Two police departments say Penn State coach never filed report

Representatives of Penn State’s campus police and State College police said Wednesday they have no record of having received any report from a Penn State assistant football coach about his having witnessed an alleged rape of a boy by former coach Jerry Sandusky.

The police departments’ statements don’t corroborate those made in an e-mail from the assistant coach, Mike McQueary, who said he witnessed the alleged incident in a Penn State locker room in 2002.

Lisa M. Powers, a Penn State spokeswoman, told CNN that the university police has no record of any police report filed by McQueary. “Today was the first we have heard of this through the media,” Powers told CNN in an e-mail.

State College police also had no reports from McQueary, according to State College Police Chief Tom King. (State College is the town surrounding the university campus).

However, grand jury records indicate that McQueary did talk to Gary Schultz, who was then senior vice president for finance and business, and that Schultz never presented the information to university police. Schultz and Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz are charged with lying to the grand jury.

But, in the e-mail obtained by The Morning Call newspaper of Allentown, Pennsylvania, McQueary said that he helped stop the assault and talked with police about it.

“I did stop it, not physically, but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room,” McQueary wrote in the November 8 e-mail to a former classmate.

“No one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes for those 30-45 seconds,” McQueary said. “Trust me.”

In his e-mail, McQueary also wrote that he “did have discussions with police and with the official at the university in charge of police” after the alleged incident involving Sandusky.

There are situations in law enforcement in which conversations with officers don’t result in official police reports, according to In Session legal contributor Sunny Hostin.

“Sometimes a tip is given to a sex crimes detective, notes are taken, the witness account is investigated but a report isn’t generated, especially if it is determined that no crime occurred,” Hostin told CNN. “Since we don’t know the circumstances surrounding McQueary’s alleged conversations with police, it is impossible to determine what happened. We also don’t know what the protocol is at the campus police department and the city police department.”

The alleged locker room rape witnessed by McQueary, who was then a graduate assistant, was detailed in a grand jury report released this month.

According to the report, McQueary told Joe Paterno, who was then the team’s coach; Paterno then alerted his boss, the school’s athletic director.

The scandal revolves around Sandusky, charged by Pennsylvania’s attorney general with 40 counts in what authorities allege was the sexual abuse of eight boys, and allegations that Penn State officials failed to inform police when the complaints reached them.

A source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN that the McQueary e-mail is not inconsistent with the grand jury presentment.

Read the indictment (PDF) (Warning: graphic content)

Sandusky is free on $100,000 bail, against the wishes of prosecutors.

The grand jury presentment is a summary of the proceedings, not a complete transcription. The grand jury report led to the firing last week of Paterno and Penn State President Graham Spanier. McQueary was put on administrative leave.

The report says Sandusky molested young boys after developing close relationships with them through The Second Mile, a charity he founded for at-risk youths.

On Wednesday a new judge was assigned to the case against Sandusky in the wake of a controversy over the Centre County judge who had been on case. That judge – who freed Sandusky on $100,000 bail – had volunteered at Sandusky’s The Second Mile charity.

Her replacement in the case is Robert E. Scott, a senior judge of Westmoreland County, who will preside over Sandusky’s preliminary hearing on December 7.

Judge Scott “has no known connections with the Pennsylvania State University, the Second Mile charity, nor any officers or representatives of any of those entities,” according to the administrative office of Pennsylvania courts.

A spokeswoman for a nonprofit agency serving New York City children has informed authorities that the Sandusky family hosted at least one child from a low-income family during a summer vacation.

The Fresh Air Fund provides free summer vacations to New York City children from low-income communities; at least one child stayed in the Sandusky home in the mid-1990s, said spokeswoman Andrea Kotuk.

Five more children are thought to have stayed in the home during the 1970s, Kotuk said.

In a separate development, public records and legal notices show that Paterno, 84, transferred ownership of his family home to his wife, Sue, for $1 in July.

Paterno’s attorney, Wick Sollers, said in an e-mail that the transfer was “unrelated to and unaffected by the current situation. The Paternos have been engaged in a multi-year estate planning program and this was simply one element of that plan.”

Mark Lloyd, a certified estate planner in Atlanta, said the Tax Relief Act set the maximum gift that would not incur inheritance tax at $5 million, so splitting assets and utilizing trusts may be part of estate planning for a couple with an estate worth more than that amount.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said he wasn’t drawing any conclusion about the transfer. “It’s hard to know what kind of advice the Paterno family received,” he said. “Frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine the transfer was done to avoid a possible civil judgment.”

