The Penn State Mess

By now the sickening details of the Penn State Football child sex abuse scandal have become well known. Jerry Sandusky, the team's legendary defensive coach has been charged with multiple acts of rape and sodomy on boys as young as ten years old. The alleged abuse went on for years as Sandusky was able to bring in a steady stream of new recruits through his foundation, The Second Mile.

Set up with the goal of helping young fatherless and/or at-risk boys, Sandusky also allegedly used it as a pipeline to bring boys into his orbit for the purpose of gratifying his own sexual desires.

It is a terrible story of weakness, perversion and betrayal, of good men failing young men because they couldn't believe one of their own was a monster.

Unless the world has conspired to charge an innocent man with unspeakable crimes, Sandusky's future includes a long, long prison sentence.

But there remain serious questions about what Penn State officials knew and when they knew it.

Two men have been charged with perjury in the case for allegedly lying to the grand jury investigating the matter. Athletic director Tom Curley and finance officer Gary Schultz have been charged based on the testimony an Assistant Coach named Mike McQueary who, in 2002, claimed to have witnessed Sandusky assaulting a boy in the showers of a Penn State locker room.

At the time McQueary was a 28-year-old Graduate Assistant (GA). He told the grand jury that he witnessed Sandusky naked in the shower having anal sex with a boy about 10 years old. He'd returned to the locker room to pick up some film and drop of some sneakers, when he heard strange noises coming from the shower. When he looked in he saw Sandusky behind the boy and the boy pressed up against the wall.

According to what McQueary told the grand jury, he was "shocked" and both the victim and Sandusky saw him before he left the lockerroom "distraught." He went home and called his father, who told him to call coach Joe Paterno. And that's what he did, the next day.

According to the grand jury report McQueary told Paterno what he had seen. What it doesn't say is just how he described what he had seen. Paterno testified that he reported the alleged incident to Curley describing that Sandusky had been seen in the lockerroom "fondling on doing something of a sexual nature" to a boy.

Here's the question: Is that how McQueary described what he saw to Paterno? Did he leave out the most grosteque details? Furthermore when he was interviewed by Curley later, how specific was he about what he witnessed. Because both Curley and and Schultz deny that McQueary ever mentioned "anal sex."

This much is certain neither Paterno, Curley nor Schultz did enough to find out what happened. But it's McQueary's behavior that is the most questionable in my mind. Here he claims to be a witness to a sexual assault on a child as it was happening and what does he do; he walks away. He leaves.

How does he not intervene? How does he not rescue the kid? And immediately report the whole thing to the police. What he witnessed was a crime, and among the worst that an adult can visit on a child. And he stands there, watches, and leaves?

Of course, his father should have told him to go right to the police. If he told Paterno the details of what he saw, that's what Paterno should have told him to do. But the report of the grand jury suggests he told Paterno something less stark and more vague.

I will say this, I would hate to be him when Curley and Schultz go on trial. Just imagine what their lawyers will do to him on the witness stand.

For the rest of his life he will be the coward who saw a 10-year-old boy getting raped in a shower who did nothing to stop it.

No doubt, Curley and Schultz were in willful denial about what they had on their hands. No doubt they didn't want to believe that St. Jerry Sandusky was a child predator. Neither they, nor Paterno, acted in the best interests of children, especially when you consider all the boys that Sandusky got his hands on between 2002 and the present.

Whether Curley and Schultz are guilty of perjury is another matter.