Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette photos
	Colin Boyarski died of alcohol poisoning while a freshman at Kenyon College in Ohio. His parents, Libby and Dan Boyarski, hold photos of him when he was a young boy and while at Kenyon.

By Bill Schackner
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

GAMBIER, Ohio -- Seven months after sending their son off to college in this tranquil farming town, Dan and Libby Boyarski got a phone call that shattered their world.

	UNDER THE INFLUENCE
	An impromptu memorial for Colin Boyarski was carved by his friends at a place where they liked to congregate. Click photo for larger image.
	LISTEN IN: PG reporter Bill Schackner spoke with Kenyon student Ryan Stewart, 21, a junior from Stillwater, Minn. He entered Kenyon the same year as Colin Boyarski. Talks about the drinking culture on college campuses Unless you're going to post guards at every party, it's hard to stop drinking on campus; has to be a student-driven initiative. Feels school has made sincere efforts to change students minds about drinking.
	Click to larger version

Their son, Colin, a high school honors student who enjoyed his studies in philosophy and art history, had been found face down in a field just off the Kenyon College campus after a night of hard partying.

An autopsy revealed he died from alcohol poisoning. The 19-year-old freshman from Point Breeze had a blood-alcohol level of 0.43, more than five times the legal limit for an adult in Ohio.

Shaken by his death, two years ago this week, the 1,600-student liberal arts college overhauled its counseling and prevention programs and mobilized students to help keep parties safe. The school held forums on high-risk drinking and created an amnesty policy so students at risk from excessive drinking would seek help before it's too late.

But for all the progress, including a halving of alcohol-related ambulance runs to the campus, Kenyon, like other colleges nationwide, is finding that a major health threat often dismissed as a rite of passage isn't easily eradicated

"Just a few weeks ago we had an unresponsive female in a dorm," said Knox County Sheriff David Barber, recounting another alcohol emergency at the school.

The difference, he said, was that Kenyon student survived.

For Colin's parents, the pain of April 3, 2005, is still fresh. In a dining room snapshot, their son wears a gray sweat shirt with purple Kenyon letters and flashes a radiant smile.

"You'll be in the middle of a meeting somewhere and all of a sudden it will hit you -- 'Colin died, Oh my God, he died.' " Mrs. Boyarski said. "And it's like it's new all over again."

They still don't know who supplied the whiskey and mixed drinks that their underage son and others drank at two off-campus apartments occupied by fraternity members. Nor do they know how an afternoon that began with friends watching college basketball in a dorm room could spin so far out of control.

No group or individual has been charged by law enforcement or sanctioned by the college.

Dan Boyarski, head of the school of design at Carnegie Mellon University, said he and his wife knew there would be drinking in college. But they underestimated its pervasiveness and the extent that Colin's joining a fraternity would nudge him toward older students and off-campus parties largely out of reach of school supervision.

As it was, when Colin first told them he planned to become a fraternity pledge, "We were not so keen on it," said his mother, who runs a design business.

Noticing a strong odor of liquor on his breath one morning during a visit home weeks before he died, Mrs. Boyarski confronted her son. "I got really upset at him, and I said, 'Colin, I'm really scared. This isn't right.' It had never been that way before."

He assured her he was just relaxing with friends, and a mother's instinct to protect her child collided with advice hammered home during college orientations -- that kids learning to be on their own must be given enough room to stumble.

Even when Colin's failure to return calls led her to phone the college and say, "I'm worried about our child," she wondered if she was overreacting.

The final time they dropped Colin off on campus he hugged them both and seemed fine.

"We wanted to give our son the benefit of the doubt," his father said.

Long list of tragedies
Year after year, the toll that excessive drinking takes on college campuses is measured in grieving families and broken dreams. Each year, more than 1,700 college students 18 to 24 years old die of unintentional injuries, including car crashes, linked to alcohol, according to federally supported research.

Campuses in Pittsburgh have not been spared.

In February of last year, acute alcohol intoxication contributed to the death of University of Pittsburgh dean's list student Leland Holly IV, 23, of McCandless, who fell down the concrete front steps of a Greenfield home during a party and sustained a fatal brain injury. Friends, apparently thinking he was not seriously hurt, carried him back into the living room for the rest of the party, where he later died.

In March 2005, Meredith Kenneff, 20, a dean's list sophomore at Duquesne University who hoped to teach elementary school, died of alcohol poisoning. She was drinking throughout the day, including at Pittsburgh's St. Patrick's Day parade, and later collapsed while dancing at a Mount Washington party.

Research shows that colleges with larger shares of binge-drinking students tend to be found in states that have higher overall rates of adult binge drinking. Binge drinking is defined for males as having had five or more drinks in a sitting, four drinks for a female.

Some say the campus problem simply mirrors what goes on in society.

But researchers such as Harvard University's Henry Wechsler dispute the notion that students passing out on fraternity sofas or vomiting in dormitory bathrooms would automatically behave the same if they were not in college.

Fifty percent of campus binge drinkers did not do so in high school, said Dr. Wechsler, a social psychologist and architect of Harvard's closely followed College Alcohol Study. The share abusing alcohol on campus exceeds the overall rate for 18- to 24-year-olds, including those who go from high school into work.

Dr. Wechsler said college somehow "adds to the drinking," perhaps because students on campus have more spare time and fewer family responsibilities.

Schools "can be enablers," he said, by not scheduling exams around major weekends such as homecoming where partying is intense, or by avoiding earlymorning and Friday classes.

