Updated at 4:42 p.m.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This article contains graphic content.)
BELLEFONTE – Former Penn State wide receivers coach Mike McQueary testified Tuesday afternoon that he saw Jerry Sandusky naked in the Lasch Football Building shower with a boy who was also naked and standing extremely close together.
He saw them through a mirror and in plain sight, a total of three times.
McQueary said the two were standing “very, very – in the closest proximity that you could be.”
“Both saw me. I saw the fronts of their bodies. We looked directly into each other’s eyes,” McQueary said.
Then a graduate student, McQueary had gone to the football building with the intent to get some work done. He was in high spirits after watching the film “Rudy,” he said.
Earlier that day, on Feb. 9, 2001, McQueary had bought a new pair of sneakers, which he decided to stow in his locker that night.
“There are two doors to that locker room immediately upon opening that door. I heard showers running, smacking sounds,” McQueary said. “Very much skin-on-skin smacking sounds.”
Initially, McQueary said he was embarrassed because he thought he was walking in on an intimate moment between two adults. Not wanting to interrupt, he proceeded to his locker.
“In that room my locker was immediately to the right of that second door. I turn to my locker, I glance over my right shoulder into the mirror,” he said. “I was not looking into the shower with my own eyes.
“I see coach Sandusky with a boy and he is right up against his back with his front. The boy’s hands are up against the wall,” McQueary said.
“I immediately turn back to my locker, trying to digest what I just saw. I stepped two or three feet to my right … I didn’t want to trust the mirror.”
McQueary saw exactly what he saw before, he said. Sandusky’s arms were wrapped around the boy’s midsection and Sandusky’s midsection was moving. There was no hard or fast movement.
McQueary said he put his shoes in his locker and slammed the door shut with all his might, in hopes of indicating that someone else was in the locker room. He said his head was spinning and he had a hard time dealing with what was going on.
“You don’t expect to see anything like that, ever,” he said. “This is the Penn State football building … No, you don’t register that.
“I wasn’t thinking. I’m used to pressure situations and I think that’s more than my brain could handle.”
McQueary called his father right away, who told him to come over to his house immediately so his son could better explain what he saw.
McQueary didn’t go into “gross detail,” he said – not with his father, and not with Joe Paterno.
McQueary told his father, “Dad, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on.”
The next day, a Saturday, McQueary called the Paterno home around 7:15 a.m. The coach thought he was gunning for a job – positions were open at the time – but McQueary said he explained to the coach it was about something very important.
“I told him what I had seen – again, on the surface. I made sure that he knew it was sexual and it was wrong,” McQueary said. “I did not do anything after that conversation. I waited for something to happen.”
Per the Grand Jury report, McQueary met with then athletic director Tim Curley and then vice president Gary Schultz, who was also head of Penn State Police. McQueary said Schultz’s position was the reason he never contacted a uniformed officer regarding what he saw in the Lasch Building shower.
“In my mind, Shultz represented the police, without a doubt,” McQueary said.
Photos of the Lasch Football Building locker room were shown to McQueary so that he could verify the location of his locker and its proximity to the shower. Mannequins in the form of an adult male and a male child were standing in the shower in one of the photos.
Another photo depicted the location of what McQueary could see in the mirror’s reflection. McQueary is in two of the photos.
After the incident, McQueary said he avoided any contact with Sandusky, with whom he never spoke about what he saw.
“If Jerry would come in the equipment room I would get up and leave real fast,” McQueary said. “I saw something and didn’t want to be around him.”
During cross-examination, McQueary said it was out of respect for his father, Paterno and the other men his seniors that he did not divulge any details that he considered too perverse, vulgar or overly sexual.
Counsel for the defense Karl Rominger questioned whether he was sure Sandusky and the boy saw him the night he heard showers running late in the locker room.
“I’m sure they saw me,” McQueary said. “I don’t know how they didn’t. I get seen a lot of places.”
When McQueary was asked about his statement, “I didn’t just leave, I made sure it stopped,” he said that the slamming of his locker was to what he was alluding.
After he slammed the locker, McQueary said Sandusky and the boy had separated.
Following McQueary’s testimony, Joe Miller, the former assistant wrestling coach who walked in on Sandusky and Alleged Victim 1, testified.
He said he saw the two in the gym when he went to retrieve a bag his son had forgotten earlier that evening.
Sandusky and Alleged Victim 1 were lying face-to-face on the floor, he said. When Miller walked in, Sandusky propped himself right up on his elbow.
Sandusky told Miller he and Alleged Victim 1 had just been practicing some wrestling moves.
“I thought about it for a second,” Miller said, but he didin’t further question Sandusky’s actions that night.
“I thought, he’s a saint for what he’s doing for these kids.”
Court recessed for the day around 4:15 p.m. because Judge John Cleland said the next witness needs a bigger time slot to give testimony and be cross-examined.
The trial resumes at 9 a.m. Wednesday.
Updated at 12:10 p.m.
BELLEFONTE – Jerry Sandusky told a caseworker with Clinton County Children and Youth Services he could not say if his hands ever went down the pants of Alleged Victim 1.
