Hazing

State police said yesterday that they are investigating a hazing incident at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in which a student who was caned dozens of times over a two-month period had emergency surgery to remove gangrenous flesh.Five pledges of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity at the UMES campus in Princess Anne were treated at a hospital last week with injuries to their buttocks after being regularly beaten with wooden paddles and canes from Feb. 8 to April 4, said Capt. Greg Shipley, a state police spokesman.

State police have arrested a fifth member of a University of Maryland Eastern Shore fraternity in the hazing and first-degree assault of five student-pledges whose injuries required hospital treatment, including surgery.Six other suspects, all members of Kappa Alpha Psi, were being sought, police said.Police said Andre L. Vaughn, 21, whose Baltimore address was not available, surrendered to authorities at UMES in Princess Anne about 1: 30 p.m. Saturday. They said Vaughn's bail was set at $12,000.

It happens everywhere, from high school to college to professional sports. If there is a team hierarchy -- where the older athletes exercise some form of authority or control over the newcomers -- there is likely to be some kind of initiation process.In a national survey of NCAA athletes conducted by Alfred University, of the more than 325,000 athletes who participated in intercollegiate sports last year, more than 250,000 (about 78 percent) experienced some kind of hazing to join a college athletic team.

COLLEGE PARK - A review this summer by senior-level administrators in the University of Maryland athletic department revealed that underage drinking had occurred at a number of team functions and selected activities fitting the broadest definition of hazing took place at those functions. Rob Mullens, senior associate athletic director, who was in charge of the review that resulted from anonymous allegations made this spring, pointed out yesterday that the "health of the student-athletes involved [in the hazing]

The University of Maryland, College Park has begun investigating allegations of hazing and underage alcohol drinking in its athletic program. An anonymous e-mail sent May 31 to university President C. D. Mote and Athletic Director Debbie Yow accused nearly a dozen teams of transgressions, the Washington Post reported yesterday. The alleged offenses ranged from escorting high school recruits to off-campus bars to hazing new athletes at the school. All would be violations of the university's code of conduct for student athletes.

The buzz around Western Maryland College the past month and a half has been about the student who got drunk in a fraternity hazing, then crashed a car into a vice president's front porch.But the college's Greek organizations want to set the record straight -- he's not one of theirs and they don't want the whole flap to give fraternities at the Westminster campus a bad name.The incident involved a small underground fraternity called "Preachers," which lost its charter about 15 years ago.Its members never reapplied, choosing to remain independent of the college, according to Philip Sayre, vice president and dean of student affairs.

Anne Arundel County prosecutors trying three men Tuesday on murder charges in a hazing incident will be armed with a videotape, which a detective said shows the defendants assaulting a teen.Dennis Steven Roche, 16, of Huntingtown was found dead in a bathtub in August, after passing out during a night of heavy drinking at a home in Lyons Creek Mobile Estates in Lothian.Police say the youth died in a hazing incident captured on videotape that began after he fell unconscious during a "drinking contest."

PRINCESS ANNE -- News this week that five fraternity pledges wound up in a hospital emergency room after violent off-campus hazing stunned students and administrators at the rural University of Maryland Eastern Shore.But neighbors of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity say they've expected trouble for months -- since the chaptermoved last fall into a two-story white frame house three blocks from the courthouse in the Somerset County seat's historic district."I have thought something was going to go awry with this group," said Wallace Landon, whose back yard abuts the fraternity house property.

MOSCOW -- "Go home, babushka!" yelled a strapping young man, dressed in a Los Angeles Kings hockey jacket, and trying to muscle his way out of his grandmother's grip and into a tough-guy stance among the crowd of new draftees."

A troubled fraternity at the University of Maryland, College Park had its national charter revoked last week and its members were ordered to leave their house on Fraternity Row by Friday because of hazing and underage-drinking incidents. Members of the university's Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter were suspended from the fraternity after a member filed a complaint with the university's Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life that triggered an investigation into hazing allegations, the Diamondback student newspaper reported Friday.