FROSTBURG, Md. — From the outside, the dark house at the end of the street seemed ordinary.

It blended into the still residential area, another roof dusted with light snow, quiet with the clock approaching midnight.

Inside, a four-way social between off-campus fraternities and sororities raged. The windows were covered with blankets and towels as about 50 people danced.

“Y’all came on a bad weekend,” one partier said. “Usually it’s way more lit.”

The large off-campus frat house smelled of moldy keg residue. Supermodel posters dotted the walls. Seventy-three empty liquor bottles served as décor. A red flag read: “Get dressed up to get messed up.”

Then came a knock at the back door.

In a Snapchat video shown later, captioned “F*ck 12,” slang for police, officers dragged two kegs out to their cruisers, leaving behind the one hidden in a closet. The night scaled down to a 20-person hangout. Partiers drank from red Solo cups, calmly sitting around a large living room talking and toasting. Four girls and one of their mothers, visiting for the weekend, puffed a joint in the kitchen. The only rise in action came from a spirited debate when one pledge asked: “If it guaranteed world peace, would you cut off your dick?”

To some, it was a disappointing end to a Saturday night. But for these students, it wasn’t just unlucky. They were feeling the effects a decade later from a hard-charging new president who cracked down on a school infamous for heavy drinking.

Frostburg State University by all accounts — community members, students and administrators themselves — was a legendary party school with 24-hour beer pong tournaments, dime beer nights, under-policed streets and overflowing cups.

In 2006, Frostburg hired Jonathan Gibralter, a Syracuse University alumnus, as president. The same year, a study revealed 54 percent of its students binged alcohol — 11 percentage points higher than the national average. Binge is defined as five drinks in a two-hour period for men and four for women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When a drunk student nearly killed a community member, Gibralter launched a crackdown. Alcohol consumption rates fell, but students rebelled. The small, public college tucked into the rolling hills of western Maryland became a national story. Students pushed parties underground, chose other drugs and had a tenuous relationship with the police, who suddenly had more power.

“The students hated Gibralter, collectively and across the board,” said Robert Webber, who attended Frostburg at the height of its party school status, from 1998 to 2002, and now serves as director of the campus’s student center.

Gibralter — last year named the president at Wells College in Aurora, New York — created an alcohol task force at Frostburg composed of school and city leaders as well as bar owners. He synchronized the city and campus police departments so students arrested or cited by city police also faced university discipline. He scheduled Friday classes to stop the weekend from starting Thursday night, mandated freshmen pass an online alcohol education course and started weekend programs to offer alternatives to drinking.

He announced these measures at a school-wide meeting about having “zero tolerance” for alcohol violations. Gibralter told USA Today that a man in the back stood up and yelled he came to FSU to have a good time. If Gibralter tried to stop that, he’d leave and tell others to do the same.

A shocked Gibralter said he didn’t know the school had an alcohol problem until he got there. When he drove down to visit campus in 2006, he and his wife felt “horrified” as they saw one student urinate on a parked police car and “hundreds” walking around drunk.

Within Gibralter’s first few months at Frostburg, a student leaving an off-campus party punched a 45-year-old man. The man survived, but suffered permanent brain damage.

“If your only reason to come to college is to drink, then you should go somewhere else, this is not the place for you,” Gibralter said in a recent interview as he recalled his thoughts at the time. “I really believe this in my heart. People are going to drink. I’m not on a crusade against alcohol. I just don’t want you to die, and I don’t want your life to be ruined. I want your degree (from Frostburg) to mean something.”

Despite student’s reactions, Gibralter made progress. According to a study that measures student drinking every three years, Frostburg’s binge drinking rate has declined to the national average of 43 percent.

Jeffrey Graham, assistant vice president of student affairs and chairman of Frostburg’s alcohol task force, attributes the decline to Gibralter’s policies. The task force holds monthly meetings to develop strategies based on the National Institute of Health’s alcohol intervention matrix.

“We’re not trying to create a climate where students don’t drink alcohol at all,” Graham said. “That’s never been our position. We’re focusing on harm reduction to try to help students make those connections between heavy alcohol consumption and harms they experience.”

That education starts before students get on campus freshman year, with the online education program. When students arrive on campus, orientation leaders warn them of the party streets near campus, like Central Avenue and Maple Street. But nothing compares to Bowery Street.

