Yeah, this story is as uncomfortably nauseating as the headline suggests.
According to the Patriot-News, former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky has been indicted by a Centre County (PA) grand jury on multiple sex abuse charges involving children. The charges, which stem from an investigation that lasted more than two years, include felony involuntary deviate sexual intercourse of someone under 16; aggravated indecent assault; indecent assault of someone under 16; indecent assault of someone under 13; and corruption of minors charge.
All told, Sandusky is facing 40 counts from incidents that allegedly occurred in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2005. Sandusky retired from the Nittany Lions following the 1999 season, after which he began devoting his time to running a children’s charity he had founded in the area.
In a story from March of this year, when the grand jury investigation first came to the public light, the Patriot-News relayed a disturbing incident alleged to have occurred in May of 1998 in a locker room located in the PSU football building and involved the alleged inappropriate contact of a 12-year-old boy by Sandusky.According to several sources, that boy, who was 12 at the time, alleged he and Sandusky were showering in the football building on Penn State’s campus when the incident took place.
The boy’s mother told The Patriot-News she was specifically instructed by state police at Rockview not to speak with a reporter. Her name is being withheld by The Patriot-News to protect the identity of her son.
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According to sources close to the investigation, the boy told police in 1998 that Sandusky had showered with him in a locker room of the Lasch Building — home to the football program — during a tour. The boy claimed Sandusky washed his body during the shower, sources said.
It’s unclear if that alleged incident led to any of the charges Sandusky is currently facing, although the paper noted at the time that those allegations had not led to any charges.
In January of this year, legendary Nittany Lions head coach Joe Paterno and athletic director Tim Curley were among the PSU officials called to testify in front of the grand jury regarding the case against the former coach. The allegations against Sandusky surfaced two years prior to those appearances by PSU officials, with a 15-year-old high school student accusing Sandusky of touching him inappropriately while the two were alone in a high school gym. Sandusky was an assistant football coach at Central Mountain (PA) High School at the time.
One final note on this sad tale: the title of Sandusky’s autobiography, published in 2000, is “Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story”. No, seriously. It is.
