WE HAVE always held the belief that change is something inevitable and is achieved when people decide to act on it.

Reforms are pushed because we want to change a bad system or a rotten culture and because we are convinced that in failing to do so, we would allow it to continue and endanger people.

Sometimes, change comes with a price. In the case of fraternity hazing culture, the senseless death of Horacio “Atio” Castillo III became the trigger for reforms.

It’s been a year since his family and friends lost him to a primitive cause, a rule of the jungle, all for the sake of being part of a “brotherhood” that seeks to do harm before one becomes part of it.

News of Atio’s death struck the Thomasian community in the morning of Sept. 18, 2017, from what was believed, and later on confirmed, to be the result of hazing in the hands of the Aegis Juris, a well-known fraternity in the oldest law school in the country.

The months that followed were tumultuous, not only for the UST community but for the nation. There were moments of grief for Atio’s loved ones, and later, enough noise and clamor too to shake the system and enact changes.

The wheels of justice, though slow, have progressed–from the arrest of the Aegis Juris officers, the Senate hearings, the fratmen’s expulsion from the University, the passage of the Atio Castillo Law, to the beginning of the trial of the hazing case.

Twelve months after his death, the Varsitarian takes a look back on the key events and personalities in the hazing death of Atio, a Thomasian who dreamed of becoming president someday, but whose life was taken by a cycle of violence that has prevailed for so long in college fraternities.

The 90-year-old student paper of Asia's pontifical and Catholic University joins the clamor of those who seek justice for our fellow Thomasian, by retelling the story of Atio and ensuring that his case would not be compromised or worse, forgotten.