Logan had been busted for selling LSD and club-drug favorite Molly, but the campus police offered him a way to keep the school’s administration and his parents out of the know: becoming an informant.

During a surprise visit to see their son, Logan’s father and stepmother found him dead in his dorm room, body cold and a needle nearby. He died of a heroin overdose.

Is the UMass campus police partially responsible for his death?

From Eric Bosco and Kayla Marchetti of the Boston Globe:

UMass police helped keep student’s addiction secret

Logan’s parents drove all morning from out of state to reach his off-campus apartment that sunny afternoon at the start of UMass Amherst Family Weekend last October.

His father and stepmother arrived first, around lunchtime, hoping to surprise the UMass junior with a cheeseburger when he got out of class. But Logan wasn’t there. Or at his campus job. He didn’t answer the door and he didn’t answer text messages either. Finally, the couple persuaded a maintenance man to let them inside.

There, lying on the bathroom floor was the 20-year-old, a former star hockey player and scholarship student, a needle and a spoon nearby. Logan’s father instantly knew it was too late to save Logan — his son’s body was already cold — but he couldn’t comprehend how it could be true. He had no idea Logan was using heroin.

“Who do you think you know more than your son?” said Logan’s father, recalling his son as the kind of guy who remembered to send him a birthday card and gave great hugs. While Logan had been arrested for cocaine possession two years earlier, family members chalked it up to youthful indiscretion, an error unlikely to be repeated.