A judge yesterday dismissed most of the charges against three students accused of setting a fire in front to the Tabard Society house February 25 after a request from the case's prosecutor, according to an attorney for the defendants. Engineering junior Zayd Hammam, College sophomore Seth Schorr and Engineering sophomore Tim Young -- all Zeta Psi fraternity brothers -- will be on probation for the next six months, after which the charges will be expunged from their records, attorney Nick Nastasi said. Nastasi explained that the three defendants lit a lunch box on fire on the porch of the Tabard Society house at 41st and Pine streets "in response to a pledging incident that Tabard had initiated." He added that the students brought a fire extinguisher to the house in order to put out the flames. But University Police Detective Frank DeMeo, who investigated the incident, said the defendants' extinguisher didn't work, and police were forced to use another extinguisher to put out the fire. But after being informed that the charges against the three were dropped, DeMeo said the case "went the way I pretty much I thought it was going to go." Nastasi stressed that law enforcement authorities had "overcharged" the students. "To have criminalized this in the way that they had initially tried to do was really overkill," he explained. "There wasn't really damage or consequence." The entire case, however, remains under investigation by the University's Office of Student Conduct. DeMeo told The Daily Pennsylvanian last month that the case had been referred to the office within one or two days of the incident. Nastasi declined comment when asked about the current status of the case in the Office of Student Conduct. And Office of Student Conduct Director Michele Goldfarb was unavailable for comment yesterday. She has repeatedly declined to confirm whether her office was considering disciplinary procedures for the three students, noting that she would be violating the students' confidentiality if she discussed any aspects of the case. Assistant District Attorney Joseph Whitehead, who had been prosecuting the case, was also unavailable for comment yesterday evening. Zeta Psi President and College sophomore Carter Caldwell said last night that the three students had been reinstated into the fraternity after being suspended during the course of the criminal investigation.
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