Horrifying new video shows a University of Missouri student who allegedly suffered a serious brain injury at a pledge party being forced-fed beer through a tube, falling backward and then dropped by frantic frat brothers.
Daniel Santulli, 19, has been left unable to walk or communicate from the alleged hazing at an Oct. 19 Phi Gamma Delta party shown in footage on “Good Morning America on Thursday.
The footage from the “pledge father reveal party” shows the student and his fellow blindfolded pledges being led shirtless down a staircase in their frat house.
Santulli also is seen being force-fed beer through a funnel while he is in the middle of guzzling an entire bottle of vodka, the family’s attorney David Bianchi said on GMA.
After about two hours, he appears to pass out and falls backward.
After being carried to a couch, he is seen slipping onto the floor – seemingly unresponsive while another person sits nearby.
Several minutes later, his fraternity members scramble to carry Santulli toward a door, but drop him to the floor in the process before finally driving him to the hospital, GMA reported.
“I saw Danny in the medical ICU at the hospital at Mizzou. And it’s just it’s just a bunch of tubes everywhere. And that’s an image that will probably never leave my head,” his brother Nick Santulli said on GMA.
“Just the fact that nobody, they knew he was in distress and his lips were blue and nobody called 911. It’s like, I don’t know, I mean a 6-year-old calls 911,” Santulli’s mother, Mary Pat, said on the show.
She said doctors told the family that the young man will need “care for life.”
“He’s still not talking or walking, he’s in a wheelchair … he lost his vision, but he hears us and he knows we’re there,” she said, breaking down in tears and adding that they “will not give up hope.”
Santulli’s dad, Tom, said the family is “100 percent” sure the student was hazed and calls for felony charges against some of the students.
Sister Meredith Santulli said she was “sick to my stomach seeing the people involved that harmed Danny walking around campus acting like they did nothing wrong.”
Bianchi — who has settled a lawsuit against the fraternity, known as Fiji, and 22 other defendants — on Monday sought in a court motion to add fraternity brothers Samuel Gandhi and Alec Wetzler to the lawsuit.
Wetzler was allegedly an organizer of the event, according to the probable cause statement.
“We didn’t know about them when we filed the original lawsuit,” the lawyer said Monday.
The petition, which Judge Joshua Devine approved, alleges negligence against the two defendants.
Wetzler allegedly forced Santulli to drink excessive amounts of booze by putting a tube into his mouth and pouring beer down his throat, according to the lawyer’s complaint.
Gandhi, meanwhile, walked back into Santulli’s room and saw that he had not moved from where he had left him, the Columbia Tribune reported on the amended lawsuit.
Wetzler has reportedly been charged with misdemeanor counts of supplying alcohol to a minor and possession of alcohol by a minor. He is due in court on July 5.
Bianchi said the fraternity members should be charged under the state’s hazing statute.
The national fraternity and university have both suspended the Missouri chapter.
