Original subtitles

The basement was designed as a torture chamber.

Written on the wall is, in the basement, nobody can hear the screen.

We got hate mail.

Someone threw a brick through our front window.

Your friend is dead, and people blame you for it.

They did torture him.

They did humiliate him.

I just wanted to hold him in my arms, you know, because I knew it was the last

time I was going to see him.

These are all handprints of kids, you know, in Pleasant Hill.

They've just sold the plaque so we could have all of our kids out here,

hopefully forever.

Just that we could come by the park and, like, remember.

Matt was 11 when we brought him here and got his handprint.

It's amazing that his handprint at 11 is the same size as mine right now.

This handprint's still here.

He's not.

It lasted longer than he did.

My name's Greg Keeney. I'm a commander with the Chico Police Department.

When I arrived at the crime scene, I looked at it for a time.

It didn't really mean anything.

Like there wasn't like a gun or a bullet hole. I can look at all of this and

there's no one thing that says, oh, crime, definite crime.

That's the crazy part about this whole thing.

And as I was coming down those stairs, it was just bitter cold coming up. I

mean, it just kind of hits you right in the face.

And then down in here, there was a bar set up and there were fans.

I mean, there's fans all around.

Yeah, it was just...

Just filthy and dirty and smelled.

There was water all over the floor.

There had been a sewer pipe that had broke, and so there was raw sewage on

floor.

It smelled horrible.

There was just graffiti written all over it.

All sorts of things.

The overriding one was, in the basement, no one can hear you scream.

My name is Debbie Smith.

I knew from the time I was 11 that I wanted to have children.

I always loved children. I loved babysitting.

But I knew that one day I wanted to have children because I really wanted to be

a mom.

It took me a long time to have Matt, and I ended up having to be artificially

inseminated.

Just having him, it was just that much more precious because it had taken so

long and worked so hard, which is how he got his name.

Matthew means a gift from God, and I cherished that.

Matt loved Travis from the minute he saw him.

He was so proud.

Matt was his protector, he was his teacher, he was his big brother.

Matt was basically quiet, kind of shy.

You couldn't help but like him because he treated everybody equally.

He never judged anybody.

If he knew that maybe you had too much to drink, he would take your keys. He

would make sure that you got home safely.

I am Christy Pollitt.

Me and Matt knew each other since we were really little. Our parents were

friends, so we were always at each other's house, just playing into the

Oftentimes we'd spend the night at each other's house, too. So we were really

close when we were kids.

I loved going to school in Chico.

Matt was a year or two behind me, so I kind of brought Matt into the life that

had while I was there.

We moved him into this really awesome old house.

And he was super excited because he hadn't really ever been out on his own.

I was dating Mike Quintana.

And I introduced him to Matt because I thought maybe Matt would like some

friends that were male and not just my female roommates.

Matt and I, we hit it off pretty quickly.

I think our personalities were different. I think I was a little bit

outgoing, a lot more outgoing.

Matt was a little bit more reserved.

He was very thoughtful.

Never had a harsh or mean word about anybody.

That's why we became such great friends.

Anytime I would ask, hey, you want to go do this or you want to go here, he was

always up for it.

Chica Police.

Hello, we have an emergency.

February 2nd, 2005, I was actually driving to work and I got a call from

detective sergeant who asked me to come to fraternity.

on 4th Street.

They discovered a student unconscious in the basement of the house.

I thought, okay, did this kid overdose on drugs or alcohol or something

like that?

I had actually gotten a call really early in the morning from Mike, probably

like 4 or 5 in the morning.

He just told me that something had happened with Matt and he didn't really

what was going on it was at 6 10 in the morning because i'll never forget the

time i got this text from my husband and it said to call him you know it was

urgent he had gotten a call from bill vall which was christie's dad his best

friend he said that there was something wrong with matt he was in a hospital

so i called the hospital in chico

And so when the doctor came on, he said, when he found your son,

he was at full arrest.

And he said, I just need you to get to the hospital as soon as possible, but

don't drive yourself.

And I was like, is he going to make it?

I walked down into the basement of the residence.

It was like a refrigerator down there.

The basement had several vents that were open to the outside.

The fans were kind of set up in those areas to pull the cold air in from the

outside.

Certainly somebody had made some attempts to make it very cold down

There was a small amount of blood pooled in front of the bench.

Based on other incidents that we've had at fraternity houses with overdose -type

situations, we thought, oh, hey, this is what happened here.

But we processed it as a crime scene, as if somebody had been murdered down

there, because otherwise you don't get a second chance.

We just go racing out to Chico, and I'm making phone calls.

Mike's not answering his phone.

