Authorities had ample Red flags over fifteen years: Sandusky victims in their own words

First of a series by Bill Keisling

EDITOR : Author / reporter Bill Keisling spent three weeks reviewing the  3000 page transcript  from the recent Jerry Sandusky trial .  The testimony from victims and witnesses provide much new and often shocking information.  This is but the first installment of his excerpts and comments.

Reporter and publisher spent a recent afternoon reflecting upon hundreds of hours of research, interviews and investigation compiled over the past year.

Nothing seems to satisfactorily explain the hesitancy on the part of so many for so long to prosecute Jerry Sandusky.

Nor does concern about the revelation of pedophilia by a retired Penn State faculty member who had been a football defensive coach seem to be reason enough for what followed, most notably attorney general  Tom Corbett’s stone walling the prosecution and later governor Tom Corbett taking the lead in the  firing of folk hero Coach Joe Paterno, especially in such a callous manner.

We puzzle over Paterno’s heartfelt but vague apology and his silence in the face of what seemed excessive, at times near hysterical criticism.

Then there is the  National Collegiate Athletic Association’s threat of an unprecedented “death penalty” for Penn State football and $60 million fines and extraordinary sanctions affecting both past and future of the football team. Why strip victories from  past football teams? How were they involved?

All were imposed without a normal investigation, due process, hearings and appeal.  All represented a huge aggrandizement of NCAA power over actions of a university’s administration, as opposed to traditional sports matters.  Yet criticism from members was mute.

This is made all the more puzzling because of Penn State’s and the NCAA’s uncritical embrace of the obviously inadequate and flawed Freeh Report as submitted to the public.

We pondered over the fate of the missing and presumably dead Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar.

Finally, we note the Penn State Board of Director’s rush to accept draconian punishments in order to put the matter behind them.  (It evokes how teams hurry to snap the ball for the next play lest the opponents have time to  throw a red flag to appeal a favorable close decision by a referee.)

We appreciate that some things may be better left untold. For example, who was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Perhaps the answer, if know and made public, might have triggered a Third World War.

The first installment of excerpts from the trial transcript follows below. Judge for yourself!

Robert Field, Publisher

Added 02 /01 / ’13:   ESPN article “AP study on college football players should leave no illusion about steroids”

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Afterwards many close to former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky would say they’d seen no “red flags” to indicate that he was sexually abusing an unknown number of the thousands Second Mile kids under his care and keep.

In reality, there were many red flags that those in positions of responsibility simply chose to ignore, or cover up.

Over decades Sandusky used Second Mile programs and Penn State University facilities to lure, select, and molest his young victims.

Over time, two prosecutors — Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar, and Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett — would be alerted by police to some of these red flags.

It was ultimately the job of these two prosecutors to investigate further, and to stop Sandusky.

It turns out that both prosecutors made mistakes in judgment bad enough to end their public careers.  By allowing Sandusky’s behavior to continue, prosecutors Gricar and Corbett badly erred and placed unknown numbers of children at risk.

There are many outstanding mysteries surrounding the Jerry Sandusky scandal. One of the most important questions is this:

Why did the apparently late Ray Gricar and AG Tom Corbett ignore police warnings and not do enough, soon enough, to help and protect Jerry Sandusky’s young victims?

1. Matt 1986 to 1996

Matt, like the other victims, met Jerry Sandusky through the Second Mile.

In his book Touched, Sandusky writes that Matt was seven or eight when he started with the Second Mile. Matt, Sandusky wrote, “became an instant challenge for me.”

Matt testified that Sandusky began molesting him when he was eight years old, in 1986.

Matt would be molested in the showers at Penn State, and in Sandusky’s home, while wrestling, and in bed.

“With like the showering, with the hugging, with the rubbing, with the just talking to me. The way he spoke. And just, the whole interaction with him alone. Anything, anytime we were alone just those interactions,” Matt recalls.

Sandusky would begin by “blowing raspberries” on Matt’s stomach, and then move his hand down to the boy’s genitals.

