The parents of two students who committed suicide while attending Truman State University in Missouri are suing the school, the students’ fraternity, and an ex-student over the deaths.
Melissa Bottorff-Arey, as well as Suzanne and Michael Thomas, hired attorney Nicole Gorovsky to represent them in the lawsuit over their deceased boys, Alexander David Mullins and Joshua Michael Thomas, according to the Kansas City Star.
The Bottorff-Arey/Thomas lawsuit also mentions three other unnamed students, two men and one woman, that committed suicide with Mullins and Thomas during the 2016-2017 academic year.
The lawsuit names the university, the Xi Chapter of Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity, and Brandon Grossheim, who attended the school but left before graduating and was a member of the AKL fraternity.
Grossheim knew all five students and was the last one to see each of them alive, according to the lawsuit. Grossheim had a reputation in his fraternity for being obsessed with death and would routinely befriend and counsel students struggling with depression or other forms of mental illness.
According to AKL fraternity brothers that knew Grossheim, he wore clothes of one of the dead students after he had committed suicide and dated the girlfriend of another that had just killed himself.
Gorovsky says that Grossheim’s “psychological manipulation” was involved in the deaths of Mullins and Thomas.
“This tragedy was preventable,” Gorovsky said. “This situation had been swept under the rug.”
Grossheim, a “suspicious fraternity brother,” should not have been allowed to have such free access to struggling students, Gorovsky said.
