Paterno Out At Penn State

[FORD]

[High Life Man]

Why weeks or months?

He should be done NOW.

[Blaze]

You mean Ped State?

[POJO_Risin]

Wow...good to see the Penn State Board of Idiots really make a statement.

Folks, they are going to order an inquiry!

WAY TO GET ON THAT PENN STATE!

Might as well not do the right thing yet!

I love how the Penn State faithful are surrounding JoePa with support...that's how fucking skewed things are in college athletics...that people would cheer someone for making a mistake that ultimately may have cost several boys to get assaulted...

Seriously...for someone to clearly let their friendship impede their morals...they should be there to lynch him...not support him...

[POJO_Risin]

What I want to know is how the fuck nothing was said or done to the university after 2008 when the grand jury started. Here, Sandusky was STILL showing up at the university...as recently as last week...

Good thorough investigation there...

[Va Beach VH Fan]

Well...I hate Millen...but I fucking get it...

Joe Paterno IS Penn State football...

While many colleges say that football will cunt-inue no matter what...Penn State is a little different...

Paterno has been there since what...1950...and head coach since '66?

No way fucking Urban Meyer wants to fucking take over a program after Sandusky hummered half the needy kids in Happy Valley...and to follow Paterno?

Jesus Christ...

no way...

Ohio State will look like fucking nirvana in comparison...

but fuck...not time to worry about a coach...

...these fucking kids...

You know this as well as I do Poj, not just within the context of football, but as well as with colleges in general, there was always something different about Penn State....

With the exceptions of a couple drunken football players in the dorms, you simply didn't see the shitstain that goes on at major college athletics at Penn State....

You can give multiple examples of things that happen, whether it deals with recruiting or whatever, and I always said to myself, "that shit doesn't happen at Penn State"....

Just goes to show how shocked I am with all this....

But in terms of Meyer, I think that if JoePa steps down/is fired, it'll be an assistant so it's there's simply SOME sort of transition within the football program....

And yeah, the OSU scandal looks like a kid taking a gumball from the store in comparison.....

[TFM_Dale]

Paterno gets to finish the season then retire, what a load of shit. These kids are scarred for life and now they get to hear about Paterno all season long and to be followed by some grand retirement ceremony, fuck off Paterno, ignorance is no excuse and sports are NOT bigger then everything else. I hope the NCAA (and yes, they are fucking douchebags to) nail Penn State to the fucking wall for this.

[chefcraig]

What concerns me the most about all of this is that no one, no one has thought to mention the 800 pound gorilla in the room here: Sandusky didn't just wake up late in life sometime in the late 1990s and decide "Yup, I'm gonna start molesting little kids." And he certainly didn't decide to stop sometime in the early 2000s, either.

Human nature doesn't exist in a vacuum, so he had to have been doing this for years before getting caught. How many more victims are out there? Wherever this creep went in life he had the warped need, if not the opportunity to attend to his desires. Somebody, somewhere along the line had to have seen or suspected something. Furthermore, if this has been taking place for a length of time, we are talking about an institutionalized form of cover up, and not just at Penn State.

[fryingdutchman]

Fuck Joe Paterno and fuck Penn State. Those pom-pom waving, rah-rah, holier-than-thou assholes finally got what's coming to them.

The culture of that university finally bit them in the ass. Working all of the angles from the top down, with the "old boys network" handling everything and covering it all up.

Joe Paterno might have been a great coach, but he SUCKED as a human being. When you are such a legend at an institution that you get a statue outside of a 100,000 seat stadium BEFORE you're dead, then you have a HUGE responsibility to do what's right. In this case, "JoePa" should have been burning rubber to the police station, with his coaching staff and university administration in the car with him.

But Joe did the bare minimum to cover his own ass and ensure that when all of this shit came raining down, he had the biggest umbrella.

Paterno was the face of Penn State through DECADES of success. Now, he is the face of their failure...even more so than the pedo Sandusky, because he was a nobody until this news broke.

I'm surprised this isn't a bigger thread. Can we get a re-title like "Child sex scandal rocks Penn State University" and get it some more attention. This is big sports news...especially in my neck of the woods.

[chefcraig]

OK, now this is just plain odd...

Questions on Sandusky Are Wrapped in a 2005 Mystery

By KEN BELSON NYTIMES

One of the questions surrounding the sex-abuse case against Jerry Sandusky is why a former district attorney chose not to prosecute the then-Penn State assistant coach in 1998 after reports surfaced that he had inappropriate interactions with a boy.

The answer is unknowable because of an unsolved mystery: What happened to Ray Gricar, the Centre County, Pa., district attorney?

