WA Supreme Court Rules WSU Can Be Sued Over Sam Martinez Hazing Death

Washington State University can be sued for the 2019 death of freshman Sam Martinez, the Washington Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a 5-4 decision that reshapes how far a public university's legal duty extends into the off-campus fraternity houses it recognizes and promotes. The ruling ends more than three years of appeals over whether WSU owed Martinez, a 19-year-old Bellevue native, any duty of care the night he died of alcohol poisoning during an Alpha Tau Omega pledge event, and it sends the case back to King County Superior Court for a trial on whether the university actually breached that duty. The decision does not find WSU liable for Martinez's death outright; it clears the legal hurdle that had kept the underlying question from ever reaching a jury, and it does so by a single vote on a nine-member court that split almost evenly on how much responsibility a university bears for a private, off-campus organization it still chooses to recognize.

The Big Brother Party That Killed Sam Martinez

Martinez, a freshman pledging Alpha Tau Omega, identified in some court filings by the pseudonym "Gamma Chi," died in November 2019 after members of the fraternity gave him and another pledge a half-gallon of rum to finish in under an hour during a ritual known as the Big Brother Party, according to MyNorthwest. Martinez was found unresponsive later that night and pronounced dead from acute alcohol poisoning, one of several college hazing deaths nationally that drew sustained state-level attention that year. The case became one of the highest-profile hazing deaths in Washington's history, in part because it was not an isolated incident inside an otherwise well-run chapter. MyNorthwest's reporting notes the same fraternity had a documented history of dangerous hazing rituals predating Martinez's pledge class, including a 2013 episode in which pledges were forced to clean raw sewage and a 2017 pattern of excessive drinking and aggressive initiation that was flagged internally but did not result in the chapter losing its recognition. In the aftermath of Martinez's death, 15 WSU students were criminally charged with furnishing alcohol to a minor, a gross misdemeanor, and were sentenced to between one and 19 days in jail or probation, a resolution his family has said never felt proportionate to what happened. The Washington Legislature responded directly, passing what is now known as "Sam's Law," which requires university employees who learn of suspected hazing to report it to administrators, a mandate that simply did not exist the night Martinez died.

From a Dismissed Lawsuit to the State's Highest Court

The path to Thursday's ruling was anything but straightforward, and it illustrates how much a hazing death's legal fate can hinge on a single, technical question of duty rather than on the facts of what happened. Martinez's estate first sued WSU, arguing the university had a legal duty to protect students from the foreseeable hazing dangers its own recognition process had exposed it to for years. In 2022, King County Superior Court dismissed the case outright, ruling that WSU owed Martinez no duty of care because the fraternity operated off campus, in a privately owned house, outside the university's direct day-to-day control. That dismissal meant the case never got to a jury; a judge decided, as a matter of law, that there was nothing to try. The Washington Court of Appeals reversed that dismissal in January 2025, finding WSU's decades-long relationship with its recognized fraternities was close enough, and formal enough, to create a legal duty regardless of who technically owned the house where Martinez died. WSU then appealed to the state Supreme Court, arguing the Court of Appeals had gone too far in holding a public university responsible for the private conduct of an independent, off-campus organization it did not staff or supervise. Thursday's 5-4 decision, reported by The Spokesman-Review, upholds the Court of Appeals and sends the case to trial, where a jury, not a judge, will now decide whether WSU actually breached the duty the court says it had.

The Majority: A "Special Relationship" WSU Helped Create

Writing for the majority, Justice Sal Mungia grounded the ruling in what Washington law calls a "special relationship," a legal doctrine that can impose a duty of care even without direct physical control, when one party has cultivated enough authority and involvement over another to make harm foreseeable. Mungia found WSU's decades of formally recognizing, promoting and lightly regulating its fraternities met that bar, writing that dangerous hazing and alcohol abuse inside Greek life was "certainly no surprise to WSU," a finding that leaned heavily on the university's own institutional knowledge rather than on any new evidence about the night Martinez died. The Court of Appeals language the justices upheld put the standard more directly: "Because WSU has a special relationship with its recognized fraternal organizations, we conclude that it owed a duty to use reasonable care to control the fraternity and protect Sam from the foreseeable harms of fraternal hazing and alcohol misuse," according to reporting from MyNorthwest. In practice, the ruling treats WSU's institutional relationship with Greek organizations, chartering them, listing them as affiliated student groups, and allowing them to recruit on campus, as carrying real legal weight rather than symbolic sponsorship. That distinction matters well beyond this one case: it means a university's administrative choice to keep recognizing an organization, rather than any physical presence inside its house, can be enough to create legal exposure.

