He Always Picked a Day for Us
Who Stone Foltz was, before the headlines
Every year, a little while after his birthday, Stone picked a day.
Not his actual birthday. The birthday was never the part he cared about. A day he chose, just for us. And what he wanted to do with it never changed: he wanted me to take him shopping. Not for the things, though he cared about those too. For the time. Walking through stores, no reason to hurry, the two of us talking about everything and nothing, the way you do when you’re not trying to have a conversation, you’re just having one.
Somewhere in the middle of growing up, most kids stop choosing your company. They still love you, but the day starts to be about the gift, or the cash, or getting back to their friends. Stone never stopped choosing the day. Every year, he picked one. For us.
I can’t walk past those stores anymore.
I miss his hugs. I miss his smile. I miss his laugh.
He was sharp in the way that sneaks up on you. When he was younger and would spend the day at my house, we would just talk. One afternoon I was explaining why I had to travel for work, a longer answer than he needed. He listened to the whole thing, looked at me, and said, “The higher ups make you do it.”
That was Stone. He cut right to it. No edge, no attitude, just clarity. And that little smile after, like he knew exactly what he’d done.
Another time, his mom had him doing something around the house, and he wanted to know why. She gave him the answer every oldest child has heard forever: because you’re the oldest. I jumped in the way a protective aunt does; I’m the oldest in my family, too. We ended up laughing about it, the two of us, shaking our heads. Yeah. It’s always the oldest. That was the connection that belonged just to us.
Get in the car with Stone, and within thirty seconds, his phone was hooked up, and the music was loud. He loved music the way some people love breathing. Completely, without apology. He was convinced, absolutely convinced, that he and his friend had discovered Post Malone before the rest of the world caught on.
Maybe they did.
He loved his friends the same way. Total, uncomplicated loyalty. He would do anything for them. Show up in the middle of the night if they needed him, no hesitation. Those friends are now the best big brothers to Stone’s younger brother.
Sit with that for a moment. The friends Stone loved so fiercely now show up for his little brother the same way. That is who he was, and what he built, just by being himself.
There was a lunch, not long before he left for college. Just the two of us. He showed up with a binder.
Inside it was his future: the car he wanted to drive, the city he wanted to live in, the job he saw himself doing. He had thought about all of it, written it down, organized it, and brought it to lunch to show me. When he talked, his smile got so big his whole face changed. He wasn’t telling me about a dream. He was telling me about a plan.
He was so sure. He was so ready. He was 20 years old, and his whole life was in that binder, and he wanted to show it to me.
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Here is what I need you to understand about Stone, and about what happened to him.
Everything that made him who he was is also exactly what hazing counts on: the loyalty, the love, the way he would do anything for the people in his circle.
Stone trusted people. When he got to college and found his group, he trusted them the way he trusted the friends he’d grown up with. These were his people. They would take care of him. That is what you believe at 20, when you finally belong somewhere. He had grown up around team traditions, around coaches and leaders who taught him to respect those above you and protect those below you. He believed in that. He lived it.
And the men who hazed him used every bit of it against him.
That is the hardest part to say: the things we love most about our kids are the exact things that put them at risk. Their trust. Their loyalty. Their need to belong. Hazing doesn’t prey on the weak. It preys on the ones who want to be part of something, the ones who would never let their people down.
The ones just like Stone.
Stone Foltz is my nephew. He lost his life on March 7, 2021, because of hazing at Bowling Green State University.
I have been trying to figure out how to write that sentence for years. There is no way to write it that makes it feel real. No way that does justice to the shopping trips, the binder, the music in the car, the way he said the higher-ups make you do it with that look on his face.
The world knows Stone as a hazing victim. I know him as the kid who picked a day, every year, just to be with me. Both are true. Only one of them tells you who he really was.
Maybe you’re a parent. Maybe an aunt, an uncle, a coach, a teacher. Someone who loves a kid in high school or college right now. Think about that child. Think about what you love most about them: their loyalty, their enthusiasm, the way they light up about their team, their friends, or the group they finally belong to.
Those are the exact qualities that make them vulnerable to something most adults were never taught to see.
Hazing doesn’t announce itself. It hides in the places that look most normal: the locker room, the team bus, the group chats you don’t know exist. It hides behind the word tradition. It lives in the silence of a kid who’s afraid that speaking up means losing the one thing they worked so hard to be part of. The adults around that child, good and caring people, were almost certainly never taught to recognize it.
Neither was I.
I’m not writing this because I want you to know my story. I’m writing it because I’m an aunt who misses her nephew so deeply that she needs the world to know hazing is still happening. Every day. In schools and on teams that look perfectly normal from the outside.
What gets me through is the thought that maybe something I learned the hardest way possible keeps someone else’s child alive. That the next family doesn’t have to sit across from an empty chair. That some aunt somewhere gets to keep taking her nephew shopping.
I’m writing this for the kid who has a binder full of their future sitting in their room right now.
Please. Pay attention.
DJ Williams is the Founder and Executive Director of Hazing Prevention Partners and the author of The Harm We Ignore series, which includes Bullying Leads to Hazing and The Danger of High School Hazing, as well as Light After the Loss of Your Child. Her nephew, Stone Foltz, is a hazing victim who lost his life on March 7, 2021, at Bowling Green State University.
