When Grief Turns to Fury

The parents of Jacob Stiles -- an SMU student found dead in December at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house -- are furious with the university, claiming it has done nothing to find out who provided their son with the drugs on which he overdoses. According to the Dallas County Medical Examiner's report, Jacob died of a deadly cocktail consisting of alcohol, cocaine and designer drug fentanyl, which is usually misidentified as heroin in toxicology reports but is significantly more powerful.

A few days after a similar story appeared in Dallas' Only Daily, the Stiles family tells their hometown newspaper, the Naperville Sun in suburban Chicago, that the university's doing nothing to stop drug and alcohol abuse on campus -- or find the kids involved in their son's death.

"I do not know how to tell you about the grief we deal with on a daily basis," Thomas Stiles said. "Jacob was not some random kid from Illinois bringing drugs into Texas. Now we know that the drug that killed our son may have been supplied by a member of the fraternity, and SMU seems to refuse to do anything about it."

Also according to the paper, SMU President R. Gerald Turner yesterday said SMU has has formed a Task Force on Substance Abuse Prevention. --Robert Wilonsky