“Do not ever go on Bowery Street,” an orientation leader told junior Zoe Harris when she first started at Frostburg. “That’s the party street and if you go there, then you will stay there forever … or drop out.”

Five of the 25 students in her orientation group dropped out by the end of first semester, Harris said.

The local bars are the primary non-house party drinking spots. It’s also popular to make the roughly 60-mile trek west on Interstate 68 to West Virginia University, a legendary party school itself.

Donovan Burriss, a junior and Harris’ boyfriend, lives on Bowery Street. He’s heard about the wild times pre-Gibralter, when partying students clogged the streets, making driving impossible. At one recent Homecoming Weekend, off-campus fraternity alumni group hung up a banner: “Blackout or back out.”

That shows, Burriss said, alumni aren’t used to the new Frostburg with its strict open container laws and stringent bar regulations.

But despite an overall decline in drinking, tragedy still struck.

In 2011, at a Maple Street off-campus party with a cover charge and unlimited drinks — exactly  the type of party Gibralter tried to limit — a sophomore student reportedly tried to break up a fight around 2 a.m. when another student stabbed her in the head. Nineteen-year-old Kortneigh McCoy died, becoming Frostburg’s second student death in 19 months.

Gibralter knew he needed a different approach. He erased jurisdictional boundaries. He created a joint law enforcement team with a local criminal investigation task force and university, city and state police.

According to an FSU survey, 62 percent of students reported seeing police officers patrolling multiple times every weekend evening.

In early March interviews, more than 25 students — different racially, socially, in Greek life affiliation and drinking habits — said police presence is excessive and targeted.

Graham said there are “certain tensions” with a “mostly-white police force” and a student body that draws heavily from Baltimore. Frostburg’s black population is 31 percent.

“There often develops mistrust with (the black community) and police force,” Graham said. “We do everything we can to reach across the aisle and tell individuals that they’ll be treated equally, but also we’ll stick to our policies and enforce them regardless of background.”

Today, the existing party scene has been forced to move behind the curtain — literally. Burriss recently attended one party with the backyard covered by a huge black tarp. Another student said she had similar experiences and thought of the tarps as decorations, but soon realized they were there so partiers could hide from police.

When the police bust these underground parties, inside is chaotic. Partiers rush to the basement while someone yells, “The cops are here, shut up!” Then, depending on the police’s verdict, Burriss said, the parties usually begin again once they leave.

The crackdown has led to drug usage increases, several people said, and Cumberland, Maryland, a 10-minute drive from the FSU campus, is a distribution port.

“Ten years ago, if we got a call on campus, it was alcohol,” said Ed Douglass, who’s been a Frostburg EMT for 41 years. “Now, sometimes, it’s mixed (with cocaine). (Cocaine use) has definitely increased in the last few years.”

A student at the fraternity and sorority social, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he used to do cocaine and added that on-campus drug use is common.

EMTs are equipped with Narcan, a drug that combats an opiate overdose, because of the national rise in heroin use and proximity to Cumberland.

As Gibralter tried to increase student awareness of risk and safety, he said FSU retention rate rose from 67 to 80 percent.

“When I got to Frostburg, almost 30 percent of our students were leaving after the first year,” Gibralter said. “Many reported that the reason they were leaving was because of the alcohol culture.”

If Gibralter came to Syracuse University, he said he would form a university-wide task force and bring together faculty, staff, students, bar owners and police to devise a solution to reduce drinking. He also said it’d be a “disservice” to say SU isn’t making efforts to curb its drinking culture.

SU also has a fundamentally different culture than FSU and Wells, he said, because the alcohol at the Carrier Dome, on Marshall Street and in the fraternity houses is closer to campus.

When Frostburg alumni return to campus, they may not know Gibralter’s name, but they learn his policies quickly. Their alma mater no longer tolerates large parties. Walking around with an open container won’t fly.

One student remembers her friend’s father at Homecoming, chanting old slogans and swilling alcohol like times gone by.

Then campus police approached. The father stood on a street once immune to these authorities. But no longer. They left him holding a ticket.

Then he turned, and yelled to no one in particular: “This isn’t the Frostburg it used to be.”

Editor’s Note: Over the past month, The Daily Orange has collaborated with the Department of Newspaper and Online Journalism at Syracuse University on a series of stories relating to alcohol culture on the SU campus. Multiple stories will appear in The D.O. in the coming days.

Published on April 6, 2016 at 12:40 am

Contact Sam: sjfortie@syr.edu | @Sam4TR