Gricar went missing in April 2005. The murky circumstances surrounding his disappearance — an abandoned car, a laptop recovered months later in a river without a hard drive, his body was never found — have spawned Web sites, television programs and conspiracy theories. More than six years later, the police still receive tips and reports of sightings. The police in central Pennsylvania continue to investigate even though Gricar’s daughter, Lara, successfully petitioned in July to have her father declared legally dead so the family could find some closure and begin dividing his estate.

Yet as the Sandusky investigation moves forward, questions will be asked anew about why Gricar did not pursue charges against him 13 years ago. A small but strident minority believes Gricar did not want to tackle a case that involved a hometown icon. Others who knew and worked with Gricar say he was a meticulous, independent and tough-minded prosecutor who was unbowed by Penn State, its football program and political pressure in general.

“No one got a bye with Ray,” said Anthony De Boef, who worked as an assistant district attorney under Gricar for five years. “He didn’t care who you were; he had a job to do.”

De Boef said Gricar did not share any information with him about the case in 1998, which involved Sandusky allegedly showering with an 11-year-old boy. Gricar, he said, reviewed the police reports in private including, presumably, notes or recordings of two conversations that the police heard between Sandusky and the boy’s mother. But Gricar had a reputation for thoroughness, and if he thought he had enough to charge Sandusky, he would have, De Boef and other lawyers said.

Still, the circumstances surrounding Gricar’s disappearance prompt many questions.

On April 15, 2005, Gricar, then 59, took the day off. At about 11:30 a.m., he called his girlfriend, Patricia Fornicola, to say he was taking a drive on Route 192. About 12 hours later, she reported him missing.

The next day, Gricar’s Mini Cooper was found in a parking lot in Lewisburg, about 50 miles from his home in Bellefonte. Gricar’s cellphone was in the car, but not his laptop, wallet or keys, which were never recovered. Months later, the laptop was found in the Susquehanna River without its hard drive, which was discovered later. It was too damaged to yield any information. On the fourth anniversary of his disappearance, investigators revealed that a search of his home computer yielded a history of Internet searches for phrases like “how to wreck a hard drive,” according to a report at the time in The Centre Daily Times.

When Gricar disappeared helicopters, dive teams and patrol cars were deployed, and the F.B.I. was brought in. Reports of Gricar turning up in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Maryland and other states proved to be dead ends.

So what happened? Friends and colleagues say Gricar was not the type to walk away. His bank accounts were not touched after he disappeared, he had no other sources of income and he had no major debts, said Robert Buehner Jr., a friend and the district attorney in Montour County. Though divorced twice, he seemed happy with his girlfriend and close with his daughter. Gricar had already announced that he was retiring at the end of his term.

“He was absolutely looking forward to his future,” Buehner said.

If Gricar committed suicide, Buehner added, he would have wanted the body to be found. Foul play is the next possible conclusion. By the nature of their jobs prosecuting criminals, district attorneys end up having many enemies. But no credible suspects have emerged.

“I don’t think you’ll find too many district attorneys who disappear,” said Ken Mains, a detective who works on cold cases in Lycoming County. “D. B. Cooper, Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, until a body is found, there are going to be conspiracy theories.”

[Kristy]

I don't believe that Sandusky has the wherewithal to make somebody up and disappear. This whole story reeks of creepiness from no-neck Paterno on down. Now I don't know much about college football other than the University of Colorado's program sucks but it's so difficult to understand how Penn State's college football program can literally wield power to the point where it is above the law. Just how many in that program had to have known Sandusky was a fucking creep who most likely not only had a penchant for touching and molesting little boys but that he must had have photos, stories and other connections to keep his twisted perversion satiated? Maybe Gricar was in on it, too and that this is part of a larger sex ring that anyone can imagine. I mean, how else could it have had gone on like this for so long with so many people knowing and nobody contacting the authorities?

What gets me is the hard drive missing and then found years later in a river all of places as if somebody wanted it to be found. I can only speculate the Gricar had the names and addresses of others who were into the same sick game Sandusky was during the coarse of his investigation and that their careers were much higher up on the social order. It reads oh so Hollywood. Gricar could have been blackmailing people or he was ready to issue some arrest warrants to some very important people...who knows? Either way, it's really creepy.

[Va Beach VH Fan]

JoePa and Pres. Spanier just got fired, effective immediately....

[FORD]

Is Sandusky a friend of the BCE? This whole "disappearing district attorney" subplot sounds like one of their moves.

Don't laugh at this just yet..... I heard Tom Ridge is in the running to be the new Big Cheese at Pedo State, and we all know who he used to work for.

[DlocRoth]

JoePa and Pres. Spanier just got fired, effective immediately....

No shit?

[Kristy]

Sandusky is a blatant sociopath if anything. It wasn't just boys he was (allegedly) touching but poor boys who came from broken homes and most likely had emotional problems so who would believe them if they told anyone? Seems Sandusky was the proverbial wolf guarding (i.e., running) the perfect hen house. And with all sociopaths, they will do or say anything to keep their ways functioning