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."

Dion said the college and city had promised that changes would be made before the start of the 2004-05 school year. But aside from the formation of a task force, he said nothing had been done before the notice of claim was filed last week.

Since then, school officials reportedly have had meetings to discuss banning bar and alcohol ads from the university newspaper and to consider ending the practice of having the Safe Ride buses drop students off right at the bars.

Officials from both the city and the university declined to comment on the notice of claim, saying their lawyers were reviewing it and would have a response within the 120-day period allowed by law. They also declined to comment on any actions they may or may not have taken.

If they accept the claim, they must pay the money demanded. They can also reject it or ignore it, in which case the family can formally file suit against them.

An Alternative to Drunken Driving

University spokesman Carl Heyer said the Safe Ride program was started in 2001, "to suggest an alternative to students who may have considered drinking and driving." He said it was modeled on the Safe Ride program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

At that school, though, the buses do not take students directly to bars and the school paper does not accept advertising from bars.

Anti-alcohol abuse advocates and scholars who study alcohol-related issues say there are questions about whether "safe ride" programs are a completely good thing and how they should be implemented.

"These programs have been a bit of a source of friction in our field, between the individual health consideration and the public health consideration," said Ann Bradley, a spokeswoman with the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a division of the National Institutes of Health.

The National Organization for Youth Safety also suggests there is some controversy surrounding "safe rides," though it offers tips for setting up designated driver and safe ride programs.

"There are two sides to every issue and there exists a strong belief by some that if you offer people a designated driver program or a safe ride home you are just encouraging irresponsible behavior by eliminating consequences, even though you may be saving a life," the group says on its Web page offering advice on setting up such programs.

A Bad Message?

Drew Hunter, the president of the Bacchus & Gamma Peer Education Network, a 30-year-old Denver-based organization with branches on roughly 1,000 campuses that deals with the problem of college drinking, said the group does not advocate "safe ride" programs unless schools also have alcohol-abuse education programs.

"If a safe ride program is all a campus is doing, I would say that it is sending a bad message," he said. "The biggest problem at many colleges are the accidental deaths that go along with heavy drinking."

Alcohol-related injuries result in the deaths of roughly 1,400 college students every year, and drinking contributes to a range of other problems, according to figures from the NIAAA.

About 500,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are injured annually while under the influence of alcohol, more than 600,000 are assaulted by another student who has been drinking, and more than 70,000 students are victims of alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape, according to the NIAAA.

At Wisconsin-La Crosse, Dion is the seventh student since 1997 to have drowned in the Mississippi after a night of drinking in the city.

At a public meeting after Dion's body was found in April, La Crosse police Chief Edward Kondracki said, "I personally see these young men as the victims of an alcohol culture that targets them and encourages binge drinking."

And another member of the police department, Lt. Dan Marcou, whose nephew also drowned in the river after getting drunk at a party in October 1997, said, "This community has a drinking problem. It will never fix itself because it denies and denies. When is the community going to pull its head out of the sand and fix this?"

Jared Dion's father admitted that his son "made his decision to drink on his own," but said the culture in La Crosse and at the school encouraged him in that decision, and it is that culture he hopes will change as a result of the family's legal action.