STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The Pennsylvania attorney general and the state police commissioner excoriated Penn State officials on Monday for failing over Learning Language several years to alert the authorities to possible sexual abuse of young boys by a prominent football assistant.
They said the university employees who declined Supra Shoes to report the incidents to the police put countless more children at risk of being abused by Jerry Sandusky, the longtime assistant who has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year span, including during his tenure as an assistant at Penn State. Frank Noonan, the police commissioner who spent more than 30 years with the F.B.I. and the Attorney General’s office, said the nature of the alleged incidents was unprecedented in his experience.
Even after Sandusky “made admissions about inappropriate contact in the shower room” in 1998 to the Penn State campus police, “Nothing happened,” Rosetta Stone Works Noonan said. “Nothing stopped.”
He said that janitors witnessed a sexual act in the football facility’s showers two years later, and still “nothing changed, nothing stopped,” because the janitors feared for their jobs and did not report the incident. Then, in 2002, according to prosecutors, another sex act involving Sandusky and a young boy was witnessed by a Penn State graduate assistant coach, who reported it to Coach Joe Paterno — yet the police still were not contacted.
“That’s very unusual,” Noonan said Monday at a news conference at the Capitol in Harrisburg where he and Linda Kelly, the attorney general, Supra Shoessummarized the cases against Sandusky and the university officials. “I don’t think I’ve ever been associated with a case where that type of eyewitness identification of sex acts taking place where the police weren’t called. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like that before.”Through his lawyer, Sandusky Supra Shoes has maintained his innocence.
Two Penn State officials charged with perjury in their grand jury testimony and failing to report the suspected sexual abuse surrendered Monday, a day after they Rosetta Stone stepped down from their positions. The officials — Tim Curley, 57, the athletic director; and Gary Schultz, 62, the vice president for business and finance who oversaw the university police — were not required to enter a plea Monday. They have denied any wrongdoing, and their lawyers are expected to seek to have the charges dismissed.