Maya Rao of the Star Tribune points out that in especially cold winters, college students who drink face a real danger of getting caught outside and freezing to death.

Minnesota college tragedies: Drunk, frozen and underage

Pink flowers adorn a tree by the wooded trail where a drunk college student wandered in her final moments, just before she slipped in a creek and froze on a bed of snow.

They honor 20-year-old Sandra Lommen, a Bemidji State University freshman whose manner of death, while rare, is all too familiar in the Upper Midwest. College students in recent years have been found frozen in fields, under a bridge, in an alley and on a porch.

The accidents have shaken campuses in Minneapolis, Duluth, La Crosse, Wis., and beyond, but particularly here, at this 5,000-student campus along the shores of Lake Bemidji. Just weeks after Lommen’s death, a second Bemidji student believed to have been drinking nearly died after spending hours in an alley on a frigid January night.

“Is that behavior private? Is it something that we would leave alone?” asked Bemidji State President Richard Hanson. “We don’t think so.”

More than 500 students filled a ballroom for a summit on campus drinking in January, as Hanson called on students to take responsibility and look out for one another. The school has sent letters to parents about a new task force charged with examining how to prevent more tragedies. The group, which will draft a report for Hanson by May 1, is discussing how to offer more accessible transportation and train students to intervene on peers’ behalf.

They are wrestling with where to draw the distinctions between private drinking and campus responsibility. And should Bemidji State further restrict underage drinking, they wonder, or acknowledge that it will happen and find ways to make it safer?