Adding more 8 a.m. classes at Kenyon was part of a broad series of moves following a frank look at its own drinking culture.

Seeking solutions
Located in a sleepy patch of central Ohio about 35 miles northeast of Columbus, Kenyon is a highly selective school where students who pay $44,000 a year in tuition, room and board seem to relish their homey surroundings. The school says undergraduates need not carry IDs to get into the dining hall and have been known to go to the post office in slippers and a robe.

That students feel so relaxed within its leafy confines -- "the Kenyon bubble" as one put it -- partly explains why Colin Boyarski's death hit so hard.

"Now that you look at it, we should have expected something like that to happen sooner or later but we didn't," said junior Ryan Stewart, 21, of Stillwater, Minn. "It was a huge jolt. Even people who didn't know him were kind of numbed, shocked."

In focus groups set up by the school, students said rural isolation, Kenyon's academic rigor and a shortage of those early classes encouraged more drinking.

The school redoubled efforts to provide alcohol-free alternatives. It adopted a "Good Samaritan" policy, under which a student reporting that he or other students are drunk and in need of help won't face campus sanctions.

"We didn't want there to be any reason that a student would not call someone, a rescue squad, the campus security or a resident assistant," said Tammy Gocial, dean of students.

She said when drinking is simply forced underground, students more likely engage in higher risk behaviors including "pre-partying," the practice of downing multiple beers or liquor in private before going to social events.

Kenyon is planning more campus events such as comedy clubs and band sessions at which students who are 21 years old will be allowed to drink under supervision, thus creating a role model for younger students.

Kenyon President S. Georgia Nugent said the school is making inroads against truly high-risk behavior, but it's unrealistic to think 18- to 21-year-olds are never going to drink.

"There's a history of prohibition in this country, and we know how unsuccessful that was," she said.

'Living hard'
Colin Boyarski enjoyed sports from an early age, including soccer, and his sense of adventure showed in his love of travel.

As a student at Allderdice High School, he took great pride in tutoring math and reading to grade school pupils at Homewood Montessori School. He would come home, excited, when a student who had struggled with a concept finally caught on.

At Kenyon, he seemed at home and even wore clothing stamped with the college's name, something Mrs. Boyarski said he was normally loath to do. "He told me, 'Mom, I love my school.' "

His mix of A's, B's and C's reminded him that he was no longer in high school, but he was on solid academic ground, his father said.

But statements from students obtained by investigators after Colin's death said he also had begun to drink heavily, nine or 10 beers in a single night, by one account. His roommate in Norton Hall told investigators that Colin "was living hard" and had been staying in another campus residence hall with brothers of Delta Phi, the fraternity he pledged.

He had a fake ID, not uncommon among underage students, and his parents learned after his death that he was referred at one point to campus substance abuse counseling.

The afternoon and early evening before he died, Colin was in a room in McBride Hall watching the NCAA men's basketball tournament with friends, including fraternity brothers. According to investigators, he consumed two 40-ounce containers of malt liquor and, at 9:45 p.m., a witness said, he pulled from a Ziploc bag a dark red capsule believed to be Ritalin. Student statements to investigators said Colin sometimes used the stimulant to stay awake and study.

Traces of it were found in his body during the autopsy, though it was not listed as a contributor to his death.

Colin and the others left about 10 p.m. for an off-campus complex widely known as "The Milk Carton Apartments" for their unusual shape. Several brothers of another fraternity, Psi Upsilon, were hosting a party in an apartment there, and had secured services of their pledges as bartenders, said assistant Knox County prosecuting attorney P. Robert Broeren Jr.

He said investigators believe a number of the 60 to 80 party-goers were underage.

Prosecutors subpoenaed a receipt from an off-campus liquor store showing a $311.40 purchase for 19 bottles of liquor including gin, vodka and whiskey. On the way to the party, witnesses said, Colin smoked some marijuana. After arriving, he had three to five mixed drinks.

Colin later showed up at another apartment in the same complex occupied by brothers of his fraternity. He and several others passed a whiskey bottle among themselves before Colin left the complex at about 2 a.m., going off on his own, Mr. Broeren said.

Investigators theorize he lost his balance and tumbled into a nearby lot. Seven hours later, just before 9 a.m., a groundskeeper heading home spotted a figure in jeans, a black hooded sweat shirt and Nike shoes. Colin's body had been there for some time in overnight temperatures that dipped into the mid-30s.

The prosecuting attorney's office for Knox County concluded there was no foul play or evidence of a felony but also noted after investigating that not everyone who could provide details came forward.

The college said it waited for the criminal probe to wrap up and has just received the prosecutor's report.

Some who saw the young man's body are troubled with questions to this day.

"You have to ask yourself," said Jeff Bowers, a physician and Knox County coroner. "Are we better banning alcohol on campus and forcing kids to go off campus, or are we better putting them in an environment where we can teach them about drinking responsibly? I don't know the answer."

In interviews across campus, students said Kenyon hasn't shied from talking about the death. The school brought in two of Colin's friends to talk to first-year students at an orientation, said Eric Louis, 19, a freshman from Shadyside.

Colin's parents, meanwhile, are left to anguish over what could have been done differently for their son, whom they said knew the consequences of drinking but felt invincible. They said they wish people around him on campus had taken underage drinking more seriously.

"We wish we had asked more questions, made Colin spend more time with the family," Mrs. Boyarski said. "We wish we had been more proactive when he was coming home late, not answering his cell phone and being exceptionally moody.

"We tried, we really tried," she said. "We thought it was a stage and he would be OK. It was not, and he was not."