Part 1 of this series, featuring the stories of Matt, Dustin, and Brett, can be read here.
Part 2, featuring the stories of Zach, Brandon, Ryan and Jason can be read here
Commentary will follow in the series.
Unknown victim 2000
In the fall of 2000 Ron Petrosky worked as a janitor at the Penn State main campus in State College.
“At that time I was what they call a grade nine janitor,” he says. “I worked in the football building, (called the) Lasch Building. I would clean the showers at night, take out the garbage, shampoo all the carpets when they needed shampooed, and clean the windows. I was throughout the building, like, all night — different times in the night. That’s what my job was.
“It was in 2000, the fall of 2000, during football season. (The) football players were away. It was before a home game. Usually they left Thursday or Friday night before the games. If I recall right, I believe they were going to play Ohio State that weekend.
“So the building was empty. It just had five guys and the janitors and that. My job was to clean the showers.
“At the football building they change their shifts three times a year because of football, of course. But when this incident occurred we were on, I believe, it was 7:00 to 3:00 in the morning”
Several other men worked the late shift with Petrosky, including a janitor named Jim Calhoun.
“Jim was a part-time worker”, Petrosky explains. “They call it wage payroll, and he was there — I think he was retired or just about ready to retire. So it was just supplement income until he reached retirement age.”
“Jim Calhoun was what they call ‘them gray tents.’ They go in and pull the garbage and clean up the locker room. They cleaned the toilets, the urinals.
“My job was to go in and do the showers after they were done.
“So this particular night, Jim, he was already in the assistant coaches’ locker room. I went in to hook up the hose.
“I came down the hall with my cleaning stuff. I had a cart. I had my cleaning stuff on the cart with the hose. I would always go in and hook up the hose. There was a hose hookup under the sink. So that’s what I did first.
“When I entered the room I could hear the showers running. That really thrown me off because a lot of times players or coaches would leave the showers run after they had already showered.
“And when I hooked the hose up, I could hear Jim (Calhoun) in the toilet area cleaning. He was already in there. He was in cleaning the toilets in the stalls. I think there were three or four stalls there. So I didn’t think much of that.
“So I hooked the hose up. I started walking over towards the shower. I just about went in the shower, and I could see two sets of legs in there. To me it looked like there was one set of hairy legs and one set of skinny legs.
“So I dropped my hose and just backed out.
“I went back outside in the hall area, and continued to mix my chemicals to clean.
“I figured, how long does it take to take a shower? I was going to wait until whoever was in there come out and then I would finish my cleaning.”
After a few minutes, as Petrosky stood waiting in the hall, “Jerry Sandusky and a small boy” came out of the shower room, he says. “Both of their hair was wet and they were carrying gym bags.
“I said, ‘good evening, coach.’ If I ever see him, I call him coach.
“They exited the door and then took a right, went out the long hallway towards double doors where the stairs go up to coaches’ offices and that.
“About three-quarters of the way down, Jerry took the boy’s hand as they walked out through the doors. The doors closed and then, of course, I didn’t see them again.
“I finished (mixing) the chemicals,” Petrosky continues. “I grabbed my bottle and I started in the door and Jim (Calhoun) was coming out of the (shower and toilet area.)
“There’s double doors there before you go in to the locker and I met Jim (Calhoun) in between the two doors, between the hall and where you entered the locker area.
“And I could see he was upset. His face was white. His hands was trembling. I thought it was a medical condition. I said, ‘Jim, what’s wrong?’
“And this is how he said it to me. He said, ‘Buck,’ — that’s my nickname. He said. ‘Buck, I just witnessed something in there I’ll never forget the rest of my life.’
“I said, ‘What are you talking about, Jim?’
“He said, ‘That man that just left, he had the boy up against the shower wall licking on his privates.’
“I said, ‘Are you sure that man that just left?’
“He said, ‘I’m sure.’
“I said, ‘You know who that is?’ I said, ‘That’s Jerry Sandusky.’
“He didn’t know who he was but he knows what he seen that night.
“I asked Jim if he wanted to call somebody or, you know–. He said he didn’t. He was afraid I guess and so I calmed him down.
“We went down the hall. There was a meeting room off to the right. He was crying and shaking. Jim was so shook up, I called for other people. The other guys come down from upstairs.
“He told the other guys the same story then.
“He told Jay and them, he said he seen Sandusky holding that boy up licking on his privates.
“He said, ‘He was sucking on his dick,‘ is what he said.
