Some FAMU staff wanted band suspended before the Florida Classic

By Peter McKay | FAMU ’97 | Email

The plot thickens as to who knew what, when regarding hazing at FAMU.

In a story on Monday, the Orlando Sentinel’s Denise-Marie Balona and Stephen Hudak wrote:

The former chief of Florida A&M University’s police department and the school’s dean of students recommended that FAMU not allow its famed marching band to perform at the Florida Classic in Orlando last fall because of concerns over hazing, the former chief told the Orlando Sentinel on Monday.

Former band director Julian White quashed the idea when it came forward during a brief staff meeting Nov. 16, saying the band was a main feature of the annual fundraising event, said Calvin Ross, who recently retired from the FAMU police department. A spokeswoman for White, however, said the former band director actually agreed with the recommendation, but no one at the meeting had authority to suspend the band.

The little he said-he said conflict there aside, this story goes on to provide quite a little narrative about whether Champion’s death was preventable based on what administrators knew.

A story like this also makes it incrementally harder to defend President Ammons, as many FAMU alumni have, by saying that he can’t control every little detail of everything at the university, that he didn’t know exactly what was going on with the band, et cetera.

The Sentinel story doesn’t place Ammons in the Nov. 16 meeting, and the story is inconclusive as to whether he was told afterward about the proposal to suspend the band. But given the significance of such an idea, coming from the police chief and the dean of students, it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t be told.

In other words, this story involving other senior-level administrators moves things incrementally closer to the president’s office. You can bet that the president will be asked about it publicly the next time he’s in front of the trustees, who already have no confidence in him, or one of the several other state-level entities now investigating the Champion incident.

He better have a good answer as to why he was either unaware of or opposed to his own deputies’ desire to ban the band.

Following the Champion tragedy, why was FAMUPD so slow to follow through on a new hazing report?

By Peter McKay | FAMU ’97 | Email

The latest news from Tallahassee — that two FAMU faculty members were investigated in connection with a hazing incident in 2010 — is a true bombshell. USA Today reports:

A Tallahassee Police Department investigative report, released Wednesday, tells of 14 Kappa Kappa Psi band fraternity pledges who gathered at the off-campus home of a faculty member and were subjected to paddling and punishment related to initiation rituals…

An unnamed student, who made the original complaint two days after Marching 100 drum major Robert Champion was killed in November in an incident being investigated as a hazing-related homicide, described events from the spring of 2010.

“He further stated that he remembers receiving anywhere from 20-25 ‘licks’ across his buttocks with the paddle,” the police report said.

The police incident report lists Diron Holloway and Anthony Simons — both employed by Florida A&M, according to the police report — as suspects in the hazing investigation.

The full TPD report, which is definitely worth a read, goes on to state that no charges will be filed in the case, in large part because the two-year statute of limitations may have passed since the events in question. But the report hardly represents a great vindication of FAMU on the questions of whether anything happened in the first place, whether the faculty members were indeed involved in some way, and how the organization responded.

After the report was released on Wednesday, FAMU announced that it is putting the two profs mentioned therein on administrative leave.

The alleged complicity of faculty in hazing has grabbed most of the headlines in news coverage of the TPD report so far, which makes sense. But I think there are a few other details hiding between the lines that we shouldn’t overlook.

Chief among them is TPD’s not-so-implicit criticism of FAMU campus police for being slow to pass along the incident. According to the report, these particular hazing allegations came to FAMUPD’s attention on Nov. 21 — just a few days after Robert Champion’s death. FAMUPD determined they would have to pass them along to TPD because the alleged incident took place off-campus.

But then they never did. TPD says it never heard about the incident until Jan. 20, when it learned of the allegations from the media. Then TPD called FAMUPD — not the other way around — to ask about it.

Then one of the key witnesses says he never got a call from FAMUPD until a few days after that, when the department got wind that the Tallahassee Democrat was working on a story about hazing at FAMU.

What’s really breathtaking about all this lollygagging is that it took place after Robert Champion died, when everyone on campus should’ve been on extra high alert about the risks of hazing. Especially the police.

Amazing.

By the way, one final thought: If you’re one of those Rattlers who’s been huffy about media coverage of hazing at FAMU, this is great evidence why you should chill out. Media coverage sometimes has a way of getting necessary things done when you’re dealing with intransigent and/or plainly dumb-as-bricks bureaucrats. If it weren’t for media coverage, that original hazing report would probably still be collecting dust on someone’s desk at FAMUPD, and the faculty members wouldn’t be under any scrutiny at all, even though certain of their students and colleagues had accused them of hazing.