Bemidji death casts student drinking in harsh light

Justin Leach crunched through snow along the edge of a clearing in the woods north of Bemidji. He breathed in the cold air and lit a cigarette.

"There'd be a beer pong table here, lit with headlamps," he said, "and a big bonfire there. Sometimes there are so many people here you can barely move around."

Leach is 22, coming up on his senior year as a biology major at Bemidji State University. He was visiting a place known by his fellow students as the Whiskey Pit. It's a disused gravel pit about 10 miles of forest road away from Bemidji.

In the daylight, people use the place to shoot clay pigeons and sight in rifles. But most Wednesday nights in the spring and fall, Leach said, scores of young people, mostly BSU students, load their cars with alcohol and go out there to party.

The last time he visited the Whiskey Pit, Leach said, people danced in the beds of jacked-up pick-up trucks and drank by the light of a 10-foot-high bonfire.

Fun time turns fatal

Many college towns have problems with underage student drinking. In Bemidji, the issue was brought sharply to light back in December, when 20-year-old BSU nursing student Sandra Lommen froze to death after leaving a house party. Police believe she'd been drinking and got lost trying to walk back to her dorm room.

A month later another BSU student, 19-year-old Hannah Rolschau, was also found outdoors, suffering from hypothermia after a night of drinking.

University President Richard Hanson responded by forming an alcohol prevention task force. The group of students and university staff is charged with creating a plan of action to discourage underage drinking.

It's not an easy problem to fix.

"You really can't get people in these rooms and drink," said Randy Ludeman, university conduct officer. "The dorm walls are pretty thin."

So students drink off campus. When one of them has an alcohol-related run-in with Bemidji police, Ludeman receives an incident report — but not much is done with that information.

He sends such students an email, letting them know that he knows what happened. Unless they are student athletes, who are held to a higher standard, there are no additional consequences.

Ludeman said the university has backed away from a more parental role in the 25 years he's been working there.

"We don't assume responsibility as a parent," he said. "We instead front-load our students with education related to being responsible."

The task force hasn't yet made any recommendations; it's still researching possible solutions. But members are talking about the balance between education and punishment. Off campus, Bemidji Police Chief Mike Mastin has stiffened underage drinking penalties through a process called "long forming." It's a reference to a change in paperwork.

Underage consumption is what police call a "payable offense" in Minnesota. That means a college freshman who gets busted for underage drinking in the evening pays a ticket in the morning. Mastin said the fine is about $130.

"Sometimes that's the cost of a night on the town," he said.

Ever since Lommen's death, Bemidji police officers have been filing separate consumption charges with the county attorney's office, forcing offenders to appear in court. Facing a judge, Mastin said, is much more memorable than writing a check.

Even before the recent prevention effort, Leach said, the party scene in Bemidji was winding down.

Blood in the driveway

Leach has spent four years at BSU. He was a regular in the student party scene and has the sort of wild stories you might expect. But he's not at the center of those stories; generally, as he tells it, he's the clear-eyed observer.

A few weeks into his freshman year, Leach saw something that made him careful. He was at a big house party near campus one night when an inebriated guest fell head first from a second-story balcony.

The guy landed hard on the driveway below. A few of his friends pulled the injured student into a car and rushed to the hospital. Leach watched it all happen.

The student recovered from the fall, Leach said, but the pool of blood on that driveway remains clear in his memory.

Leach still went to parties after that. He said he's been to the Whiskey Pit more than 30 times and has attended quite a few house parties. It was a fun scene, he said — one he enjoyed cautiously.

Four years later, Leach is old enough to cut loose legally at those house parties if he wants to, but there aren't that many of them anymore. These days, he said, underage students who want to drink just hang out in small groups in someone's basement.

The Whiskey Pit is the last big party location he knows about, and its future is uncertain. Last October, sheriff's deputies busted a Whiskey Pit party for the first time in years. They wrote more than 40 minor consumption citations that night.

Looking for online clues

As parties are split up and driven indoors, Mastin said, enforcing underage drinking laws is growing more complicated. Years ago, locating a giant kegger was as simple as following the noise complaints.

Now officers have to dig through Facebook and Twitter feeds for clues to illegal drinking. Mastin said his department's minor consumption citations have dropped off in the last few years. From 2012 to 2014, the number of yearly minor consumption citations handed out in Beltrami County dropped by more than 25 percent, from 440 to 320.

His officers have the technical training to make cases using digital evidence. Bemidji detectives actually handle many of the cyber cases for departments across northern Minnesota. But their experience is mainly forensic — finding child pornography on seized hard drives, for example.

Social media is a different animal. Accounts turn over so fast, Mastin said, it's difficult for his officers to be proactive.

"It would be foolish to believe there's not far more [parties] happening than we ever know about," he said.

A question of priorities

On a recent day, the Whiskey Pit contained only a few mounds of winter snow and some busted clay pigeons.

"It's pretty surreal to be here," Leach said, "when it's empty like this."

But the snow under his boots was melting. Soon, Leach said, students will return with crates of beer. At least, he thinks they'll come back. The scores of citations handed out in last October's bust might scare people off.

Unlike the small-scale house parties in the basements of residential Bemidji, the Whiskey Pit is no great secret to law enforcement. Beltrami County Sheriff Phil Hodapp has always known the pit was a party location.

"We used to go up there and shoot beer bottles for target practice," he said.

That was 25 years ago, well before he was sheriff. Hodapp said he tries to break up big parties when he knows when and where they'll occur. Deputies patrol the section of forest road by the Whiskey Pit fairly regularly, but in a county as big as Beltrami, he said, enforcement of drinking laws is not that simple.

Most nights he has just two or three deputies on duty. And those deputies are busy reacting to the steady stream of calls coming in from across Hodapp's 3,000-square-mile jurisdiction.

"We have to prioritize our time," he said.