“If you were pretending you were asleep and you were touched or rubbed in some way, you could just act like you were rolling over in your sleep so you could change positions,” Matt recounts.

Young Matt would hide behind a bedroom door when Sandusky arrived to pick him up, his birth mother would say. He would beg his mother to tell Sandusky he wasn’t home.

Matt’s mother, Debra Long, says she finally tired of Sandusky’s controlling behavior. In the fall of 1994 she tried to stop Sandusky’s visits with her son. But Sandusky kept taking Matt out of school, without her knowledge or consent.

In December 1994 Matt set a fire to a barn. He was remanded to a juvenile detention facility, and probation. On January 6, 1995 officials placed Matt in foster care — with the Sandusky. Once under their foster care, Jerry and Dottie Sandusky would try to isolate Matt from his birth mother, Long says.

Matt’s mom tried unsuccessfully to fight the foster home placement with the Sanduskys.

“Jerry told Matt that he had a judge ready to sign the order and nobody could stop it,” Long told the Associated Press in December 2011. “He told Matt before we ever went to court that I wouldn’t win against him. Matt came right to me and told me, he said, ‘Mom, Jerry said you wouldn’t win against him.’“

Matt’s mother at first was limited to spending a half-day a month with her victimized son. Her lawyer repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, petitioned the court for greater access to her child. But now Matt was almost completely under Jerry Sandusky’s control.

One night Matt tried running away to his paternal grandparents’ house. Sandusky drove over to the grandparents’ home and confronted Matt’s grandfather, Harold Heichel, who hid the boy.

In March 1996 Matt and his girlfriend — who was also staying at the Sanduskys’ house of horrors — fled to a motel and tried to commit suicide by eating 80 to 100 aspirin tablets.

“I know that I really wanted to die at that point in time,” Matt says.

After the attempted suicide, Matt’s probation officer wrote, “The probation department has some serious concerns about the juvenile’s safety and his current progress in placement with the Sandusky family.

Nonetheless, state child welfare and probation officials recommended that Matt stay with the Sanduskys, and the county judge in the case agreed.

When he turned 18, the Sanduskys would legally adopt Matt.

By this time, in 1996, Matt came to believe that he was being spared from Sandusky’s molestations because the coach was “transitioning” to other young victims.

2. Dustin  1995

Dustin, from Milesburg, Pennsylvania, was born in October 1984.

He says, “I had some problems in school and The Second Mile was (geared) more towards troubled kids and to kind of get them to do more team-based things and, you know, just get you to be a little bit more social. I was … actually was told by my (elementary school) guidance counselor to go into the program in about ’95.”

At age 11 Dustin was enrolled at a Second Mile camp at Penn State University in State College. The camp was held over the summer. Dustin, like the other Second Mile campers, was given a room in a dorm on the university campus.

There Dustin met Jerry Sandusky.

“I met him at the natatorium, which we were all taken to during one of the summer camps, and we were all kind of just playing around at the pool,” Dustin recalls. “And I just remembered getting out of the pool, being approached by Mr. Sandusky, and him asking me if I was interested in going to Penn State games, if I liked Penn State, things like that. And I said yes.

“I think I was a little bit too young to be, you know, a real big fan but I thought it was pretty cool.

“Well, (Sandusky) actually had called my mother and talked to her, asked her permission to come pick me up. And then at that point started picking me up, and I would stay at his house. Generally it was Friday nights going into Saturday.

“And then when I would stay at his house, some of the things that would happen, we would pull in the driveway and he had this habit of putting his right hand on my left leg and squeezing. He would squeeze around my knee cap and sometimes would squeeze to the point where I would just about cry out in pain. It hurt.

“And then eventually (Sandusky) would start to work his hand up my leg. If I was wearing shorts, his hand would actually go inside my shorts toward my groin area, and there was actually a time when I was wearing pants and I was wearing a belt and his hand actually went inside the pants and the belts and touched my penis. … I remember him putting his hand up my shorts several times.

