By Myles Snyder and Megan Healey
WHTM News
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| Jerry Sandusky |
Penn State's legendary assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, was arrested Saturday on child sex abuse charges, as state prosecutors announced charges against two top university officials who apparently knew of at least one incident on the campus and did nothing about it.
Attorney General Linda Kelly said Timothy Curley, Penn State's director of athletics, and Gary Schultz, the university's senior vice president for finance and business, are charged with perjury and failure to report suspected child abuse. Schultz's position includes oversight of the university's police department.
"This is a case about a sexual predator who used his position within the university and community to repeatedly prey on young boys," Kelly said in a news release Saturday. "It is also a case about high-ranking university officials who allegedly failed to report the sexual assault of a young boy after the information was brought to their attention, and later made false statements to a grand jury that was investigating a series of assaults on young boys."
Kelly said the attorney general's office and state police began the investigation when a young boy reported that Sandusky had sexually abused him while the boy was a house guest at Sandusky's home near State College.
According to evidence presented to an investigating grand jury, the boy was 11 or 12 years old when he first met Sandusky at a camp for The Second Mile program, a charity for at-risk children founded by Sandusky.
Sandusky used expensive gifts to keep in touch with the boy - including trips to professional and college sporting events, golf clubs, a computer, clothing and money - and used the overnight visits at his home to perform sex acts on the boy, according to the grand jury.
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"The failure of top university officials to act on reports of Sandusky's alleged sexual misconduct, even after it was reported to them in graphic detail by an eyewitness, allowed a predator to walk free for years - continuing to target new victims," Kelly said.
"Equally disturbing is the lack of action and apparent lack of concern among those same officials, and others who received information about this case, who either avoided asking difficult questions or chose to look the other way."
Kelly said that despite the false testimony and "uncooperative atmosphere" by some Penn State University and Second Mile officials, the grand jury eventually identified a total of eight young men who were targets of sexual advances or assaults by Sandusky, starting in 1994 and continuing through 2009, after meeting him through Second Mile activities.
