Sandusky

STATE COLLEGE — The warning signs were there for more than a decade, disturbing indicators that Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was breaching boundaries with young boys — or maybe worse.

Yet the university's top administrators kept allowing, even encouraging, Sandusky to invite some of those boys into campus sports buildings — locker rooms, showers, a sauna and a swimming pool — where prosecutors now say he fondled, molested and sexually assaulted some of the most vulnerable in the place known as Happy Valley.

Too many, from the university president to department heads to janitors, knew of troubling behavior by this revered, longtime coach who founded a charity for children with hardscrabble backgrounds. But at this school whose sports programs vow “success with honor,” the circle of knowledge was kept very limited and very private.

Prosecutors say the only thing that stopped Sandusky, who retired a year after a 1998 allegation was not prosecuted, was when he was accused elsewhere, a decade later, of sexually abusing a freshman at a local high school where Sandusky had volunteered to help coach the football team.

Today, Sandusky is charged with more than 50 counts related to sexual abuse over a 12-year period. According to the criminal charges, when he wasn't acting out his compulsions on the venerated main campus of Pennsylvania State University, he was doing so mostly in a basement bedroom of his home.

And while the official allegations, so far, target only three people — Sandusky, along with the school's athletic director and a since-retired senior vice president, who are both charged with perjury and failure to report a 2002 sexual abuse complaint — an investigation by The Associated Press suggests that blame also rests on Penn State as an institution and the entrenched traditions of now-fired head football coach Joe Paterno.

It matters greatly what Penn State officials knew and how they reacted to sexual abuse allegations because failing to act could imperil the future of the university's athletic programs.

Under NCAA regulations, the overall ethical conduct of a college sports program is paramount. Failure of institutional control can result in a range of sanctions, including a ban from participation in intercollegiate sports, ineligibility for lucrative bowl games, and a loss of athletic scholarships.

The NCAA, the Big Ten Conference and Penn State are each separately investigating whether the university violated any rules in its dealings with Sandusky.

The first known complaint made to authorities about Sandusky, who says he's innocent of all charges and faces a preliminary hearing Tuesday, came in a 1998 phone call to the Penn State police department. A mother was troubled after her 11-year-old boy told her he had showered naked with Sandusky on campus.That complaint would trigger a separate review by Centre County's Children and Youth Services, the child protection agency charged with handling abuse cases in the State College area.But it was the Penn State police department, which is overseen by a top university administrator, that would lead a more comprehensive criminal investigation.Those two investigations also would represent the university's first known missed opportunity.The woman's son would become known as Victim 6 in the state's current criminal case against Sandusky. Prosecutors say Sandusky lathered up the boy, bear-hugged him naked from behind and picked him up and put his head under the shower. Detectives say that later, with police secretly listening in, Sandusky told the boy's mother the joint shower had been a mistake, and blurted: “I wish I were dead.”When county officials heard Sandusky's name, they decided quickly to kick the case up to state child welfare investigators. Of course they knew Sandusky as a prominent Penn State defensive coach, and they also knew that his charity, The Second Mile, had a contract with the county that paid $47 each day per child to provide foster care.“I think his affiliation with The Second Mile program precluded the county from doing it,” said Jerry Lauro, the state Department of Public Welfare investigator who handled the complaint.Together, Lauro and Ronald Schreffler, the lead detective from the university police, interviewed Sandusky about his shower with the 11-year-old. The grand jury report says Sandusky promised he would never shower with boys again.Lauro eventually found no indication of abuse by Sandusky. “Boundary issues are one thing, but substantiated child abuse is another level,” Lauro said.The social services worker said he didn't have access to the criminal investigative file, which made an argument for charging Sandusky. Schreffler's still-sealed report runs about 100 pages.Schreffler declined comment. The grand jury report that led to the first 40 charges against Sandusky on Nov. 5 cites extensively from his work.Schreffler testified that his boss, then-campus police chief Thomas Harmon, told him to close his investigation, and the county prosecutor decided there would be no charges, for reasons that remain unknown today. Harmon served as an administrator under Gary Schultz, then Penn State's senior vice president for finance and business.Schultz has been charged in relation to a 2002 sexual abuse complaint against Sandusky. In grand jury testimony, Schultz said he was aware of the 1998 complaint investigated by his police department but never asked to see the investigative report and didn't realize how lengthy it was.Such seeming indifference runs throughout the grand jury documents as well as a civil lawsuit filed by an accuser not covered in the criminal case.But Sandusky's lawyer, Joe Amendola, sees the extensive 1998 investigation as vindication of his client. “All these people looked into that and decided there wasn't enough to file criminal charges,” he said.Sandusky has argued that the 1998 complaint was a minor allegation that was determined not to be true. Amendola said Sandusky did not discuss that case with Paterno, Schultz or athletic director Tim Curley — the other official now charged in the 2002 allegation. Curley, now on leave, and Schultz both deny the criminal charges.Still, Amendola said he believes university officials knew about the 1998 complaint, and that they agreed there was nothing to it.