Sandusky admitted to Jessica Dersham that he blew raspberries on the stomach of Alleged Victim 1, had the boy lie on top of him to crack his back and kissed him on the forehead, she said, but he told her it was not unusual for him to kiss boys on the forehead.
Dersham, the case worker who interviewed Alleged Victim 1 in 2008, testified that when she spoke with him about his abuse, he appeared “very polite, but shy.”
“You could tell he was very nervous in talking about it. At the end of the interview I could tell he had more he wanted to talk about but wasn’t ready to do so,” Dersham said.
Dersham said she spoke with Sandusky about his interaction with Alleged Victim 1. She said Sandusky denied ever taking Alleged Victim 1 out of school, something he did many times.
Court recessed around noon and Dersham had not yet been cross-examined.
Earlier, at 10:54 a.m.
BELLEFONTE – The first time Alleged Victim 1 tried to report the abuse he suffered at the hands of Jerry Sandusky, no one believed him.
“They said we need to think about it and he has a heart of gold and he wouldn’t do something like that,” Alleged Victim 1 said Tuesday morning.
By that time, the boy who never knew his father had been trying to distance himself from Sandusky for months.
About 20 minutes into his testimony, Alleged Victim 1 started crying when he talked about what happened to him in Jerry Sandusky’s basement.
Overnight visits started with Sandusky cracking the boy’s back but it did not take long before physical contact escalated.
Alleged Victim 1 said Sandusky’s hands would go down his shorts. Then, Sandusky would lift up the boy’s shirt and blow on his stomach – and Alleged Victim 1 said the same thing always happened next.
“He … put his mouth on my privates,” Alleged Victim 1 said, a grimace on his face and a whimper escaping his throat.
“I spaced. I didn’t know what to do,” Alleged Victim 1 said. “With all the thoughts running through my head I just kind of blacked out and didn’t want it to happen. I was frozen”
“He blew on my stomach and then it just happened, I don’t even know,” he said.
Prosecutor Joseph McGettigan asked Alleged Victim 1 if that routine ever changed.
It took him a few moments, deep breaths and a shudder before he answered.
“He sat there and looked at me and said, `It’s your turn,” Alleged Victim 1 said.
Alleged Victim 1 said his abuse continued – there were more than 25 times he was forced to give or receive oral sex – but he was to embarrassed to say anything. He didn’t think anyone would believe him.
Soon, it started to affect his life.
Alleged Victim 1 said his grades dropped significantly. The A student saw his grades fall to the C, D and even F range. He got into fights at school and wet the bed at night.
Ending his relationship with Sandusky was no easy task. When he couldn’t avoid overnight visits at the Sandusky household, he had to find other ways to avoid coming in physical contact with Sandusky.
“I would hide. Underneath the pool table and in closet spaces until he would go upstairs or his wife would call him upstairs,” Alleged Victim 1 said.
Dottie Sandusky was never in the basement, he said.
Once, he was almost walked in on at school. Alleged Victim 1 said Sandusky rolled on top of him on some wrestling mats in the middle school gym when the door opened.
“I felt kind of a relief that nothing was going to happen in school,” he said.
Alleged Victim 1 took to avoiding Sandusky, he said, but that only led to Sandusky showing up at his house or school where they would get into arguments.
“He started yelling at me about spending more time with him and making more time with him.”
One day, Alleged Victim 1 said he asked his mother if there was any website where he could look up “people who do things to children.”
“She asked me why I was looking at the site. I said I wanted to see if Jerry was on there,” he said. “I don’t think she realized what was going on.”
Alleged Victim 1 spoke to child and youth service social workers and a state trooper, but it wasn’t until he testified before the grand jury that he was able to share complete details of his abuse.
“I just kind of wanted to forget it ever happened… Words can’t really describe it. I broke down, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t tell them but I didn’t really have a choice,” Alleged Victim 1 said.
During cross-examination, Alleged Victim 1 maintained that he was only sexually abused in Sandusky’s basement, though the backrubs and back cracking occurred in hotels, too.
One time, he said, Sandusky immediately stopped trying to crack his back when Dottie called down to him.
It was the only night Alleged Victim 1 said he got a good night’s sleep in the Sandusky house.
The grandfather of Alleged Victim 1 also testified, as well as two employees from the Hilton Garden Inn at State College.
The young man’s grandfather said he never spoke on the phone with Sandusky but according to his grandson’s mother, Sandusky “called every night to see what his schedule was.”
He had no prior knowledge about the abuse his grandson allegedly suffered at the hands of Sandusky, even when he was called to the house by his daughter when Sandusky and his grandson were in a shouting match.
Sandusky eventually just got in his car and drove away, Alleged Victim 1’s grandfather said.
Two female employees from the Hilton Garden Inn in State College testified regarding Sandusky’s access to the fitness center. One woman said she was instructed to give Sandusky a key so that he could bring boys from The Second Mile to the fitness center pool to swim.
She said no complaints were ever filed concerning Sandusky’s actions with the boys. Until about 2007, she said, surveillance video in the fitness center was recorded on a VCR tape and taped over every week.
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