They told him to hold his hands above his head and keep them there. Eight boys then administered "the atomic bomb" — some slugged him in the stomach while others repeatedly punched him in the back. It was not a mugging.
It was "hell night" initiation last April for the Omega Gamma Delta fraternity of Oceanside High School on Long Island. Not surprisingly, the bomb had a predictable effect on Ninth-Grader Michael Kalogris, then 14. He collapsed with what doctors at first feared was a ruptured spleen.
After Michael spent three weeks in a hospital recovering from other internal injuries, a grand jury found that only two of his bombers were old enough to stand public trial. The grand jury charged Francis Gannon, 17, and Robert Lenti, 18, with violating an 1894 New York State law that provides up to one year in jail and a $100 fine for anyone convicted of "engaging in, or aiding and abetting, what is commonly called hazing."
Last week, after a two-week trial, Nassau County Judge James L. Dowsey Jr. tongue-lashed the two defendants' conduct as "sadistic, barbaric and immoral." But then he shocked educators who view high school hazing as a plague that only the courts can cure. He freed Gannon and Lenti on the ground that the hazing law is not "so explicit that all men subject to its penalties may know what act it is their duty to avoid."
As Judge Dowsey saw it, he had no other choice in the first test of the law that anyone could remember. But many lawyers mused: If the "atomic bomb" is not hazing, what is?