“I think I would cry out. But my primary reaction was since I was in the passenger’s seat, I would try to scoot as far over to the right as I could. I didn’t want to upset Mr. Sandusky in any way. So I just kind of tried to do my best to get away and to not make him angry, I guess.”

Like many of Sandusky’s victims, Dustin liked to go to the Penn State football games. And he enjoyed hanging out at the gleaming Penn State campus. He feared if he protested too much to Sandusky about the touching, he would miss out on the football games and other things.

In this way, Penn State football, and Second Mile activities on the PSU campus, became important tools for Sandusky’s seductions.

“My home life at that time, we didn’t go out and do a whole lot,” Dustin explains. “On the weekends we would go on family gatherings on Sunday and that was about it. I didn’t really get to go out and do a whole lot. I wasn’t exposed to a whole lot. So going to games was very, very special to me.”

Dustin tried to minimize the abuse by staying out of Sandusky’s reach. In this period, 1995, he says he soon learned that Sandusky, while driving his car, would put his hand on whichever child was beside him in the car.

“I just remember trying to scoot over as far as I could,” Dustin explains. “But also it would occur when there were other kids in the car, too. It was pretty much seemed, like, whoever was in the passenger’s seat or in the middle seat behind him. So once we were, you know, in groups, went to games and things, I started to try to get into the back of the vehicle as far as I could so that it wouldn’t be me.”

From this we learn, as far back as 1995, Sandusky already had many other, yet still-unknown, victims. By this time thousands of kids had been involved in Second Mile programs at the Penn State campus, and other locations.

Sandusky as far back as 1995 would take Dustin to the Sandusky’s State College home, where the boy would spend nights and weekends.

Sometimes, when they were alone at Sandusky’s house, Sandusky would attempt to wrestle Dustin in the basement.

“And that would only occur if I was the last person to be taken home. Say it was an afternoon game, Saturday nights we would all stay — we would all stay after and eat, kind of hang out. And then Jerry would sometimes take us home one by one, sometimes small groups. It varied a lot.

“But there was a couple times I was the last one there, and he would just kind of wrestle around with me. And it was very uncomfortable just because at that age I was very, very scrawny, very lean, and then Jerry was just — I don’t know three, four times my size it seemed, and I didn’t really understand what was going on.”

At bedtime the abuse would intensify.

“I remember when I would spend the night,” Dustin says. “I spent the night in the bedroom upstairs. If you were to go into Jerry’s house, you go up the flight of stairs on the left side. There was a spare room up there. I’m not sure if it was air mattress or a futon but it was some kind of mattress close to the ground. And whenever I would go to sleep at night, I had a habit of kind of reading myself to sleep. I was into Calvin and Hobbes comics, Far Side, getting into things like that and I think I was even starting getting into Goose Bumps which was popular at the time.

“I remember I always had mesh athletic shorts that were given to me to wear by Jerry. I had never, that I can recall, taken them home, taking them with me. And I’m not sure what exactly I did with them, and I think that I just left them in the hallway for laundry and then that was it. But I never wore them home or took them with me. They always stayed there.

“But basically I remember laying down and Jerry coming in behind me, laying his front to my back pressed up against me and sort of — I like to use the word cuddle but it was more like him just wrapping himself around me, just sort of, you know, holding me tightly. I’m not sure any other words I could use to describe it. “

As with the other boys, there were plenty of red flags. But, as with the other kids, those warnings were ignored by Pennsylvania child welfare officials, and judges.

At these times, in the bedroom, Sandusky usually wore a “T-shirt and mesh shorts or sweat pants, sometimes without a shirt,” Dustin says.

“To this day I’m sort of repulsed by chest hair now, and I just remember the feeling of it pressed up against my back and looking at it that it just, for whatever reason, it just made me hate it. I don’t know. I just have this thing now where I just hate chest hair.

“I remember a few times — I’m not sure exactly how many. I think it was just two or three times that whenever he was laying pressed up against my back, he would bring his arms around my front and sort of kind of caress my nipples/chest area. And that’s another thing that now I cannot stand anybody going near. That’s the reason why.