I called the fraternity house, and there's nobody at the house answering

phone.

Nobody's answering any phones.

And then I get this phone call from the hospital's social worker.

When I'm thinking, you know what, a social worker is calling me, that means

bad.

And she said, she said, Debbie, we don't like to do this over the phone.

Chico Police.

Hello, we have an emergency. We have a guy that went into seizures earlier and

we're afraid he's not...

I was woken up.

They told me that something had gone wrong in the basement.

I was the junior active general.

I was the one that was in charge at the time.

And so I went down towards the entrance to the basement. I could see all the way

down the flight of stairs.

that there were paramedics performing some kind of triage to Matt.

And that was when I was told that he had gone into a seizure and foam was coming

out of his mouth or something like that.

The paramedic kept saying, what happened, what happened? Were you guys

Was he drinking?

Is there drugs involved? What drugs?

I said, he drank water. He only drank water.

They didn't believe us.

And then they rushed him off to the ambulance.

By this time, everybody in there is scared.

We were all conversing amongst ourselves to figure out what happened.

I think someone thought that he had had a seizure, that he had maybe epilepsy or

something.

I was really out of it.

I hadn't slept in four days, and I just watched.

My best friend collapsed.

I didn't have a good feeling.

We brought him down to a common area to find out exactly what happened.

We knew that Matt was a pledge to their fraternity.

So the story that we were getting from the group was that the pledges were

calisthenics and that Matt had had some sort of seizure that

led him to the situation he was in now.

So as we're driving, Stephanie, the social worker, keeps calling.

She said, you just need to get here as soon as possible.

Finally, I said, Stephanie, I can't take it anymore, and I think there's

something that you're not telling me I need to know.

And I hear her saying, I'm sorry Matt didn't make it.

The phone slips from me, and all I can see is I turn everything I went in slow

motion.

I just

know

that like we pulled into some little truck stop or something and And we got

and we just jumped into each other's arms.

In that instant, I was like, our lives are changed forever because our family

four is now three.

We were asking for the fraternity brothers' assistance in the

to let them know the severity of the investigation, we let them know that

had died.

When we were told by the police that Matt had died, it just kind of hit the

room.

It's almost as if everything happened on a two -minute delay, you know?

Everyone's faces were the exact same upon finding out that he passed away

about two minutes later when it really sunk in.

One of the fraternity members, Dave Mastretti, started screaming and yelling

pounding his fists against the walls.

He wanted to leave.

He was stopped by officers.

I don't think anybody had to tell me Matt had passed away.

I think I knew when he got carried out of that house.

Then we finally got to the hospital.

I said, I want to see Matt.

When we got into the room where he was, we walk in.

And it's kind of dark, and there's all these beds, and it's quiet in there.

And at the very end, there's a light, and there's a person down there, and you

could tell that there's a body down there.

And I said, is that Matt?

And she said, yes.

And my knees buckled.

I just wanted to hold him in my arms, you know, because I knew it was the last

time I was going to see him.

And she was like, you can't touch him. I was like, I touched his arm.

Because I had to. I just had to.

But I just wanted to scoop him up and just... Hold him like you hold your

babies.

You had a healthy young man that was doing an hour's

worth of calisthenics and had a seizure and died.

And what the fraternity members were telling us about how Matt died didn't

up.

The level of suspicion of all of us there was pretty high.

So we divided up all of the fraternity members and conducted interviews back at

the police department with them.

I don't have our full rights yet.

The stuff we did last night was pretty much what we do every year, especially

before I went through it.

It's like a peasy night. It's a lot of work.

It's water.

It's humiliation. It's mental.

It didn't work out at all, you know. We did less than 50 push -ups, and that was

it. Everything was okay with Matt and Mike when they went to bed. It was

fun.

They were definitely trying to hide something.

There was something going on there that they didn't want us to know.

I remember looking at my hands and them still being covered in Matt's blood.

And that's when I broke down.

His blood is still here.

That's when I lost it.

The police asked to go individually with them to the police station

to answer a few questions.

I remember being in the police station in the interrogation room.

That was the moment that it just got extremely real.

Throughout Hell Week, you just undergo a bunch of rituals.

The last night is the worst night ever.

It's called movie night.

The pledges are instructed to stand on top of a bench.

There are fans put in place around you, and you're handed a five -gallon jug and

told to drink and pass and drink and pass and drink and pass.

The active members were watching a movie or playing poker while they're going

through this.

During that time, you're asked questions.

And when you get answers incorrect, the fans would turn on.

You'd be soaking wet, and so you'd be cold.

