Nevertheless, the university Board of Trustees summarily dismissed him with a late-night phone call four days after Sandusky’s arrest. Paterno is accused of no wrongdoing, and in fact authorities have said he fulfilled his legal obligations by reporting to his superiors. Though he is not charged with a crime, Penn State president Graham Spanier was fired on Nov. It didn’t work out that way.”įormer athletic director Tim Curley and school vice president Gary Schultz face charges of perjury and failing to report suspected child abuse, based on their inaction.
“So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did.
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“I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was,” he said. It’s hard.” Almost as difficult for Paterno to answer is the question of why, after receiving a report in 2002 that Sandusky had abused a boy in the shower of Penn State’s Lasch Football Building, and forwarding it to his superiors, he didn’t follow up more aggressively. How Sandusky, 67, allegedly evaded detection by state child services, university administrators, teachers, parents, donors and Paterno himself remains an open question. If Sandusky is guilty, “I’m sick about it,” Paterno said. Jerry Sandusky, his former assistant coach at Penn State from 1969 to 1999, is charged with more than 50 counts of sexually abusing young boys over a 15-year period. “I know where I am.” This is where he is: wracked by radiation and chemotherapy, in a wheelchair with a broken pelvis, and “shocked and saddened” as he struggles to explain a breakdown of devastating proportions. “I’m not 31 years old trying to prove something to anybody,” he said. Paterno’s hope is that time will be his ally when it comes to judging what he built, versus what broke down. His hand showed a tremor, and a wig replaced his once-fine head of black hair. He sipped Pepsi over crushed ice from a cup. “If you go hungry, it’s your own fault,” Paterno likes to say.
In the middle of the table a Lazy Susan loaded with trays of cornbread and mashed potatoes spun by, swirling fast as the arguments. “I wanted to build up, not break down,” he said.Ĭrowded around the table were his three voluble sons, Scott, Jay, David, daughter Mary Kay, and his wife of 50 years, Sue, all chattering at once. Lung cancer has robbed him of the breath to say all that he wants to about the scandal he still struggles to comprehend, and which ended his career as head football coach at Penn State University. His voice sounded like wind blowing across a field of winter stalks, rattling the husks. All around him family members were shouting at each other, yet he was whispering. Joe Paterno sat in a wheelchair at the family kitchen table where he has eaten, prayed and argued for more than a halfcentury.
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