“I remember that and then there was also an occasion when he turned me over and was — I don’t know if I would call it blowing or kissing on my stomach but something along those lines. I don’t really have words to describe it. I didn’t really understand it at the time.”

“…That’s the point when I would say, okay, I need to go to sleep.

“And basically I would say I’m ready to go to sleep. I am going to read myself to sleep now. Could you please go? And I need to go to sleep, and then typically he would.”

Already at this early date, 1995, Sandusky’s methods of abuse seem well established and entrenched. The abuse, even then, involved the misuse of Penn State facilities to help lure his young Second Mile victims.

“A couple times we would go to Holuba Hall, throw the football around,” Dustin explains.

“(Holuba Hall is) basically an indoor practice facility for the football team. We would go, obviously, when it wasn’t in use. They had, you know, field goal nets. They had a couple of half football fields, just footballs and, you know, just equipment for practicing with. And we would go to Holuba Hall and throw the football around. It became a practice that myself and some of the other kids that went to games that at one point we would actually go to Holuba Hall and all play pickup games together while Jerry was coaching. And then we would just throw the ball around and go to the game right after that.

“Then also we would go to the (Lasch) building across from Holuba Hall where the showers (were).

“We were at Holuba Hall throwing the football around. Now, I don’t think it was anything strenuous but he (Sandusky) had said that we were sweaty. We needed to take a shower before we go back and turn in. I really didn’t understand it.

“I think I might have said something along the lines of I didn’t think I was sweaty. I didn’t think I needed a shower. He kind of just pushed the issue and said we need to take a shower, you know. ‘You’re sweaty. I’m sweaty. We need to take a shower.’

“I kind of just thought that it was a little odd. But I wasn’t real sure how to handle it and, again, I didn’t really want to make him angry.

“So I just went with it. And he took his clothes off. I took my clothes off and got into the shower. He had turned on the showerhead beside me, and I had gotten in the shower with him. I remember him trying to basically shampoo my hair and shampoo my back shoulders at which point I slid down another shower stall and tried to get away.

“I don’t remember the showers being that long. I just remember coming out of the showers then and he had tried to dry me off and I — he started to dry off my back and then I said, no, I can dry myself. And I took the towel and dried myself off.”

Eleven years old, Dustin had never before showered with an adult.

He says he felt “extremely uncomfortable about it, but I just — I went along with it. I didn’t know really what else to do.”

With nowhere, and no one, to turn to for help, the helpless 11 year old suffered through several showers (at least five showers he says) with Sandusky.

“It was the same type thing. It was (Sandusky) trying to soap me up. I would move away. There came a point where he actually came up behind me. Pressed his front to my back. Put me in what I call bear hug which was basically he put his arms around me and squeezed. Again, just basically to the point where it would physically hurt. And then would actually lift me up off the ground which seemed playfully. I’m not real sure why. And then (he) would try to drop me off and I would push him away and I would do it myself.

“I remember him saying something along the lines of let me wash your hair for you, something like that. And then when he did the bear hug in the shower and picked me up, I don’t remember him saying anything. I just remember him sort of grunting. I don’t remember any words in particular.”

At times in the shower, when Sandusky would hug him, “His entire front touched my back side,” Dustin remembers.

Eventually Sandusky seemed to tire of Dustin.

“It was just — I thought I did something to upset him,” Dustin remembers. “It was just very, very confusing to me.

“And there was a point when there was a concert that came up, I believe in ’99, and I was into the kind of music that was going on for that concert. And I had found out through some of the other kids bragging that they were going to it and they got free tickets from Jerry. And at that point I was a little bit upset that I wasn’t offered to go, and it seemed like from that point, when I started thinking about it, that he kind of had favorites and that there were people that got, I guess, special treatment.”

Matt says, “I remember going to his son’s, Matt, high school football games at State High. I went with Jerry and (Jerry’s wife) Dottie actually. Went to a couple of those.

