Where was the fury over the rape of a boy?

In this May 27, 2010 file photo, Penn State football wide receivers coach Mike McQueary speaks during a news conference at a Penn State alumni event in Hershey, Pa.

By Ronnie Polaneczky / Philadelphia Daily News (MCT)
Thursday, November 10, 2011 – Added 10 hours ago

 Imagine you are a 10-year-old child. It is nighttime. You are in an otherwise empty gym shower with a man whom your family trusted. You are both naked, and he is sodomizing you.

You are bewildered, terrified and in physical agony. And then another grown-up enters the shower area. He sees you being anally raped against the wall. All three of you lock eyes.

Help is here, you think.

Help is here. But your would-be savior runs away. And you’re alone once more with the monster you’d thought was your friend.

By now, we all know that the man in the shower was Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football defensive coordinator now accused of sexually assaulting kids. And the witness who fled was Mike McQueary, then a 28-year-old graduate assistant.

And I keep asking myself, “How could McQueary have left that little boy to fend for himself?”

I can’t get my head around it.

McQueary is 6 feet 4. He weighs 213 pounds. He could have knocked Sandusky flat, scooped up that child in his strong arms, and physically stopped the torture of a small boy. Instead, according to the grand jury report detailing Sandusky’s alleged monstrous behavior, a “distraught” McQueary rushed to his office and phoned his father.

The elder McQueary, unbelievably, did not order his son to race back to the shower and seize the child. He did not dial 9-1-1 himself and then speed to the gym to offer support until police arrived. He did not call an ambulance for a child who, by that point, undoubtedly needed medical care.

Instead, he summoned his son home, where they decided to tell Coach Joe Paterno what happened — the next day.

Paterno referred the incident to Penn State’s athletic director Tim Curley and to senior VP Gary Schultz. But no police report was ever filed. And no attempt was made to locate the raped child, to check on him.

Sandusky’s punishment? He was ordered to stop bringing kids on campus, as if the rape had been a crime of geography. No one knows what became of that poor boy, whom the grand jury could not identify or locate.

It goes without saying that Paterno, Curley, Schultz, and a host of other Penn State administrators acted with a disregard so bloodless, it’s hard to believe they’re actually human.

But the behavior of McQueary, whom the grand jury report paints with a degree of high regard, baffles me more.

As an eyewitness, he knew firsthand the horror that child had experienced. It was not a rumor he heard, and dutifully reported. It was not a frightening hunch he determined should be brought to the boss’s attention.

McQueary saw, with his own eyes, a child being brutalized. And he did not attempt to stop it.

One or two McQueary sympathizers I have spoken with have told me: “You weren’t there. You don’t know the shock and revulsion he must have felt. He was stunned. He tried to do the right thing. You can’t make a judgment. He is the hero in this thing.”

Bull — — !

I know, like I know the sun will rise tomorrow, that if I’d seen what McQueary saw, nothing would have stopped me from screaming bloody murder. From using every ounce of strength I possess to pull that naked, repulsive predator off of that little boy. From gathering the child in my arms. From telling him, “I am here. You are safe. It’s over.”

I am not alone. So many others I have spoken with about McQueary — whether male or female, a parent or childless — say the same, decent thing: They would not, could not, have left that boy. They would not, could not, have thought of anything other than ending the horror of what he was enduring.

It’s easy to imagine how hopeful the child must have felt when he locked eyes with McQueary. And it’s devastating to imagine how he must have felt when McQueary fled.

Abandoned. On his own.

Prey.

___

(c)2011 the Philadelphia Daily News

Distributed by MCT Information Services

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