If so, you’ll have company.
But man, this is crazy. I mean, not only didn’t they report any of this to the police, but they couldn’t even be bothered to revoke Sandusky’s access to the locker room, even though he’d been retired for years?
Seems the least they could have done to cover their ass, so to speak.
I know that, from a factual standpoint. That said, your “questionable loyalties” concept is very true. The Campus Police office is where crimes embarrassing to the admin go to die.
Say it isn’t so, Joe!
This pitting is spot-on. Ol’ JoePa should be fired, post-haste and appropriate charges filed against him by the DA.
It’s a very sad day indeed for Happy Valley.
Bri2k
I wonder . . .
. . . what if this situation had been handled in exactly the same manner but the victims had been girls? I tend to think that the Penn State Athletic Dept. would not exist this morning. The women at Penn State probably would have burned down the AD offices and fed all these guys to the [Nittany] lions before they ever had a chance to resign. At least I hope that’s what they would have done.
Personally, I wouldn’t say that. I’ve raised sons and daughters. I would be just as outraged if my son got raped as my daughter. The pitchforks and torches may come out as it is.
Yeah, it’s really a complicated legal question as to whether Joe Paterno is in any way guilty of a crime. But here’s the thing, Joe Paterno is Penn State. He has set the tone for their program for generations, his influence dramatically transcends the athletic department. He has made major contributions to the University, he has buildings on campus named after him, he was Athletic Director for some time. It is well known that he essentially controls the Athletic Department and additionally that he is probably the most powerful man at PSU.
We have no idea if Paterno knew anything in 1998, the details on that incident are still very murky (and strangely the District Attorney involved in that case disappeared from the face of the Earth, and his successor claims to not have all the files/details on that case.) However, given Sandusky was being groomed as Joe Paterno’s successor it is very odd that he left when he did, so abruptly. It makes me think something was known.
Even if you try to find ways to excuse Paterno, it really just isn’t possible at this time. Okay, so he goes up the chain of command about this incident. I get that, it makes sense, you would go to the AD to talk about this report. However your next step should have been the police, no questions about it. The only reason to even involve the AD is to make them aware of what is going on, and because he was Sandusky’s boss, technically. I’m not sure what official capacity Sandusky had at the University after his 1999 retirement, but all the news articles I’m reading say that he was under the VP for Finance and Business (Gary Schultz) who reported to the AD directly.
Once Paterno reported it to the AD, why didn’t he go to the police? Once some time had passed, why didn’t Paterno follow up? Why didn’t he ask the AD why Sandusky was still on campus? Why hadn’t the police been by conducting an investigation? Even if you assume the very best about Joe Paterno, he heard about a child being abused in his football facilities, and all he did was kick it up to his boss and never followed up on it again. I’m sorry but when you’re a man with the prestige, position, and responsibility of Joe Paterno you have a greater responsibility than that–maybe not legally, but certainly ethically.
The reality is that Paterno probably knew the entire sordid story. The GA that went to talk to Paterno (who is now an assistant coach btw), went to speak with Paterno at his home. It is reported that he suffered serious emotional trauma from witnessing this, I have a feeling he went to Paterno and laid it all out there, because he needed to talk to someone about it. Once the administration heard about it, they did everything they could to ignore it and make sure it didn’t go public. What is even worse is they let Sandusky continue on as a Penn State employee, and let him continue to have access to the facilities. Do you really think that when the decision was made to let Sandusky stick around and to just warn him “don’t bring any boys onto campus” that Joe Paterno was not either involved in the discussions leading up to that or at the very least informed of them?
Joe Paterno’s son has released a statement on behalf of his father today that makes him look absolutely horrible. He says that his father grew up in a “Norman Rockwell” painting, and that the GA was not specific about what happened. He’s basically doing the whole, “my dad is an old man who grew up in a different time, he doesn’t even understand horrible stuff like that, I mean this stuff didn’t happen in the 40s and 50s!.” That’s absolute horseshit, though, Joe Paterno didn’t grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting and it doesn’t matter if all the GA said was “I saw Sandusky sexually abusing a boy”, Paterno didn’t need to know the specifics of the abuse, but just that the abuse was happening. What’s even worse is Paterno’s son (an attorney) has said that Paterno couldn’t have gone to police, because they would not have investigated the matter because it is “hearsay.” I don’t know where he got his J.D., but that’s just absolutely idiotic. As any lawyer could tell you, the hearsay rule excludes evidence at trial. The police have specific requirements (like probable cause, reasonable suspicion etc) to take certain actions, but they don’t need any formal barriers to be overcome to follow up on a report. Sure, if all they had was Paterno saying, “Someone told me that they saw Jerry Sandusky abusing a child” that may not be enough for police to get search warrants and all that on Sandusky. But they would have listened, because it was Joe Paterno. They would have immediately interviewed the GA, who was a direct eyewitness, and they would have then definitely been able to get warrants against Sandusky. Maybe not for his arrest but definitely to search his house and to get into his life, get his calendar and his personal files, get access to the people at The Second Mile charity so they could get to the bottom of who the victim was and then they could have proceeded from there.
What’s really, absolutely terrible about all this is if you read Sandusky’s bio it is almost certain he has victimized an enormous number of children. He started The Second Mile as a charity in the 1970s, and that has given him continuous access to young children since that time. Further, it is reported that his family has taken in many foster children throughout the years. I sincerely wonder if even a single one of his male foster children went through his house and escaped serious sexual abuse at his hands.
I think PSU also has massive legal liability for this, and I hope that if there are more children who were victimized on PSU facilities they all come forward and sue. I’m sorry but they deserve serious compensation, especially any of them who were abused after 2002 when it was definitively shown PSU knew what kind of person Sandusky was.