“I remember getting picked up at my parents’ house in Milesburg on Friday nights. Then we would go to his son’s (Matt’s) football game.”

Little did Dustin know or understand that Matt Sandusky was another of Jerry’s victims.

3. Brett  1997

Brett was 13 years old when he met Jerry Sandusky in 1997. He was a scrawny 90 pounds, and was “not very big.”

He lived for a while with his grandmother in Show Shoe. His mother had remarried, and he didn’t get along too well with his stepfather, so he’d stay with his grandmother.

At Mountaintop Elementary School in 1996 he’d gotten into “trouble a lot.” His school guidance counselor referred him to a Second Mile soccer camp held in Reading, PA

The next summer, in 1997, he went to a Second Mile overnight camp on the Penn State campus in State College. That’s where he met Sandusky.

“I had a roommate,” he says. “(We) were all paired off in the dorms. We had two beds.”

“The roommate that I was staying with knew Jerry Sandusky somehow, and he had came to the room basically to talk to him, see him, and I was there and that’s how I ended up meeting him.”

Sandusky, he says, “found out that I lived in Centre County and then told me what he did and he was this coach for Penn State and all this kind of thing. And just wanted to know if I would be interested in doing, you know, anything at all. Just going to play some basketball sometime or anything like that. I said sure.”

Not long afterward Sandusky called and invited Brett to a picnic at Sayer’s Dam. “Jerry came and he picked me up.” Brett’s car ride was similar to Dustin’s.

It was “weird,” Brett remembers. “It happened right off the bat, too, the very first time that I had ever rode in a car with him. He would put his hand on my leg. Like, basically like, I was his girlfriend, you know what I mean? Like, sit it there, you know, kind of grab sometimes, do this kind of thing. It freaked me out like extremely bad. I could not stand it.

“That would happen almost every time that I was in the car. I would brush that off. I never would say anything, you know what I mean? But I would push it away. I would brush it off. Keep my arm there if I could, that kind of a thing. But after a little while with me not paying attention, it would be right back. That just drove me nuts.”

Like that, Sandusky drove Brett to Sayer’s Dam. “I met his family. You know, (we did) the normal thing you do on a family picnic: ate out, those kinds of things. And then at one point we decided to go down to the beach. There’s a little beach there. And just, you know, play around in the water.

“He was throwing kids up into the air. Just like you do, you know, with a little kid. Pick him up and throw him into the air but he was trying to — he was grabbing more like around your buttocks area and trying to throw you. (It was) kind of like he was having trouble getting a good grip. He’d basically be brushing over your genitals and then he would throw you

“I didn’t think much about it right then. It happened, like, maybe twice and that was about it. I just swam away a little bit.”

A week or two went by, and then Sandusky telephoned to ask Brett if he “wanted to so something, like play racquetball or basketball, (or) work out.”

Sandusky picked Brett up and his grandmother’s house and took him to a building on Penn State’s campus.

“The only thing that was a little unsettling about it was we first went to the East Area Locker Room and got changed into shorts and a T-shirt and went and did the racquetball or whatever it was. I believe it was racquetball,” Brett says. “(We) played that and then came back and he said, you know, ‘Let’s get a shower.'”

“And at that time I had never showered with anybody in my life. I didn’t get showers at school. During gym class or whatever, some kids would go get a shower. I wouldn’t. I would just splash some water on my face. It was kind of weird to take showers in front of people.”

Brett showered with Sandusky in what the young man remembers as a coaches’ locker room. He says the abuse happened in both the old East Area Locker Room, and the newer Lasch Building shower room.

“He told me it was the coaches’ locker room. I had seen coaches in there.”

A week or two later he got another call from Sandusky.

“Same type thing,” Brett says. “It was either we’d go play racquetball or some basketball. Same exact deal. We would go back to the coaches’ locker room. Get changed. Go do whatever, and then come back and get a shower.”

Over the next two months or so, over the course of many showers (Brett remembers as many as 15 showers), Sandusky began to get physical.