“We thought he was going to have a heart attack. We kept people with him all night throughout the night, and made sure he was all right.
“We had to finish our jobs, of course, but it was hard to concentrate after that.
Petrosky says he saw Jerry Sandusky later that night, in separate and strange circumstances.
“Between probably 10:00 and 11:30 I was out cleaning the windows towards the coaches’ office,” Petrosky recalls. “There’s a balcony there. I could see out into the parking lot.
“I seen Jerry Sandusky drive real slow by. It was about 10:00, 10:30, 11:30.”
Later that night, “almost at quitting time,” Petrosky says he saw Sandusky again.
“Quitting time was three. So it was 2:00, 2:30.
“I was taking the garbage out. We stage it out there for the people in the morning to throw it in the dumpster. I seen him one more time drive real slow. He never got out of the car or nothing. He didn’t have the boy with him then.
Jim Calhoun didn’t work at Penn State too much longer as a janitor after the incident, Petrosky says.
Calhoun never reported the incident.
“No, he never did,” Petrosky says.
None of the men reported the incident.
Michal 2000 to 2001
In 1999 Michal was ten years old and living in State College with his parents and older brother when he first met Jerry Sandusky at a Second Mile overnight camp at Penn State.
His parents were Polish immigrants, and Michal was having difficulty speaking English. His guidance counselor at Park Forest Elementary School recommended the boy go to a Second Mile camp.
“Because I lived in a household where Polish was the prominent language,” he says, his guidance counselor “thought it would be a better idea for me to learn how to speak English with a bunch of kids over a summer camp.”
Activities at the camp included swimming, soccer, and football.
Then one night, he says. “There was a skit performed by Mr. Sandusky where he was a Polish gangster, and I’m Polish. I approached him and told him that I was Polish. And it was just cool to meet the camp director.
“He was like, ‘Oh, cool. I’m Polish, too.’ He said something in Polish but I don’t recall what he said.”
Sandusky’s Polish wasn’t very good, he says.
Sometime after the end of the first summer camp in 1999, he says, “I received a phone call at my parents’ home. I believe my mother picked up the first call. It was Jerry.
“He asked me if I wanted to go to some Penn State football games and hang out with kids and go throw the football with a bunch of other kids. I thought it was going to be a lot of fun.
“He came and picked me up at my house with a bunch of other kids in the vehicle.”
He fell into a routine at these games.
“We usually got dropped off by the indoor football field,” he says. “The older kids led us around to play football in the building and just mess around.
“Eventually we would go to a tailgate where we would have food before we went into the football game. I went to many over a few seasons.”
Sandusky would call the day before a game, and then pick up Michal the next morning.
In the car, he says, Sandusky “would usually reach over and put his hand on my left leg while he drove.”
“In some sense” this made Michal uncomfortable, he says, though it wasn’t totally strange to him. “My father would always squeeze my knee to help me relax because there’s a pressure point there.”
Another incident seemed stranger.
“We went to Reading once to a football game. It would have probably been 2000. I believe it was just him and I. I think it was an Albright Lions football game, and on the way down to Reading, he placed his hand on my thigh.”
Then one day in the summer of 2001, “my mother received a phone call and it was Jerry asking if he could talk with me,” he says. “He asked me if I wanted to go to the gym and work out.”
Sandusky picked up the boy and took him to a gym in “the building next to Holuba Hall on the Penn State campus.”
“There was a bunch of fitness equipment and I believe he put me on a treadmill type of unit, and we’re on it for a few minutes. And then he showed me how to do some chin-ups on a bar, but it wasn’t a chin-up bar. It was one of the things you pull down on your lap. And I wasn’t strong enough to pull it down. So I lifted myself up on it.”
This “workout” only lasted a “very short period of time,” and seemed to offer little physical benefit.
Suddenly Sandusky said, “‘Let’s go to the sauna.’ I said sure. I have heard of what a sauna was but I didn’t really know what the point of it was.
“We got undressed and we had just towels on,” Michal remembers. “We sat down in the sauna, and it was really hot. I was sitting there with my towel on, and Jerry had his towel and then he parted the towel out.
“He sat down on his towel and he sat back and exposed himself to me.”
This made Michal uncomfortable, he says. “It felt like forever. It was really hot.”
Afterwards, he says, “We left the sauna, and we went down like a long hallway and ended up in the shower area. And he hung up his towel and turned on a bunch of the showers.