I’m trying to figure out what point you’re trying to make here, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck it is. You don’t think people are horrified enough by what’s happened already? You actually think that people at PSU think, “Oh, it was just anal rape of 10-year-old boys, let’s put the pitchforks away?”
Lots of stuff in your post and I can’t discuss it all because I have a meeting to attend, but I’m just mention this last part about the missing DA Ray Gricar. Gricar’s brother committed suicide by jumping off a bridge; Gricar’s car was found next to a bridge in Lewisburg, PA (incidentally I have parked in that same lot many times). I wouldn’t go to the conspiracy theory quite yet.
Right, no I’m not trying to say Gricar’s disappearance is in any way linked to this, I just think it is well, mysterious. He was a pretty normal guy, had announced he was retiring as DA and would not be seeking reelection, then he disappears without a trace. He left behind his wallet and personal effects, and they found his car in a parking lot. They found his laptop in the river…I think Gricar was running from something but I don’t know what, and I think he took his own life most likely (or that he’s definitely dead, anyway…he’s been declared legally dead.)
When forensics experts looked into Gricar’s recovered HDD they couldn’t find anything, but they did find search history on his other computers where he was searching for “how to wreck a hard drive.” So obviously Gricar was involved in something he wasn’t proud of…I doubt it was the Sandusky thing, though. Gricar disappeared in 2005, and his involvement with the Sandusky case dates back to 1998. It’s probable Gricar was involved in some other bad thing that he didn’t want his family finding out about. I guess it’s possible that he helped “make sure” Sandusky didn’t get prosecuted back in 1998 and he felt guilty about that and then the Federal investigation scared him, but who knows. It’s just as likely it was something else entirely.
Paterno was 72 at the time, and Sandusky was one of the top coordinators in college football (Linebacker U), so it is suspicious that Sandusky was suddenly passed over for the job not long after the 1998 incident. Apparently, at Sandusky’s retirement banquet, Paterno only spoke for less than a minute. If you’ve ever seen Paterno at Big Ten media day, you know he loves to ham it up, so to barely speak at a tribute to his assistant coach of over 30 years is pretty surprising.
It’s becoming clear that Paterno and the higher ups at Penn St. were more interested in shielding the program from being tarnished by association than they were in doing the right thing. But hey, at least they finally banned Sandusky from the campus. :rolleyes:
Nice post, Martin Hyde.
I’ve never been a Paterno fan (I’m a Buckeye, after all), but even I would have thought JoePa better than this. McCreary goes to him (with his dad, I seem to recall reading somewhere) and says – going with the most charitable possible explanation* – “Coach, I saw Sandusky doing something inappropriate with a kid in the locker room.” And all JoePa does is say, “Well, I’ll run it up the flagpole and call it a day”? No disgust? No repulsion? I can understand JoePa thinking, “I’ve known Jerry for years, I have a hard time believing it”… but still, how do you not follow it up with, “But I should absolutely use my unique position as God of PSU to look into it further”?
Seriously, Paterno? You choose to go with the bare legal minimum in this instance?
What a fucktard.
[sub]* More likely, it seems to me, is that McCreary said, “Coach, I saw him having sex with a kid in the locker room.” Honestly, “I didn’t get specifics, so I didn’t do nothin’” doesn’t even pass the smell test.[/sub]
I’m curious about the missing link here, the graduate assistant who actually witnessed the rape. Was HE a mandatory reporter? In fact, why didn’t he call the cops right on the spot? He was witnessing a crime in progress. Did the fact the Joe heard this story second-hand from this other guy change Joe’s reporting responsibilities? Not to say he acted correctly, I’m just wondering.
How could this guy not have called 911?
Any cites on the anal rape of the 10-year-old? What I’ve read in the news was that Sandusky had the kid pinned against a wall and was performing oral sex on him. Both are bad of course, but I would think that a grown man’s penis being forced up the anus of a ten year old child would result in screams of pain that could be heard all over campus.
I think the GA saw something incredibly disturbing, and briefly lost his mind. If I saw what he saw, I’d like to think I would immediately stop it and protect the child…but who knows. How do you even process something like that?
But I think it’s telling what he did do, and what his father advised him to do: he went to Paterno. That’s what makes Paterno’s weasel-worded denials so disappointing. Whether he ultimately had a legal responsibility to report what happened to the police or not, he was probably the most visible authority figure on the campus, and this GA probably assumed that Paterno would take care of the situation. Instead, he tried to wash his hands of it and pass the buck. Disgraceful.
The reporting law stipulates that the report should be made to your superior or supervisor, who should then contact the authorities on behalf of the institution. Probably the intent of this clause was to ensure that authorities would only have to deal with a single coherent complaint. This seems to be a problem with the legislation that should be fixed in the very near future.
This likely insulates the GA from prosecution, by my guess.
It might not insulate Paterno, since his subsequent actions were in the service of a conspiracy to defeat the intent of the mandated reporting law. Paterno had the power to pull this off, the GA did not.
You can read or search and find the relevant passage - I’m not going to quote it here.
That was another incident witnessed by a janitor. It was never reported.
Sound doesn’t work that way.
Thanks for the info, guys.
Yeah, the grand jury indictment is on the web in several places, and it is clear and unequivocal as to the GA witnessing a boy (around 10 years old) being anally raped by Sandusky.
I don’t doubt you, but that’s just crazy, certainly in the case of an eye witness. The witness reports it to the supervisor, and the supervisor’s report to the police (assuming it happens) amounts to, “That guy saw it.”
Would the cops want a non-police institution to do any investigating of a case like this? I would think not, in that it would warn the defendant and possibly taint evidence.