“Kind of like play fighting, slapping around type thing. That’s how it basically started.

“The horsing around would lead to him starting a soap battle. There was soap dispensers beside each one of the showers, and he would pump his hand full of soap and basically throw it. You know, I thought it was a game. So I went along with it which eventually led to him getting a lot closer to me. Like, you know, bear hugging me, grappling me — grappling me up, these kind of things.

“After a little while, it led to him more like hugging and caressing me and him wanting me to, like, wash his body. He wouldn’t say it. He would just kind of like take his hand and wash his body. He would do the same to me.”

The 1997 football season began, and Coach Sandusky began taking Brett to Penn State games. Sandusky at this time was at the height of his career and reputation as a talented defensive coordinator for the Nittany Lions.

“Basically what would happen is usually he, Jerry, would come pick me up after school. I would already have my clothes and all that kind of thing ready because I had known, you know, at least a week before that I was going to a football game. And he would come pick me up from school.

“We would go back to his place and just hang out there throughout the day. Sometimes we’d go see the players or he had a meeting that he had to do. And I would stay at night at his house. And then on Saturday mornings we would wake up, eat breakfast, and then usually go to either pick up a few other kids, or go to Holuba Hall, and there would be other kids there that we had gotten. Jerry would go off to get ready for the football game. We would hang out there at Holuba Hall and play football until time for the game, and then we would walk across to the game.

“Usually we’d walk across to the tailgate party that his family was having, eat, and then go into the game.

“The first couple games I went to I sat with his family up in the stands.” Then Sandusky began to allow Brett to sit on the sidelines. It was a big deal for the boy to sit out in front of tens of thousands of cheering fans, a guest of the famous coach, and watch the game.

“I was a mascot, you know what I mean?” The players were “extremely nice to me.”

“Oh, I loved it,” Brett says. “At this time Penn State was very good.”

It was “a huge deal” Brett says to go to the games.

He “loved it,” he says. “Even to this day, I’m a hard core college football fan. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It didn’t take very long to be in that atmosphere to enjoy it.”

During this ’97 football season, however, between games, Sandusky kept taking Brett to the shower. Before long Sandusky began forcing the boy into sexual acts. He’d place the boy’s hands on his body.

“Basically my hands touched his penis, and every other part of his body, pretty much,” Brett says.

Brett was afraid to complain or tell anyone, fearful that Sandusky would no longer take him to the football games, and other places.

“I didn’t want to lose the other things (which) were, you know, nice. I didn’t want to lose that.”

So the abuse intensified.

“After a while the soap battles would lead more to him wrestling around and maneuvering me onto the ground,” Brett says. “And once that would happen — now, I’m a little kid. There’s not, you know, (a thing) that I could do. He’s a big guy.

“He would basically maneuver either himself to where I would be between his legs and his penis would be in my face or he would maneuver himself, like, down where his head was between my legs and, like, kiss on my thighs, things like that. And if it was the other way around, he would have his penis in my face, like, rubbing on it and he would get erect. He would try to, not every time, but, you know, just sort of sneakily try to put it in my mouth. … It would get, you know, more to where he’s actually sticking his penis in my mouth, you know. There’s even a few occasions where he ejaculates.”

Afterwards, Sandusky would never speak about what happened.

Sometimes, in the shower, they’d hear the sounds of other coaches coming into the locker room. They could hear the four buttons of the lock to the door being opened.

“You could hear it. It would be like click, click, click, click and then you could open the door.” If they were on the floor of the shower, Brett says, they would have time to stop what they were doing, and “jump right up.”

Warned by the sounds of the lock, they’d jump up from their “wrestling match” on the floor of the shower when the other coaches came into the locker room.

“Nothing was going on when they came in but, yes. I have been in there when many different coaches have come in. I knew most of them by that time. There was Ganter, Bradley, oh, man. Anderson, Sarra.”

Brett says he would say hello to the other coaches in the locker room, and they’d say hello to him.