“I went to the far end of the shower. I stood under the showerhead and I tried to face the wall as much as I could. I kept looking over my shoulder, and I saw that he was standing a few feet away from me but it was just uncomfortable and I could just — I felt like he was looking at me.
“I noticed that his penis was enlarged but I didn’t understand the significance of it back then and just stood in my corner area. And I noticed he started coming in my direction and he threw some soap at me and started lathering my shoulders.
“And I crept forward a little bit more as did he, and I felt his body on my back, and I kept lurching forward but I didn’t have any more — anywhere to go, and I just felt his penis on my back.
“I kind of like turned away and I felt his arm move forward and he touched my hip, my genitalia. And then he took my hand and he placed it on his.
“That was — I don’t know how long that was but I was able to just round around the corner and get away. I just remember just drying off. That’s pretty much it.”
Sandusky “was upset with me,” Michal says. “Because he didn’t talk to me. Just no eye contact.”
Sandusky drove the boy home. After that, Michal says, Sandusky never again called.
And Michal never went to another football game with Jerry Sandusky.
Unknown victim 2001
Assistant Penn State football coach Mike McQueary recounts the following:
“I had gone to bed early, actually laying in bed, watching the movie Rudy, a football movie, actually. It was a Friday night, and after about an hour or so of watching the movie, I got fired up and just said — you know, I went to bed at 8:30 or nine o’clock, let’s get up and let’s do something and get motivated.
“So I decided to get up and go to the office and do some work. I was going to look at a couple recruiting tapes. We had just come off of a recruiting cycle and the junior tapes were in, and I was trying to get involved with that.
“And so I got in my car, drove to the Lasch Football Building. Earlier that day, I had bought a pair sneakers and I said, well, on my way in, I’ll take my sneakers to my locker, and got the sneakers out of my car, walked to my locker, which was in the support staff locker room at that time. And there are two doors to that locker room and — opened the first door.
“And immediately upon opening that door, I heard showers running and smacking sounds, very much skin-on-skin smacking sounds, and immediately became alerted and kind of — I don’t know — embarrassed that I was walking in on something that I didn’t want to see or walk in on.
“I thought maybe one of the other people had someone with him in the showers, one of the guys in the locker room, someone who worked there. I went into the second door, and in that room my locker was immediately to the right of the second door, literally probably where my hand is, turned to my locker, and, as I’m opening my locker, glance over my right shoulder right there into the mirror.
“In that reflection you can see a 45-degree angle into the shower room. Okay. So I’m not looking directly in the shower room with my own eyes, but I see in the mirror Coach Sandusky standing behind a boy who is propped up against the shower.
“The showers are running, and he is right up against his back with his front. The boy’s hands are up on the wall. And the glance would have only taken one or two seconds. I immediately turned back to my locker, trying to digest what I just saw and making sure I saw what I just saw.
“I stepped probably two or three feet or paces to my right to get a better view with my own eyes into the locker — again, I didn’t want to trust the mirror.
“I thought maybe I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing and looked directly into the shower at that angle and again saw what I explained: Coach Sandusky standing right up against the back of the young boy with the boy’s hands up on the shower wall, Coach Sandusky’s arms wrapped around the boy’s midsection in the … closest proximity that I think you could be in.
McQueary says he was “extremely alarmed, extremely flustered,
extremely shocked, all of those things.”
Sebastian 2004 to 2009
Sebastian lived with his mom in a trailer in McClure, a small town outside of Lewistown. His nickname is Seb.
He attended Second Mile camps for three or four summers, beginning in the mid-2000s. Seb remembers meeting Jerry Sandusky in the swimming pool at Penn State when he was about 12, in 2005. Seb weighed about 67 pounds at the time, he says.
“He was playing with the kids in the pool and I went over there, started playing with the kids and him, and he started talking to me, asking me if I wanted to hang out outside the camp,” Seb says. “I gave him my mom’s number and stuff, and then he called my mom. They talked, and I started going over to his house.”
He thought he’d enjoy hanging out with Sandusky because, he says, “he’s a well-known guy and he’s nice.”
A few weeks later Seb began sleeping over at Sandusky’s home.
He would stay at Sandusky’s house for the next three or four years, he says, until 2008 or 2009.
“At first he was nice and stuff,” Seb says. Sandusky gave him gifts: “He got me a running suit, racquetballs, and a tennis racket.”
He also took Seb to Penn State home games.
Before long, Seb says, Sandusky “would come to the bedroom with me when I would go to bed and start rubbing my stomach and stuff and cracking my back and hugging me and kissing me all over and stuff.”
