. Tom and Rhonda found themselves wishing, not for the first time, that their son had not gone to college so far away, and they looked forward to Christmas. “You just have a couple more weeks,” Rhonda had told Jake. “Then you’ll be home for a nice, long break.”
Tom began pulling Jake’s things out of the box and laying them on his desk. He spotted Jake’s cell phone, a narrow black Samsung, which he flipped open and turned on. Jake loved to send text messages, and the inbox and outbox were filled with dozens of notes. At the top of the inbox was a message from one of Jake’s high school friends, sent the day after his death. It read, “Jake ill nevr 4get u. u were such an amazing person. U were always kind-always happy. U had a true zest 4 life and im so glad I got a chance to know u. we’ll miss u.” Then Tom looked at the outbox. He was surprised to see that on December 5, three days after Jake’s death, a number of messages had been forwarded to the e-mail address of Mike Snellgrove, SMU’s chief of police.
Tom had spoken with the campus police, who handled the investigation from beginning to end, on a couple of occasions, but no one had mentioned anything of interest on Jake’s phone. Eighteen messages had been forwarded, each of them seemingly discussing drugs. Tom was struck by their tone: Jake and his friends talked about cocaine the way he and his wife talked about the weather. “Sure I’ll do a rail,” one of his fraternity brothers had written, referring to a line of cocaine, in a text sent after midnight on a weeknight. One message in particular brought Tom up short. “That was a delicious morph patch,” Jake wrote at 2:40 in the morning on December 2, the day of his death. It was sent to someone identified only by the initials “AB.”
“How long ago did you take it,” AB replied.
“I took half last nite and half tonite . . . perfect dose,” Jake answered.
That was the last text he sent. Tom carried the phone downstairs to show Rhonda. “I think I understand now,” he told her.
Nestled among the tree-lined streets and stately homes of the twin enclaves of University Park and Highland Park, the SMU campus has a regal beauty, with Georgian Revival—inspired buildings of red brick and neatly manicured lawns on which students rarely walk, sunbathe, or throw Frisbees. The endowment, fueled by gifts from the school’s army of wealthy and well-connected alumni, is impressive, and the annual cost of tuition, room and board, and fees—$43,000 last year—is comparable to that of the Ivy League.
But SMU does not have the academic tradition of the Ivy League. It has long battled its reputation as a place where wealthy families send their coddled, underachieving children. Only six out of ten students graduate in four years. (At Duke University, which SMU considers one of its benchmark competitors, nine out of ten do.) Friday classes are rare, and students are allowed a generous ten weeks to drop a course in lieu of failing it. Freshmen can repeat certain classes they don’t pass without any adverse impact on their grade point average. Students who find themselves short of credit hours can enroll in summer courses at a satellite campus in Taos, New Mexico, where they can stay in cozy cabins and do some sightseeing on the weekends. The school has a robust Greek system, the members of which have a reputation for hard partying. In a recent survey, more than half of SMU students polled said they thought the typical SMU student was at least an occasional cocaine user. (Only 6.6 percent reported ever having used the drug themselves, however.)
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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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