Justice for Sanda
Sanda Dia (20) was in his 3rd year of college at KU Leuven in Leuven, Belgium when he decided to try and join the studentclub 'Reuzegom', a club almost entirely filled with white kids from rich or elitist families, of which many of its past members now hold a higher status in society. Sanda was multi talented and very ambitious and hardworking. He dreamed big, wanting to be make a future for himself and make his family proud. He hoped to become a Reuzegom member to solidify his own future, coming from a lower income household himself.
On December 4th of 2018 Sanda, along with the other two newcomers, would be forced to drink enormous amount of alcohol for their initiation into Reuzegom. Sanda had drank almost 2 bottles of gin and pints of beers, even more than the other two had. When nearly passed out, the members each urinated on him as is custom according to them. After taking him back to his student room that night, they taped off the faucet in the room to keep him from sobering up. Unsurprisingly, he did not feel much better the 2nd day of the initation. As seen on camera footage and told by eye witnesses he seemed to be in a bad state already. Even one of the members had pointed out he was completely out of it. During the next part of the initation on December 5th, Sanda and the other two were forced to dig a hole, which was to be filled with ice cold water. They’d be stuck here for the next 8 hours while being ridiculed and peed on, and forced to consume over a liter of fish oil. Then he’d have to swallow live goldfish, bring it back up, swallow it back down all until it was no longer alive. All of which was laughed about, filmed and photographed by the members of Reuzegom. He eventually passed out, his body no longer able to keep up. It wasn't until at least 2 hours of him being passed out (speculated that it took even longer) that he was finally taken to the hospital in this critical condition. He fell into a coma due to his extremely low body temperature and insane level of salt intake before his family could even get to the hospital to say their goodbyes. Sanda was in such critical condition that he died of organ failure less than 2 days later.
In these 2 days the members of Reuzegom were more concerned about covering up their tracks and deleting the evidence than the death they all caused. In recovered messages and statements the members talk about Sanda’s situation as if he was not in critical condition and felt no responsibility towards the situation.
The following 4 years they'd use their family's influence and money to finally end up being convicted to mere community service and a 400 euro fine. That’s not justice. This is a huge group of rich, influential families wiggling their way out of their involvement in Sanda’s death. They couldn’t know fish oil would kill him, but when you put someone in a cold bath, let them drink copious amounts of alcohol and other substances and they don’t look well, stop being able to respond and pass out… it’s clear that he was seriously not doing well. And their response to that was to let him suffer in this state for hours without giving him medical care. He could have lived, had they brought him in right away. They get to live on with their name and faces protected and mostly in tact, without real punishment, having the truth twisted to their own advantage.
Aside from the lack of proper punishment, none of them spoke up when Sanda’s father asked for clarification about what happened. The majority of them didn’t even care to show up for the final sentence. They didn’t even do the bare minimum of giving the family of their alleged “friend” any closure.
So why should their name be protected when they took his?