“I told him to stop.”
But Sandusky wouldn’t stop.
Sandusky would be “Telling me he loves me and stuff and he wants the best for me. (He) started taking me to the pool and stuff, and the gym. And we would be — like, if we were in the pool, he would never let go. Like, he would always have his arms around me and hugging me.”
Sandusky first kissed his cheeks, and then his lips.
Then, Seb says, “He started getting physical, like had me touch his penis and stuff.”
Seb kept going to the Sanduskys’, he says, because “my mom wanted me to go. …She just thought it would be a good idea for me.”
He didn’t want to go back to Sandusky’s house, but felt trapped. He couldn’t tell his mom what was happening.
“How are you supposed to tell your mom something like that?” he asks.
Finally, Seb says, one night when he was staying in Sandusky’s basement, Sandusky “came into the room, pulled his pants down, laid on top of me, (and) kind of forced it in. … He said suck — suck my penis.”
“What was I going to do? I mean, look at him. He’s a big guy. He was bigger than me at the time, way bigger than me.”
From 2005 to 2009, Seb says he stayed over at Sandusky’s house up to 150 times.
On “all of those occasions,” Seb says, Sandusky would kiss him.
On “some of those occasions,” Sandusky would make him “suck his penis.
Then, “He put his penis in my butt. That’s how you’d have to put it.
“He came in. I sucked his penis, and then he got real aggressive and just forced me into it, and I just went with it. There was no fighting against it.”
Seb says he would, “Sometimes scream, sometimes tell him to get off me. But other than that, who was there? You were in the basement. No one can hear you down there. You’re always down there.”
Seb says Sandusky raped him “more than once.”
It happened, “just a few times.” But, he says, “I got to the point after that to where I had enough of it. I just quit going. My mom would try to tell me to go and I would just tell her no and get real bullheaded and stubborn.”
Finally, sometime in 2009, Seb says he simply refused to go back to Sandusky.
“It was the last time I stayed at his house. I called my mom and I told her to come pick me up. I didn’t tell her why or for what. I just told her to come pick me up and she came and picked me up.
“He was trying to be physical with me and I had enough of it, and I kind of just called my mom, because I had a cell phone finally. I called my mom and told her to come pick me up, and she came down to State College, to his house, and picked me up.”
Aaron 2005 to 2008
Aaron was 11 years old and living with his single mom in Lock Haven when his school guidance counselor referred him to a Second Mile overnight camp.
The Second Mile, he says, “sent out things to the school that (it) wanted to recruit kids, and … the school suggested me to it.”
“There was things like swimming,” he says. “Played a few games, some other things.”
Sandusky, he says, “introduced himself to everybody the first year that I went.”
It was “the third year that I kind of got to know him a little bit more.”
“He came up and spoke to me aside from the group I was with, about the camp.
“What fun I was having. What could be more fun, just a general question about the camp.
“A little bit after my second or third year” at the Second Mile camp, Aaron says, Sandusky came in a car with several other boys and took him to Blanchard Dam.
From then on he’d attend football games with Sandusky. They go swimming, and wrestle.
When they were driving, Aaron says, “He put his hand on my leg and just kind of kept it there as he was driving. I didn’t really think anything of it.”
Sandusky finally suggested that Aaron spend the night at his house.
“My mom didn’t find anything wrong with it,” he says. “I didn’t find anything wrong with it. So it kind of just went.”
“She kind of let me do my own thing. She asked if I wanted to go and in some ways she encouraged it. She said that maybe, hey, it might be good if you go and do some stuff with Jerry, and so I did.”
“It was fun, the stuff that we did, and with her encouraging me, I just thought, hey, I’m having fun, so why not?”
“The first time I stayed over at his house we ate lunch, ate supper, played some various games in the basement. There was a pool table or shuffleboard table, a dartboard, and an air hockey table,” Aaron remembers.
He’d end up staying in Sandusky’s house “probably close to a hundred” times, he says.
At first he stayed overnight in a room upstairs. Then Aaron was given the room in the basement. “Downstairs in the basement room. It’s right off of the bottom of the stairs, to the right, waterbed, TV.”
It was there that Sandusky “would kiss me on the forehead goodnight. And then it — it came to him kissing me on the cheek and then rubbing my back and pulling me on top of him and cracking my back.
“I kind of thought that he sees me as family and this is just what his family does.”
Aaron Fisher attempted to have Jerry Sandusky arrested in November 2008.
His story is told in his book Silent No More, which we reviewed at length here.
