The ordeal of Sanda Dia, who died in 2018 as a result of his hazing, had moved Belgium. Eighteen comrades of the student were sentenced Friday, May 26 to community service for assault and battery that involuntarily resulted in death. Sentences of eighteen to fifty months in prison were requested in March, during the trial before the Antwerp Court of Appeal (North). But the court was more lenient, dismissing the count of "administering a noxious substance resulting in death," a reference to the very salty fish-oil mixture that the newbie had to swallow, and which doctors considered it to be the cause of the fatal cerebral edema.
Born in Antwerp to a Mauritanian father, Sanda Dia, 20, began his engineering studies at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain (KU Leuven) in the fall of 2018. On December 4, the day after a sales test of roses in the street, from which he came out badly classified, he had to swallow a phenomenal quantity of alcohol. The investigation showed that after several beers he had drunk a liter of gin on his own, and that the objective was not to let him sober. The sink faucet in his Leuven apartment had been taped shut to prevent him from hydrating.
The next day, the ordeals continued around a remote chalet on the outskirts of Antwerp. This time, the pledge had to stay outside, in the cold, in a hole filled with ice water, after swallowing this mixture of fish oil. When Sanda Dia was admitted to the emergency room of a nearby hospital on the evening of December 5, his body temperature fell to 28.7°C, hypothermia making "any blood test impossible", said during the first trial, in 2021, one of the doctors having examined him. He was quickly transferred to the intensive care unit in another hospital, where he was declared dead on December 7. The fatal cerebral edema resulted from abnormally high sodium levels in his body, the medical record says.
"Dry Clothes"
In the end, the eighteen students sent back to correctional two years after the events were all found guilty of "grievous bodily harm resulting in death without intent to give it". Depending on the case, they receive penalties of two hundred, two hundred and fifty or three hundred hours of community service, as well as a fine of 400 euros, not to mention the thousands of euros in damages due to the civil parties.
The court also ruled out, in addition to the administration of harmful substances, the "non-assistance to a person in danger". Members of the Reuzegom fraternity, the now-disbanded circle in which the hazing took place, "took action as soon as they saw he [Sanda Dia] was in danger," a doorman commented. - Word of the Court of Appeal, citing the reasons for the judgment. After the cold water well episode, "they gave him dry clothes, tried to warm him up," the spokeswoman said.
The court's decision was greeted by the Dia family with "relief" and "frustration", according to Me Sven Mary, lawyer for the father. However, "there remains a great void and questions to which the family will never have an answer", he lamented, castigating the "omerta" which reigned throughout the procedure within the Reuzegom circle.
