Police investigating VCU fraternity after student’s death

A Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) fraternity is under investigation after a 19-year-old student was found dead Saturday morning.

Richmond police said they are working to determine Adam Oakes’s cause of death.

Courtney White, a cousin of Oakes’s, told ABC News that he had recently rushed the university’s Delta Chi fraternity.

Delta Chi’s national office said it has suspended the VCU chapter, according to the network, while the university itself said it had taken similar action.

“We encourage all members to cooperate with law enforcement, investigative efforts and all directives of the University Administration,” the fraternity’s national office said in a statement.

White told ABC that Oakes, an only child from a Washington, D.C., suburb, had pledged the fraternity in an effort to “be accepted and find his place.”

She asked classmates and members of the fraternity who might have further information about her cousin’s death to come forward.

“Don’t be afraid, be brave,” she told ABC. “There is no healing from this, but it would give us a sense of what happened.”

Oakes’s relatives reportedly have said he was to be paired with a “big brother” at a Friday night event, but that other friends who had attended the party told them he had passed out at the fraternity house during a bout of heavy drinking. Police have drawn no conclusions about whether the event in question was connected to Oakes’s death, according to the network.

White told an NBC affiliate in D.C. that her cousin’s friends “checked on him at midnight; he was breathing and okay and on his side, but then when they woke up… they found him face down on the couch and when they rolled him over, half of his face was purple; half of it was not.”

“We want some answers, you know, we deserve answers,” Oakes’s father told NBC4. “Adam deserves answers.”