In his 2000 memoir, titled “Touched,” Sandusky, now 67, breathes no word of the 1998 investigation. But he does acknowledge that in the months that followed, “I came to the realization that I was not destined to become head football coach at Penn State.” And so he retired.But his departure remains clouded in mystery, leaving open the question of whether Penn State gave him a push.Many in the athletic community were stunned that this admired assistant, who had long openly wished for a head coaching job and interviewed elsewhere, would just up and retire at 55. “You never expect coaches just to quit. They usually have another job to go to,” said George Patrick, an athletic department staffer who has since retired after 40 years at the school.Even Kip Richeal, a friend who co-authored “Touched,” was puzzled. “I tried to get it out of him: `Why are you retiring at 55?' And he didn't really talk about it.”Some local news reports at the time cited an unexplained rift between Paterno and Sandusky.Penn State took the public position that Sandusky was retiring to devote more time to his charity for troubled children. Paterno's wife Sue told the AP in a phone interview last week that by then, “Jerry was more Second Mile than he was coach.”Amendola, Sandusky's lawyer, said Penn State superiors made no mention of the 1998 shower investigation when discussing his departure, and even offered to let Sandusky stay on — in his assistant coach position, as an administrator of minor sports or some other job. He said Sandusky preferred taking an early retirement financial package then available to other campus employees.Schultz gave the grand jury a different explanation, testifying that Paterno felt it was time to make a coaching change.And Paterno's wife, while not saying her husband had wanted Sandusky to leave, said he had been “comfortable” with the move.The university showed it was more than comfortable with Sandusky's retirement, giving him special honors as a professor emeritus. He was given a parking pass and was allowed to keep keys to the football facilities, with a personal office inside. As an esteemed guest, he was free to move openly around campus, where prosecutors say he kept abusing boys.Such privileges are ostensibly rewards for good work — but are sometimes used as sweeteners to encourage someone to leave quietly.The perks granted were extraordinary in some ways. Sandusky was promoted to assistant professor of intercollegiate athletics in 1975, in the days when coaches also were teachers. However, he remained in that lower rank throughout his career, never becoming a tenured associate professor.

Penn State has long cast itself as embodying the highest standards of personal conduct coupled with academic excellence, as captured in its school song: “May no act of ours bring shame to one heart that loves thy name.” And few bled the school's blue and white colors more than Sandusky, who earned his bachelor's and master's degrees there and began his Nittany Lions coaching career in 1969.In retirement, Penn State football continued to play a big role in Sandusky's life; he just wasn't pacing the sidelines at games.He received celebrity treatment from adoring fans and football faithful at home games, where he watched from a special Beaver Stadium box “almost like being an ambassador to Penn State,” said Richeal, Sandusky's co-author.It was there in plain sight, prosecutors say, that Sandusky built relationships with the boys he would later attack. It was there that he was still regarded with awe as part of the Penn State family and part of a community that proudly separated itself from the rest of college athletics.Paterno ruled, and preferred handling problems internally.“He was a tougher taskmaster” than others at the university, his wife said. “Anyone who knows Joe knows he doesn't put up with anything. No one wants to be in Joe's dog house.”Vicky Triponey was Penn State's standards and conduct officer when she wrote an e-mail about the coach on Aug. 12, 2005, that became a controversy when she released it after Sandusky's arrest.Her e-mail said Paterno was “insistent he knows best how to discipline his players ... and their status as a student when they commit violations of our standards should NOT be our concern ... and I think he was saying we should treat football players different from other students in this regard.”She continued: “Coach Paterno would rather we NOT inform the public when a football player is found responsible for committing a serious violation of the law and/or our student codes, despite any moral or legal obligation to do so.”When Triponey was called last week for comment about the reaction to her note, her husband explained that she isn't talking publicly about the e-mail anymore. He said she had received a letter from a Penn State lawyer taking issue with her characterizations.“It flies in the face of transparency,” said Robert Meacham, Triponey's husband, especially coming from a university that has pledged a new openness in the aftermath of the Sandusky scandal.Former Centre County District Attorney Michael Madeira, who referred the 2008 case to the state attorney general's office because his wife's brother was Sandusky's adopted son, recounted times when he pursued charges against athletes and didn't get much support from Penn State.“I can't say I was ever obstructed. But there were times when you knew you were going it alone,” he said. “It would have been nice to get support from the university, broadly, and I didn't always feel that way. ... It's amazing how many times people just happened to look the other way.”