The detectives were pulling

little bits of information out of all of them and kind of... fit the puzzle

together, as it were, kind of put the night together.

When we interviewed the EMT crew that came out there, one of the interesting

things that they actually said was they thought that Matt, he looked like a

drowning victim.

So we all thought that there was something more going on than just some

calisthenics and a seizure.

Gabe really downplayed his involvement.

He said that basically there had to have been something else wrong with him

because it was no big deal and it was easy.

And so that was a huge red flag.

In the beginning, in those first hours,

We didn't know anything other than he died in a basement.

He just looked bruised, and he just looked like he'd been through hell, you

know? How is this an accident?

You know, I was just trying to do whatever I could for Greg and Debbie.

So we put together the candlelight vigil that we held at the fraternity house.

There must have been hundreds of people, if not a thousand people, that all came

to pay their respects to Matt.

People gave talks about who he was as a person.

It was about coming to heal at that point.

All the guys were really nice.

We didn't talk about anything that happened in that basement. It wasn't

that that night. It was just about Matt.

That's all we wanted to hear.

I naturally assumed, since they were considered fraternity brothers, that

were his friends, that they would take care of him.

So, of course, nothing nefarious happened in that basement, right?

The autopsy occurred, I believe, two days after his death.

It was rough.

So what we learned, the pathologist, Dr.

Resk, did a very thorough analysis and found that the cause of his death was

water intoxication coupled with hypothermia.

I think initially everybody expected it to be some sort of drug or alcohol

-related issue with it, and when it wasn't and the actual facts of the case

out, I think everybody's pretty shocked.

They said, we think that he was killed during a hazing. I was like, killed? It

wasn't an accident?

So in this investigation, there was a lot of information flowing in.

We learned that this water hazing had been going on for many, many years,

rituals and initiation processes, even one that involved a coffin that they had

made that they would put their pledges in and then lower them into a pool of

water, almost to simulate like drowning.

It was only a matter of time before somebody was going to die.

After everything happened, the fraternity fell apart.

People were at each other's throats.

Everybody knew, like, Kytow killed a pledge.

They also ruined the Greek system because all the Greek system was

a year after what happened with Matthew.

It started to sink in.

how the rest of the world looked at us and these events.

Letters being sent that people were hoping that we would get anthrax and

Someone threw a brick through our front window telling us that they hoped that

this place would be burned down.

It became an us -against -the -world type of thing. You can almost start to

delude yourself that even things that you know were wrong all of a sudden

weren't wrong.

I think the gravity of what had occurred sunk in, and so we were getting less

and less cooperation from the fraternity members as the investigation continued.

And then everyone started pointing fingers.

Mike was a witness for the police at this point, and he became like one

of the enemies.

And so with that, we brought the district attorney in.

It would have been very difficult to know exactly what happened without Mike

there.

He provided the base upon which much of the investigation was done.

He shattered that wall of silence because he felt that he didn't want to

part of a organization that killed his friend.

Having your friend pass away from something that you survived, I can't

to feel, you know, I would have rather it been the other way around.

Especially because it was me who wanted to go party and be a rat boy and run

around.

He wasn't as gung -ho about it as I was.

The beginning was all about bonding.

So by the time Hell Week came around, we had put in a lot of time and energy,

five months, and we weren't going to quit on each other.

That Hell Week, the junior actives, which would be myself and the seven

people that I had pledged with, were going to be the ones in charge.

So movie night, we showed up, and they told us that we're going to balance on

the bench on one leg.

And then they hand us one of those big five -gallon jugs.

And we're to drink this water and pour it on ourselves while we're questioned.

So they had maybe about four house fans pointed towards us.

I've never been so cold in my life.

Our bodies are ready to give out.

We went through about five of those jugs. We peed ourselves. We threw up.

You know what happens when you drink a lot of water?

Your thinking goes first.

You can't think. You can't concentrate.

It's called water intoxication because you feel drunk.

And then your eyesight gets blurry. Everything is hazy.

That night, everything felt fine and normal.

Matt and Mike seemed a little tired. They seemed exhausted. They seemed

And that was to be expected.

Every fraternity member had gone through the same thing.

Around 1 .30 in the morning.

Jerry said, you know, okay, we've had enough.

We've been at it for five, six hours.

I had class at 8 in the morning, and I remember thinking, I need to get at

a few hours of sleep.

I remember telling everybody to just kind of finish up the night and that I

would check on them afterwards.

Carlos and JP and Gabe were still down there.

Gabe had come back from the bars at that time. I know that he had been drinking.

And that's when Gabe took over.

Gabe got us up on the bench again, got us drinking water again, got us throwing

up again, pulling us down, working out.

