More than half of the members in Boulder’s Sigma Nu fraternity were suspended last fall after hazing 45 pledges, emails show.
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All of the student leaders were replaced, and 108 members were suspended in “the worst case of hazing that the National Fraternity had ever investigated,” according to emails provided by former Boulder Sigma Nu board member Scott Davis. The chapter has about 160 members, he said.
The fraternity members took the pledges down to the Sigma Nu house basement, told them to strip to their underwear and fight each other, Davis said. It was “extremely violent,” he said, and one pledge was hospitalized. Davis said he was informed about the hazing incident through emails and meetings with Sigma Nu leadership.
Sigma Nu Fraternity Communications Director Christopher Brenton confirmed that members of the Sigma Nu chapter at CU Boulder were found responsible for hazing in the fall of 2025. Each member found responsible “was suspended at that time and will remain suspended pending completion of the Fraternity’s member disciplinary procedures, which remain ongoing,” Brenton wrote in a statement.
The national Sigma Nu chapter did not confirm or deny the details that Davis shared.
“Sigma Nu Fraternity was founded in 1869 at the Virginia Military Institute in direct opposition to hazing,” Brenton wrote in the statement. “Sigma Nu Fraternity prohibits hazing; hazing is the antithesis of the Fraternity’s mission to develop ethical leaders inspired by Love, Honor, and Truth.”
Hazing investigation
The Boulder board members voted to remove Davis from his position on the Boulder Sigma Nu board effective Sept. 29, emails show. Davis said he was removed after he raised concerns that the chapter was covering up the hazing incident. He said it’s unclear whether police were involved at the time but that he contacted Boulder police on Sept. 14 and filed a police report. The Boulder Police Department did not answer questions regarding the incident, and the Daily Camera filed a public records request for police reports on Sept. 28.
Davis, who is also a Sigma Nu alumnus, provided the Daily Camera with emails from Boulder chapter leadership regarding the incident.
Sigma Nu’s national Executive Director Brad Beacham led the investigation, which Beacham said “was the worst case of hazing that the National Fraternity had ever investigated,” according to a November 2025 email from local board chair Michael Hecht to the Boulder board members. The investigation involved three days of individual, in-person meetings in Boulder with nearly all active fraternity members in late September of 2025, according to the email.
The Daily Camera emailed Hecht and other members of Sigma Nu leadership, and Brenton responded with the written statement.
Incidents of “severe hazing” were confirmed, according to Hecht’s email to the board, through “cell phone videos and verbal confirmations.” The fraternity’s student leaders were removed from their roles and replaced, according to the email. The national chapter chose about 80 sophomore and freshman fraternity members to be the core group to rebuild the chapter. Sigma Nu did not say how many of the suspended actives, if any, were kicked out of the fraternity.
Hecht wrote in his email to local board members that there will be a “completely revamped LEAD and Candidate training program that will eradicate the currently complicit hazing culture and lack of values/ethics situation that now exists within the chapter.”
A fraternity member who videoed the incident got death threats from other members, according to a Sept. 1 email from a board committee chair to Davis, and a group of fraternity members went to his house to “beat the sh– out of him,” but he wasn’t home. After that, the student dropped out of school, according to the email. National fraternity leadership “refused” to show Davis and other Boulder board members the video, Davis said.
Sigma Nu owns about $53 million worth of property on the Hill at and around 1043 Pleasant St, according to county property records. This fall, the Boulder chapter developed plans for a new addition and gym for the fraternity house, and they’re working to raise $12 million, emails showed. It’s been more than a year since the incident, Davis said, and national leadership “didn’t do anything” to properly handle it and tried to “cover it up.”
“It’s just this game … where they’re not choosing the hard right; they’re choosing the easy wrong because they want to continue to build their wealth,” said Davis, who worked in investment and “was an entrepreneur of several companies” before selling his business and moving full time to Park City, Utah.
Sigma Nu is not affiliated with CU Boulder and is part of the Interfraternity Council on the Hill. After CU Boulder imposed stricter rules on fraternities in 2005, all the fraternities disaffiliated from CU Boulder and formed the student-run IFC on the Hill. Since then, some fraternities have reaffiliated, but most CU Boulder students who join a fraternity are involved in an unaffiliated chapter. A representative from IFC on the Hill could not be reached for comment.
CU Boulder can’t suspend or take action against unaffiliated fraternities for hazing, but it can hold individual students accountable through its code of conduct.
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“The university can confirm it has received a report from the Sigma Nu national organization regarding an allegation of hazing, which is being investigated by Student Conduct & Conflict Resolution,” CU Boulder spokesperson Jade Young-Tucker wrote in an email to the Daily Camera. “Hazing has no place in our community and is prohibited by university policy and Colorado law.”
On Sept. 24, CU Boulder posted an alert that campus police are investigating two separate reports of hazing involving conduct “that could have resulted in serious bodily injury.” The university would not release any further information. But Tucker said the Sigma Nu hazing allegation is unrelated to the possible hazing incidents referenced in the alert.
Prevention
In September, Wisconsin police began a hazing investigation after finding 30 partially clothed young men covered in food, condiments and other liquids in the basement of a fraternity house near the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A woman at Cornell University filed a lawsuit last month against seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity who she said gang raped her at a fraternity house in 2024.
Elizabeth Allan, a hazing expert and professor at the University of Maine, said it’s hard to say why crimes related to fraternities have been so frequently in the news lately.
“We can’t say for sure why there’s been increasing attention to it,” Allan said. “I do think there’s been a lot of work that’s gone into advocating for understanding the harm of hazing certainly and also the harms that are coming in terms of sexual assault on campus and the prevalence of that.”
Since 2000, there have been more than 125 deaths nationwide due to hazing, Allan said. In 2004, 18-year-old Gordie Bailey was found dead on the floor of the Boulder Chi Psi fraternity house due to alcohol poisoning.
“We know it’s certainly still a problem,” Allan said, “but the extent to which it’s getting worse and whether it’s getting worse we really can’t say from a research perspective with any level of confidence.”
Allan led a comprehensive national study on hazing in 2008 and is relaunching the study now. She and her team will analyze the data this spring to have a point of comparison. The 2008 study surveyed 11,000 students at 50 colleges and universities and found that nine out of 10 students who are hazed don’t know it, and of the ones that do, 95% don’t report it.
Hazing is a type of behavior expected when joining a group that is humiliating, degrading, abusive or somehow physically or psychologically dangerous or damaging. It could range from forcing someone to wear the same shoes every day and name-calling to forced alcohol consumption, beating and kidnapping.
Hazing education is important for prevention, Allan said, but it’s not enough. StopHazing, an organization led by Allan, outlines eight components, such as planning, evaluation and commitment, to prevent hazing.
“There has to be a serious commitment to change,” Allan said. “That means there has to be resources allocated to prevention, there has to be people who have the knowledge and skills to help with the training and education, and there has to be enforcement of policy and transparency about the enforcement of policy.”
Before he was removed as a board member, Davis was developing a team-building program with games and sports tournaments aimed at transforming how the fraternity members relate to one another. The existing Sigma Nu hazing training involves watching educational videos, he said.
“Taking a test online is not going to solve our problem,” Davis said. “Our problem is a lack of safety and concern for individuals, and it’s an epidemic I think you’re seeing across the United States.”
In 2006, the national Sigma Nu fraternity suspended 27 of the 29 members of its Boulder chapter because of hazing. This fall, the University of Oklahoma found its Sigma Nu chapter responsible for hazing, and Indiana University placed its Sigma Nu chapter on cease-and-desist status as it investigates possible hazing.
“Our culture isn’t going to change until we change it,” Davis said.
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