Dad Defends Teen Drinking Party

Lesley Stahl Talks To Father Who Was Arrested For Allowing Teenage Drinking At Home

(CBS)  Supporters started a Bill Anderson defense fund, but the charges against him were dropped, because what he did wasn’t against the law, since he didn’t purchase the kegs himself. It’s illegal in all 50 states for adults to provide alcohol to minors. But in most states, including Rhode Island, there is no law against simply allowing underage kids to drink.

That’s the way it was in Kansas three years ago, when a 17-year-old named Paul Riggs got drunk at a party in a friend’s basement with the parents upstairs. On the way home, Riggs crashed his truck into a tree and died three weeks later.

"What the parents did was -- they just went up into their room, closed the door, watched TV or whatever. And didn't bother to do anything -- check on those kids, or monitor that party," says District Attorney Paul Morrison, who investigated the case.

The parents dispute his account. They told 60 Minutes that they didn’t ignore the kids, and saw no evidence of alcohol. But just a few weeks earlier, the police had found alcohol at their house when they broke up another teen party, and warned the parents that if they didn’t stop kids from drinking in their home, someone was going to get hurt.

That made it all the more galling to Paul’s mother, Debbie Riggs, when Morrison told her that the parents would go unpunished.

"I said, 'There's got to be a law. There's got to be child endangerment, or there's gotta be, you know, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. There has to be something to hold these people responsible,'" says Riggs. "And he said, 'No. I mean, unless you wanna go out there, and you wanna change the law, there's nothing.'"

So Riggs decided she would try to change the law and set out to learn about the issue.

"What goes on in the parties is a lot of binge drinking," says Jim Mosher, a lawyer and researcher who has studied underage drinking for the federal government. He says kids who binge account for more than 90 percent of all the alcohol teens drink. "It's almost all binge drinking. It's not having a glass of wine with your parents at the dinner table. This is heavy drinking, and the parties are where it most often happens."

"These people who say, 'Well, we take their keys, and we make sure that they don't leave,' that to me is just a fallacy," says Riggs. "Because is my child going to get violent? Is my child going to overindulge? Did I give you permission to take those risks with my child?"

"What about the argument that, one, they're gonna drink anyway -- better that they drink indoors, in someone's home, than out there on a beach or somewhere," says Stahl. "And better that a parent is around in case something does happen."

"I'm sorry," says Riggs. "I still think that when a parent condones alcohol drinking in the home, they're sending a message to these kids that it's OK."

"It’s not just drunk driving. That’s one of the myths, that if we just protect our kids from drunk driving that they’ll be safe," says Mosher. "But sexual assault, violence ... We are not doing our children a favor by providing them a 'safe place' to drink."

Gregg Anderson says he and his friends were drunk the night the party was held. But Bill Anderson, who was at the front door, says he was unaware of the heavy drinking out back. But police came after Gregg says he and his friends made a lot of noise while doing a "keg stand."

"Somebody grabs the two handles on the keg. Two other people grab your feet, and lift you up, so, you're vertically straight up in the air. And then you just take the tap, and just put it in your mouth," says Gregg Anderson, describing what happened out back the night of the party. "That was when it got loud. That's why the cops came. What you do is, you count like, really how long you go for. And you know, it's all about competition to see who goes for the longest."

Bill Anderson says this did indeed happen at home.

"When parents say, 'How bad could it be? The parents are gonna be in the house,'" says Stahl. "And then you hear that they were binge drinking."

"If they were at our house, and they went into convulsions or some sort of medical emergency, we have a phone, and we can react to it," says Bill Anderson. "I can't sit here and say that everything we did was perfect. My mission for this party was to make sure kids didn't drink and drive."