It had to be about another hour and a half, if not two hours.

Gabe came across as a bully. He was relishing in administering pain and

discomfort to these two.

He just wouldn't stop. He would not let up.

Me and Matthew were doing push -ups, and Matthew, on his way down,

collapsed.

And he rolled on his back, and he... I could tell he was having a seizure, and

he was convulsing, and he had bitten down on his tongue really hard. His

was stuck in between his teeth, and his eyes were rolling back in his head.

I put my finger in his mouth to try to release his tongue, and he bit down

on me so hard I started to bleed.

I said, Matt is having a seizure. Call the ambulance.

And that's when a few of the brothers adamantly convinced me that they were

of the fire department and EMTs and this is what they're studying. And it's

fine. He's fine. It's no big deal. It's over.

He's fine.

What that does to the human body, drinking lots of water, is it washes out

electrolytes in your blood.

And if you don't have it, your body just shuts down.

They pulled me and him out of the water onto the couch.

And Matt's head was in my lap. And I heard him snoring.

And I said, guys, he's snoring.

He's asleep, you know.

And then he stopped breathing.

I said, guys, he stopped breathing. He stopped breathing.

Call the ambulance.

And still there was pushback.

And then he started to foam out of his mouth.

I finally, finally one of them called 911.

Chica Police.

Hello, we have an emergency. We have a guy that went into seizures earlier and

we're afraid he's not... What's the address?

The biggest question that I had was, why didn't anyone call 911 earlier?

That these people should have known, should have called an ambulance.

They deprived him of that opportunity for early medical intervention

was an important part in what we were looking at this homicide.

We went to the precinct and the detective told us we think that he

was killed during a hazing.

I was like, so they killed our son?

They said, with the way the laws are written, we probably won't be able to

anybody accountable.

You can't use the word kill.

and nobody accountable in the same sentence.

There's no really explaining it, you know.

You just want to find answers.

And going back to the scene of the crime, where the answers are, I just had

pull where I had to be where Matt was.

I thought after 14 years I could walk into this basement and, I mean, not have

breakdown.

It was really harder than I thought it was going to be.

From a legal standpoint, a case like this was a very difficult case to make.

I thought that there was a pretty good chance that we were not going to be able

to hold anybody criminally responsible.

And so we kept pushing.

We knew, based upon our conversations with the University Police Department,

members of fraternities and sororities had to go through

that were put on by the university.

I specifically asked the gentleman that gave the training if drinking water

could be deadly.

The trainer said it would be as clear as pointing a gun at somebody that if you

make somebody drink mass quantities of water, you can kill them.

We were able to secure the sign -in sheet from that training.

So that was the moment that we knew that we had something.

And so it was our smoking gun that we were looking at. It all was

able to be put together into that jigsaw puzzle of evidence.

Sergeant Keeney called and he said, Debbie, we've got warrants out.

They're going out this morning.

He started going through the details of what had happened to Matt.

We just thought it was going to have a breakdown.

It was a shock to be presented with an arrest warrant.

I was told that I was being charged with involuntary manslaughter.

I was in uncharted territory emotionally on how I feel being a murderer.

That was important to say, okay, we're getting felony convictions here.

This necessitated very severe consequences.

Nothing I can say here today will bring back Matthew Carrington.

I will do whatever I can to inform others of the stupidity and

hazing. I will live with the consequences of hazing for the rest of

My actions killed a good person.

After... What happened with Matthew, my drinking got a lot worse.

I blamed myself for what I didn't do to protect my friend.

I wish I was somebody different who would have been able to do things

differently.

Got up, ran out of the house, ran past them, went and got on the phone and

called the ambulance. If somebody would have called an hour earlier, Matt would

be alive.

After I got out of jail, I continued to drink and do drugs and screw up my

life, partly because it had no value anymore.

And I'd love to sit there and tell myself that it might have been different

was down in the basement, but I don't even know if it would have been

if I was down there. I don't know if I would have made the right decision.

I don't even know how I atone.

Matt, by all accounts, was a great net bonus for

this world.

I don't know what he could have accomplished or the people whose lives

have touched and probably touched in a much better way than I did.

I felt that Matt was a way better person than I was.

If one of us were supposed to die that night, whoever's in charge got that one

wrong.

It's a struggle.

Some days are worse, especially when you get to his birthday. You go through the

holidays.

How do you say goodbye?

It's important for people to remember, you know, it was a horrible tragedy that

didn't need to happen.

And in order for us to make change and for them to understand, they need to

remember, you know, what happened in this house.

I knew at some point I was going to have to let it go and forgive them in order

to move forward.

I can't live with hate in my heart.