Tom Kline, the famed Philadelphia lawyer who has battled giant corporations and powerful public institutions for multi-million-dollar verdicts through four decades of courtroom wars, still sees the face of an adversary who tormented him in the s.
Thomas Kline on Broad Street in downtown Philadelphia. He was a fraternity member, but he was meaner than the others โ scaring the pledges with his reputation for paddling during initiation rites. In the interim, Piazza continued to fall drunkenly into the front door, iron railings and hardwood flooring, all the while suffering from a fractured skull and lacerated spleen.
The year-old Kline has taken on some of the biggest Pennsylvania cases during the past decade โ the Piazza tragedy, the horrors inflicted by Jerry Sandusky in another Penn State scandal, and the Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia in , in which eight people died.
He is the namesake of the Drexel University Thomas R. In Pittsburgh, there is the Thomas R. Kline in the lobby of the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law by a statue of himself. To the Piazzas, Kline is more than their lawyer. American colleges and universities across the country are grappling with rampant fraternity hazing violations. The former Penn State assistant football coach, convicted of sexually abusing 10 boys, was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.
Three top administrators, including the university president, were also convicted of child endangerment for failing to report Sandusky to authorities. Speculation as to what revered head coach Joe Paterno knew continues to divide the university community six years after his death. Five years later, with the Piazza case, Kline is embroiled in yet another monumental Penn State shakeup. In June, four months after Timothy Piazza died, the Penn State Board of Trustees voted to strip fraternities and sororities of their self-regulating power, turning over disciplinary action to university administrators.