Justice Madsen's Dissent: A Business Deal, Not a Duty

Four justices disagreed, with Justice Barbara Madsen writing the dissent that kept Thursday's outcome from being unanimous or even comfortable. Her argument was narrower and more transactional than the majority's: WSU's relationship with Alpha Tau Omega, she wrote, was fundamentally contractual, a business-style arrangement in which the university recognized the fraternity in exchange for the organization agreeing to follow certain rules, not a custodial relationship of the kind courts have historically required before imposing a duty of care on one party for another's conduct. Under that reading, the university's role was closer to a landlord or a licensing body than to an entity legally responsible for members' safety inside a house it did not own, staff or supervise on a daily basis. Madsen's dissent is worth reading less as a defense of WSU's conduct and more as a warning about scope: if recognition alone creates a special relationship, she suggested, the same logic could eventually reach any organization a public institution formally acknowledges, from student clubs to off-campus housing cooperatives, a slippery-slope concern the majority did not directly answer. The four-justice split signals this was a genuinely close legal question, not a settled one. Washington's public universities have effectively been on notice for months that the court was divided on how far "special relationship" liability should extend, and Thursday's outcome came down to a single vote among nine.

A Pattern the University Says It Missed, Twice

What makes the 5-4 split notable is how much documented history sat behind it before the justices ever weighed in. This was not a university caught off guard by one tragic, unforeseeable night; MyNorthwest's reporting lays out a fraternity chapter with a paper trail stretching back at least six years before Martinez died, including the 2013 sewage-cleaning hazing and the 2017 pattern of excessive drinking that WSU's own processes had documented. That repetition is precisely what the majority leaned on to find the harm "foreseeable," and it is also what separates this case from a harder one WSU might have won outright. A university arguing it had no way to know a specific fraternity was dangerous faces a very different set of facts than one that had, through its own recognition and review process, kept a file on a chapter with a known history and continued to sanction it anyway. Read against that backdrop, the ruling is less about hazing in the abstract than about what happens to an institution's legal exposure once it has already put a pattern of danger in writing and chosen not to act on it. A university's own compliance paperwork, in other words, can become the evidence used against it at trial, which is a sharper incentive toward real intervention than a general duty-of-care standard alone would provide. That is the piece of Thursday's ruling most likely to change how Washington universities handle Greek life oversight going forward, regardless of how the Martinez trial itself is decided.

What Happens Next for the Case, and for Washington Campuses

The Supreme Court's ruling does not resolve the underlying lawsuit; it only restores it. The case now returns to King County Superior Court for a trial where Martinez's estate will have to prove WSU actually breached its duty of care and that the breach caused his death, questions the court has not yet answered and that a jury will now weigh directly. WSU said in a statement that it "respects the judicial process" and is still reviewing the decision to determine its next steps, while emphasizing continued investment in hazing-prevention policy and student safety education, language that stopped short of any acknowledgment of fault. For Martinez's family, the ruling is less about legal doctrine than about accountability nearly seven years after his death: his mother, Jolayne Houtz, said in comments carried by MyNorthwest, "He's gone, and I can't stand by and be worried every time a school year begins that another family will have to go through this." Beyond the Martinez case itself, Thursday's decision effectively puts every Washington public university on notice that a documented history of hazing inside a recognized fraternity or sorority can now support a lawsuit reaching trial, rather than being dismissed before a jury ever hears the facts. That shift, combined with Sam's Law's mandatory reporting requirement, gives Washington campuses from Pullman to Bellingham a clearer legal and practical incentive to intervene the first time a pattern shows up in their own files, not after a second or third documented incident.