The night leading to his death, Tim Piazza spent the early evening trying to shrink two obstacles standing in his way—a bunch of math homework and a pile of laundry. The mechanical-engineering major was tackling them at the apartment he shared with four friends near the State College campus of Penn State University. A good-looking, flame-haired kid, six feet two inches and 205 gym-honed pounds, Tim had been a football player at Hunterdon Central Regional High School, in New Jersey, where he’d also shown an interest in service to others. He’d worked with Hunterdon Outreach, promoting sports for children with special needs, and it was through his school’s Teen Prevention Education Program, which focused on responsible sexual decision-making, that he’d met Kaitlyn Tempalsky, his high-school sweetheart. For a prom-posal senior year, Tim stood on the roof of his Jeep in front of Kaitlyn’s house, danced to “Shining Star,” ripped open his shirt to reveal PROM? markered on his chest, and handed her a bouquet of pink flowers. Kaitlyn’s dad, a cop, laughed and advised Tim that the stripping better stop at the waist.

When Tim started as a freshman at football-dominant Penn State, in the fall of 2015, his own (average) football playing necessarily came to an end, but he became a regular in the bleachers at Nittany Lions home games, at Beaver Stadium. Even though Kaitlyn was now a student at Susquehanna University, 60 miles away, they FaceTimed regularly and were already talking about marriage, and children, and future shore houses. Tim remained public-spirited. He spent much of his free time on Ayuda, part of P.S.U.’s 15,000-student-strong Thon organization, which raises money for children with cancer. And he already knew what he wanted to do after graduation: having been exposed to 3-D printing, he had decided he wanted to make prosthetic limbs for children and soldiers.

But Tim still yearned for another level of male camaraderie. Two of his roommates were in fraternities, and by spring semester of his sophomore year, Tim had decided he wanted to join one, too. He rushed a bunch of frats this past January and received two “bids,” or offers. Beta Theta Pi told him he was among their top 10 picks, and he liked Beta because a lot of its brothers were engineering and biology majors. “School came first,” Kaitlyn recalls, “and he felt that if these guys could be in a frat and still have good grades, he could do it, too.”

Thursday, February 2, was bid-acceptance night, when Tim was to be initiated into Beta, and he was told to be at the fraternity house at 220 North Burrowes Road at 9:07 P.M., wearing a jacket. A brother named Kordel Davis sent a text that read: “hello pledge . . . get ready to get fucked up and get ready for a long semester.”

When Tim’s roommate Alex Park left the apartment in the late afternoon, Tim “seemed excited to be going,” Alex recalls. “I can’t imagine he’d have that same enthusiasm if he’d read that” (the get-fucked-up text). “It wasn’t like he was the wild kid at a party. He drank a little bit below average, to be honest.” When Tim set off for Beta, a few hours later, his homework was still on the countertop.

The next morning, Tim’s roommates noticed that he’d never come home. Bennet Brooks thought maybe Tim had just ended up crashing at the Beta house. Alex texted Tim several times that morning to see where he was. By 11, the roommates were worried. Then Kwaku Owusu texted a Beta brother he knew, and he received an alarming response: Tim was at the hospital. The roommates alerted Tim’s older brother, Mike, who was also at P.S.U., and he Uber’d to Mount Nittany Medical Center, where Tim was about to be helivac’d to Hershey Medical Center.

As the Piazza family assembled at the hospital in Hershey, they learned just how serious Tim’s injuries were. A surgeon had found four liters of blood, or about 80 percent of a body’s total supply, in Tim’s abdomen. His spleen was shattered. Nearly half of his skull had been removed to accommodate brain swelling. When Kaitlyn arrived at the hospital at 7:30 P.M., she was crying, and Tim’s parents, Jim and Evelyn, were crying, too. The first thing Jim said to Kaitlyn was that Tim had sustained “unsurvivable brain damage.” When she went in to see him, bandaged and intubated and wired to machines, he was unconscious and “barely recognizable,” says Kaitlyn, who is studying for a career in medicine. “I could have walked past the room. They were pumping so much fluid that everything was swollen. He was wrapped up. He had bruises. It did not look like him at all.” She held his hand as she told him, “between the crying, just I love you’s, and I kept saying, ‘Please open your eyes. Just please open your eyes.’ As much as I said, Please open your eyes, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”