Cause of Death Revealed for College Student Who Left Fraternity Party and Was Found Just Blocks Away

YOU NEED TO KNOW

• University of Michigan student Lucas Mattson was last seen in the cold at 1 a.m. on January 23 and was found dead the next day.

• While Mattson’s autopsy report stated that the cause of death was hypothermia, the manner of death was stated to be an accident.

• An attorney for the Mattson family tells PEOPLE they are preparing a lawsuit against a fraternity whose party Mattson attended before his death

Autopsy results of 19-year-old University of Michigan student person found dead after disappearing indicates being legally intoxicated in extreme weather conditions.

The Ann Arbor Police Department (AAPD) said Lucas Mattson’s body was found at 12:05 a.m. local time on January 24 in the 1900 block of Cambridge Road. expression.

Mattson was last seen at 1 a.m. on January 23. According to AAPD, the student was “walking alone…without a coat” before he was later reported missing.

“The approximately 20-hour search effort to find him was conducted in extremely cold conditions and involved AAPD and the University of Michigan Department of Public Safety and Security, as well as officers from the University of Michigan Police Department Drone Unit,” AAPD said in a statement. he said.

Mattson’s autopsy report, obtained by PEOPLE on Thursday, March 19, stated that the cause of death was hypothermia and the manner of death was an accident.

The report also stated that Mattson’s blood alcohol level was 0.156%. 0.08% legal driving limit For those over 21 in Michigan, as noted by Michigan DailyThe university’s independent student newspaper.

The pathologist who performed the autopsy, Dr. Randy Tashjian wrote that acute ethanol poisoning was a contributing factor in Mattson’s death.

The findings also found “no evidence of significant acute or recent physical trauma” to his body.

The pathologist wrote in his findings that Mattson was found dead outside after being seen leaving a nearby house party in the early morning hours of Jan. 23.

A 26 January message Domenico Grasso, the school’s interim president, said Mattson attended a fraternity house party “as a guest” on Jan. 23, adding that the student was not a member or pledge of the fraternity. Mattson’s body was later found just a few blocks from the fraternity house.

Robert Raitt, an attorney representing Mattson’s family, told PEOPLE that the autopsy report is not surprising.

“We knew he was drunk,” Raitt says. “We knew that all the booze he was drinking was provided to him by the fraternity. We talked to a fraternity who had a good friend who invited him to the fraternity. [and] “He told us what we needed to know very early on.”

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“The main thing we were looking for was to see if there was anything else in his system that might be playing a role, and there wasn’t,” he adds.

Mattson was friends with several of the brothers who invited him to the party that evening, Raitt said.

“He was celebrating a good interview with a company in Alaska for a summer internship at an engineering firm,” he says.

University of Michigan Delta Chi fraternity chapter placed temporary suspension on Jan. 25, according to the university.

Raitt says he also reached out to the university as well as the fraternity’s local chapter and national headquarters. He states that they have filed a lawsuit against the brotherhood, but have not yet filed a complaint with the court.

The University of Michigan did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

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