An accidental overdose of prescription medications killed a 20-year-old SDSU student who was found dead last spring following a party at a fraternity house at the campus, the Medical Examiner's Office reported today.
Barzeen Barzanji of Santee, a criminal-justice major who had planned to graduate from college next year, succumbed to acute intoxication from the painkiller oxycodone and alprazolam, an anxiety treatment marketed under the trade name Xanax, according to the county agency.
Barzanji was discovered unconscious and unresponsive in a bed at the Phi Kappa Theta house in the 5500 block of Aztec Walk on April 20, the morning after he went to a party there with a cousin. Medics pronounced him dead at the scene.
Barzanji was not a member of that San Diego State fraternity house, but he was president of another one, Sigma Alpha Epsilon. The 2009 West Hills High School graduate worked as a waiter at a P.F. Chang's restaurant.
Following the fatality, the university put the Phi Kappa Theta chapter on suspension, limiting its guest privileges and many of its activities, and requiring it to remain fully drug- and alcohol-free.
Administrators lifted that restricted status this week, after an investigation found no evidence that the fraternity bore any responsibility for Barzanji's death, according to SDSU spokeswoman Gina Jacobs.
The revocation of the suspension was unrelated to the medical examiner's newly released toxicology findings in the case, Jacobs said.
