BERKELEY — A 22-year old man who died after plummeting about 30 feet from the roof of a fraternity house last week had been found alive after his fall, but the people who discovered him didn’t know he’d fallen and didn’t call for an ambulance, his sister said late Tuesday.

Instead, thinking he was just drunk during a Christmas party, they helped him inside, where he lay down. The next morning he was dead.

Jeff Engler was alone when he fell sometime Friday night, Caity Engler told this newspaper. While some people attending a party at the Pi Kappa Phi house knew he’d gone to the roof, those who found him on the ground didn’t know what had happened, she said. “There was a disconnect.”

Sharing information she said Berkeley Police provided her family, Caity Engler said her brother was conscious and spoke with friends after his fall. Police were called at about 7 a.m. Saturday, but Jeff Engler was dead when they arrived. Jeff Engler was a fraternity member but didn’t live at the house and had not attended classes at Berkeley since 2012. “The roof was one of his favorite places,” Caity Engler said. “He’d go up there to write or play his guitar.”

Her brother “was with people he loved, at a place he loved. Unfortunately on this night, all that love involved too much alcohol. And a roof.”

A Berkeley Police spokeswoman Tuesday evening declined to comment on Caity Engler’s version of events and only said they were still investigating.

There was no answer to repeated phone calls to the fraternity house Tuesday. A spokesman for Pi Kappa Phi’s national office said prior to Caity Engler’s statement, that members of the Berkeley house had been urged to fully cooperate with the police investigation.

Jeff Engler’s death was the third attributed to alcohol in the past 13 months in a neighbourhood near Cal’s Memorial Stadium, dominated by fraternity and sorority houses.

“We are investigating the incident and awaiting autopsy results,” Robert Sanders, a university spokesman, said Tuesday. He was not immediately certain where the school’s probe could lead. “Obviously, much depends on the cause of death.”

Pi Kappa Phi, the school’s third oldest fraternity, has a troubled past. News reports show it was suspended for a year in 2005 as part of a deal with the university after three members hazed a pledge by shooting him 30 times with a pellet gun. At the time of the suspension it was also being investigated for allegedly having served alcohol to minors.

There was no answer at the door of the apartment-like fraternity house Tuesday morning. Portions of the roof rise in height to about 40 feet, including above where a length of crime scene tape, tied to a pipe, flapping in the morning breeze.

A small hutch on the roof has an exit sign glowing in soft green above its door. There appear to be no safety railings on the roof.

Engler, a graduate of San Leandro High School who was enrolled at Laney College, had been a bio-engineering student at Berkeley’s College of Engineering in the fall of 2011 and from June to December 2012, Sanders said. He was a proud member of the Cal marching band. His sister described him as “a musician, a computer genius, too brilliant for his own good, stubborn, fun-loving, hilarious, wild-haired, wild-spirited.”

“Life is full of arbitrary decisions,” Jeff Engler wrote in a Facebook post earlier this year beneath a photo of him having shaved a bushy beard from the left side of his face while keeping the growth on the right.

Two others have died in the same neighborhood in incidents where alcohol was involved since November of last year. A 20-year-old UC Davis student, Vaibhev Loomba, died of alcohol poisoning on Nov. 9, 2014. His body was found in front of Zeta Psi fraternity.

Apoorve Agarwal, a student from San Ramon, died of head trauma on Dec. 20, 2014, after apparently falling down a brick staircase at a residence on Piedmont Avenue. An autopsy showed he had a blood alcohol content of .31 percent.

Staff writer David DeBolt contributed to this report. Follow Thomas Peele at Twitter.com/thomas_peele. Email him at Tpeele@bayareanewsgroup.com