Family Blames College in Son's Drowning
Aug. 30, 2004 -- -- When University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Jared Dion's lifeless body was pulled from the Mississippi River, he was found to have drunk so much that it would have been illegal for him to drive.
Dion, a popular wrestler who had recently turned 21, took one of the university's Safe Ride program buses from the campus into La Crosse on April 9 and got drunk in the city's bars.
Sometime in the early morning hours of Aug. 10, he left a group of friends waiting for the last bus — the so-called "drunk bus" — back to the school, walked into the city's Riverside Park, and apparently fell into the Mississippi River and drowned.
He was the seventh Wisconsin-La Crosse student to suffer that fate in the past seven years. It was one such death in 2000 that led the school to initiate the Safe Ride program.
Dion's family has filed a notice of claim, under Wisconsin state law the first step in filing a lawsuit, with the city of La Crosse and the university, seeking $250,000 from each.
The notice of claim, filed by the family's lawyer, James Gende II, says that by allowing the school paper to print advertisements from bars and running the bus program, which takes students from the campus to the bar district on weekend nights, the university "encouraged binge drinking," and thus helped to cause Dion's death.
The city is at fault, the notice of claim charges, for failing to respond to the previous deaths, despite repeated discussions of measures such as increasing nighttime police foot patrols in the riverfront park, installing barriers blocking entrance to the park late at night or erecting a more secure railing along the waterfront.
Bryan Dion, Jared's father, said the reason for the action was not to get money but to spur the city and the university to address issues about drinking that he said have been repeatedly raised — even before Jared's death — but not resolved.
"I could have said I'm going to sue you for a dollar, and they would have given me a dollar and told me to shut up," he said. "The only reason we're doing this is because nothing has been done."
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