She doesn't talk much about her daughter these days. She's accepted the fact that Kristin is gone, that life goes on, that the answers she needs may never come.
It's been five years since police showed up in the middle of the night to tell Patricia Strong-Fargas that her 22-year-old daughter, Kristin High, had drowned in high surf at Dockweiler State Beach.
Police said it was an accidental drowning. Officers pulled the bodies of Kristin and 24-year-old old Kenitha Saafir from the water just before midnight Sept. 9, 2002. Television news reports would later describe the dead women, both Cal State L.A. students, as "coeds partying at the beach."
But a lawsuit filed in 2002 by Strong-Fargas alleged a more troubling explanation: The young women died in a hazing ritual while pledging one of the country's most venerated black sororities.
The sorority denied responsibility and said there was no official chapter at Cal State L.A. No criminal charges were ever filed against anyone involved. But the official explanations have never comforted Strong-Fargas.
Kristin was always a type-A daughter. Super student, athlete, campus leader, mother of a 2-year-old son. Joining Alpha Kappa Alpha was something she had always wanted.
But her mother said the weeks-long process of pledging was more grueling than Kristin had imagined. She'd straggle home late at night, exhausted and edgy. She wouldn't talk about what was going on. "I didn't worry as much as I should," Strong-Fargas said this week. "There were things I missed, because I trusted her. Kristin was always on top of things."
According to her family's lawsuit, Kristin, Kenitha and two other pledges were worked nightly to exhaustion, in sessions that often lasted until 1 or 2 a.m.
The night they died, the lawsuit claims, they'd spent hours at the beach doing calisthenics before they were ordered to walk backward into the ocean. A wave hit Kenitha and knocked her down. Kristin knew Kenitha couldn't swim, so she went in after her. Both were dragged by high waves under the water, the lawsuit alleges.
That is what Kristin's mother believes, based on witness accounts collected by the family's private investigator, Robert Freeman. She doesn't know for sure because the two pledges who survived won't talk to her.