The case has been slow to unfold in the public domain, at least in part because Penn State is exempt from Pennsylvania’s open records law, making it difficult to get information about who knew what and when regarding the sex-abuse claims.

Penn State and three other schools that receive state funds don’t fall under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law, according to Terry Mutchler, the executive director of the state’s Office of Open Records.

“If this were an investigation involving another university … that did have a scandal at its doorstep, they were subject to the Right to Know Law,” Mutchler told CNN.

“You were able to obtain, in that situation, e-mails, copies of incident reports at the police department, any kind of policies that came out with the Board of Trustees. That would all be available,” she said. “At Penn State, however, that’s off limits.”

In 2007, state lawmakers considered a change that would have included the school under the open records law. But then-President Spanier testified against the move before the House State Government Committee.

He told the legislature he was concerned about cost and compliance and that there were competitive reasons for keeping records private.

“Nobody would argue the point that the public has a right to know how public funds are spent,” Spanier said at the time. “But these proposals will fundamentally change the way we operate, the way our trustees govern and the way the university administers their policies.”

Preliminary hearings for Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, who has retired as senior vice president for finance and business, were set Wednesday for December 6 in Dauphin County Magistrate Court, before Magisterial Judge William C. Wenner. They are accused of lying to the grand jury.

Sandusky told NBC’s Bob Costas on Monday that he has been falsely accused, saying that he only “horsed around” with kids in the shower after workouts.

Sandusky denied being sexually attracted to boys, and his lawyer, Joe Amendola, told CNN on Monday night that showering with children does not equate automatically to sexual assault.

In the NBC interview, Sandusky denied one of the charges in the grand jury report – that McQueary had walked in on him raping a boy about 10 years of age.

The mother of one of Sandusky’s alleged victims – identified as Victim 1 in the indictment – told CNN on Wednesday that her son watched the NBC interview and cried. “I said, ‘Well, why did you cry?’ And he said, ‘Because I’m afraid that he might go free,’ ” said the woman, whose face and voice were altered to protect her – and by extension her son’s – identity.

She said she first got clues that something was wrong when her son’s behavior changed. “He went from like being a perfect 1,2,3 magic child to being ornery and being arrogant and mean,” she said. But when her son asked her to lie to Sandusky when he called the house, she became suspicious.

“Then, out of the blue, one day he was sitting at the computer and wanted to look up ‘sex weirdos.’ He asked me ‘What’s the website you get on to look them up?’ And I told him it was Megan’s Law. And he said, ‘Well, how do I type it in?’ So, I gave him the web address and he typed it into the computer and I said, ‘Who are you looking for?’ and he said ‘Jerry.’

“I kinda froze. I was like, wow. ‘What are you looking him up for?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I just want to see if he’s on there.’ I said, ‘Well, why would he be on there? Do you have something you want to tell me?’ and he was like, ‘No.’”

Asked what was going on with Sandusky, the boy answered, “Sometimes he just acts weird. So I just wanted to see if he was on there, that’s all.’”

The mother said that, a few days afterward, she learned that Sandusky had been taking her son out of school without her permission, so she called school officials and asked them to talk to her son “and just ask him how he feels.”

Soon after, the principal called her back in tears and invited the boy’s mother to meet with her and the school guidance counselor, the mother said.

“They told me that my son had said some things about that there was a problem with Jerry,” she said. “He just said that he thought he needed to tell somebody or it would get worse.”

The mother said that, at that point, she asked the school officials to call the police. “They said I needed to think about the ramifications of what would happen if I did that,” she said.

Asked what they meant, the mother said, “I don’t know. I guess, I’m assuming what we’re going through right now.”

Asked what she would like to see, she said, “I want Jerry Sandusky to go to jail for the rest of his life.”

Sandusky was arrested on November 5, after the release of the grand jury report detailing crimes that he allegedly committed between 1994 and 2009.

CNN’s Mary Snow and Sarah Hoye reported from State College; Ed Payne, Joe Sterling, Matt Smith, Josh Levs, Monte Plott and Dana Ford from Atlanta; Laura Dolan from New York and Barbara Starr from Washington.