The hearing featured two hours of testimony from Mike McQueary, the former Penn State graduate assistant who, in 2002, claims to have witnessed Sandusky raping a boy in the football locker room showers. While what McQueary saw – and said – is being challenged, one thing we know is that no Penn State official called the police in 2002.
No, the alarm wasn’t sounded until six years later, when a high school student courageously went to his principal and said he was victimized by Sandusky. He is referred to in the grand jury summary as Victim No. 1, not because he was the first to be victimized but because he was the first to come forward.
As a result, there is now a total of 10 alleged victims and 50 charges of abuse pending against Sandusky. (And if the allegations are true, it strains credulity to believe there are only 10 victims.)
But where would we be without Victim No. 1? That’s what I kept thinking while reading minute-by-minute tweets on the preliminary hearing for former athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz.
As everyone now knows, McQueary saw something on that Friday night. He told head coach Joe Paterno the next day. Paterno then reported to Curley, and subsequently McQueary met with Curley and Schultz – a meeting McQueary said lasted only 10 to 12 minutes. So what did McQueary say?
He testified that he told Curley and Schultz: “What I had seen was extremely sexual, extremely wrong,” according to the media reports.
“I would have said that Jerry was in there in very close proximity with a boy with his arms wrapped around him,” McQueary said, according to the Harrisburg Patriot-News. “I would have said that it was extremely sexual and that some type of intercourse was going on.”
Thomas Harmon, a Penn State campus policeman, testified that he had told Schultz about an alleged incident involving Sandusky in 1998.
John McQueary, father of Mike, also took the stand, testifying that Schultz told him in 2002 that there had been other allegations involving Sandusky, but that investigators never came up with anything they could “sink teeth into.”
Schultz’s grand jury testimony was also read at the hearing. Most significantly, he testified that although he knew police were involved in the 1998 incident, he didn’t contact them in 2002.
So what is the takeaway?
That Penn State police were aware of a report of abuse by Sandusky in 1998. The matter was referred to the district attorney, who declined to prosecute. Four years later, McQueary reported what he saw in the showers to the vice president in charge of campus police – a man who was in the loop on the claim just four years before. McQueary’s report should have sounded the alarm bells and led to a full investigation. It didn’t. Instead, six more years passed, and it wasn’t an adult who sounded the alarm. It was a young man who reported being victimized.
He has paid a price for his courage. Besides the personal emotional toll, he has been bullied for coming forward, so much so that he had to change high schools in his senior year.
Without that young man, the abuse might still be continuing. Once he came forward, others did likewise. Others, who, until that moment, were presumably suffering in silence.
We ought to take a moment and reflect upon how a brave young man confronted an alleged evildoer at a time when cowardly adults had simply closed their eyes and shut their mouths. The grown-ups at Penn State, it seems, can learn a lesson in personal responsibility from the children they are supposed to be protecting.
Michael Smerconish, who writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer, can be reached at smerconish.com.