When the new Lasch Building shower room was opened, Brett says, “they put in a sauna as well. So once we started just going to that locker room, it turned from the shower thing to … work out, play racquetball, (and) we would go to the sauna then, and the things would basically start there. And then have a shower afterwards.”

The sexual abuse, Brett says, “started happening more and more frequent to almost every time that I’m over there. (And) I’m over there, you know, two to three times a week.”

The abuse, he says, went on “for years.”

“At some point,” Brett says, after the 1997 football season, Sandusky “attempted to slide a finger in my butt. And on another occasion he had attempted to actually penetrate me with his penis.”

When Sandusky tried that, Brett says, he “got out of the shower.

Brett estimates Sandusky forced him to perform oral sex “40 times, at least.”

Kids at school meanwhile, Brett says, were jealous that he got to attend Penn State football games on the sidelines with Jerry Sandusky.

“I’m in high school at this point and people are jealous,” he says. “I mean, that’s the way that I look at it. … So they want to tease you, you know. They’re making up things like, oh, you know, ‘you’re being molested by Jerry and you’re his little butt buddy’ and all these kind of things, you know.

“And you know how kids are. They got to pick at each other. It really is happening but I have to pretend like it’s really not happening to everybody else.”

As the abuse continued Sandusky began to reward Brett with increasingly greater perks, which in turn fanned greater jealously among Brett’s schoolmates. He’d take the boy on trips, and take him along to the luxury Toftrees resort in State College, to stay with the team on nights before home games.

Brett even ended up in an issue of Sports Illustrated.

One day Sandusky told Brett that the nation’s premier sports magazine was doing a story on the original Second Mile foster home.

Sandusky had founded the Second Mile some 20 years earlier, in 1977. He used the proceeds from his football book Developing Linebackers as seed money, and cajoled others in the Penn State community to contribute. He organized “celebrity” golf tournaments that soon would become annual events. In 1981 the Second Mile charity used the resulting $64,000 to purchase a two-story house on twenty acres of land on Bernal Road, not far from Beaver Stadium. The plan, on the surface, at least, was to turn the house and grounds into a foster home.

The next year, in 1982, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania licensed the Second Mile as a foster care agency. By October 1982, three foster kids — all boys — would be living in the house.

Twenty years later, in the late 1990s, Sandusky told Brett that Sports Illustrated wanted to do a story on Second Mile and the Bernal Road foster home, and all the good works that were done there. He asked Brett if he wanted to have his picture in Sports Illustrated.

“Of course, you know,” Brett says, “I’m jumping all over that.”

Before long Coach Sandusky even promised Brett that he could one day play football for Penn State.

“He even said to me that, you know, I could have a spot on the team. He could get that.” Brett was still a scrawny kid and, in retrospect, it seems ludicrous that he could have been a college football player.

Sandusky took to letting Brett wear the football uniform of Penn State linebacker LaVar Arrington.

What Brett didn’t know at this time was that Sandusky was also sexually molesting Matt, Dustin and other boys.

Even so, Brett got an inkling that something was wrong with Matt’s relationship to his adoptive dad.

One time, Brett says, “Me and (Jerry) and his son, Matt, had gone to play racquetball. And after we were done with playing racquetball, we came back to the locker room. It was the same thing, you know, we went there first to get changed. When we came back, Matt got undressed and went into the shower. And then me and Jerry came in. We were in there maybe — I don’t know. You know, a minute or two, and that’s when (Jerry) started, you know, pumping his hand full of soap and threw it. At that point Matt got up and left. Not got up but just, you know, shut off the shower and left.”

Brett also didn’t know this: a few months after the 1997 football season, in early 1998, Sandusky would be caught in the Lasch Building shower room with two other Second Mile boys.

Sandusky would be questioned by police, and an investigator with the state child welfare office.

Had the police, the investigators, and the district attorney dug even a little bit deeper, Sandusky would have been exposed, and the abuse of Brett, Matt, Dustin and the other boys would have stopped.

Unfortunately for the kids, that’s not the way it happened.

(To be continued)