When any kid needs help, adults are obligated

PRINCETON — — There’s a line in a 1980s, made-for-TV movie that’s lingered in my thoughts ever since Jerry Sandusky’s sex abuse investigation blew the cover off of a host of Penn State secrets.

A TV junkie as a kid, I loved the handful of Davy Crockett remakes that starred Tim Dunigan as an updated version of the Tennessee hero purported to have killed a bear as a toddler. In this episode, though, Crockett was all grown up and facing the hazards of the frontier alongside his trusty sidekick and friend, George Russell, played by Gary Grubb.

In this installment, Crockett encountered a young Indian brave somehow separated from his tribe. Rather than allow the teen to be taken prisoner by the army he worked with, Crockett took the boy under his protective wing and trademark coonskin cap and plotted a way to safely reunite him with his family and wild culture.

Crockett soon fell under scrutiny and pressure from his very Caucasian military superiors, prompting Russell’s attempt to talk his buddy into caving and locking the boy up. Russell reasoned that an Indian on the verge of becoming a killing machine wasn’t the white man’s responsibility, but Crockett would hear none of that.

I’ve been unable to find the direct quote from the episode, but it went something like this, “Georgie, when a kid, any kid, needs your help, your obliged to help ‘em.”

It sounds naive, but that quote plays in my mind’s ear each time a tiny dancer finds herself alone and stranded across the hall from our office, a child cries for help land on deaf ears, or, worse yet, a story hits the headlines about an abused child whose pain was never reported.

Thursday, as I read former FBI chief Louis Freeh’s report on Penn State’s overwhelming determination to remain oblivious to Sandusky’s deviance, I wished that the fictional Crockett’s simple moral would have stuck in the heads of people who had the power to save children.

Sandusky, the long-time defensive coordinator for Penn State football, worked the sidelines with legendary head coach Joe Paterno and was granted unprecedented access to Penn State facilities years after his retirement from the school. Freeh’s 267-page report found that it was that access and a propensity among PSU’s leaders to turn blind eyes to repeated warning signs of sex abuse that allowed Sandusky to prey on young boys for more than a decade.

Leaders from the president’s office all the way to the football coach’s headquarters and the janitors’ closets ignored the fact that Sandusky showered with young boys enrolled in his charity programming. They closed locker room doors on interrupted rapes and feigned ignorance when confronted with the idea that boys could be sexually assaulted by a man in a position of authority.

Even in the wake of 45 sex crime convictions earlier this year, Penn State officials have still claimed that Sandusky was somehow a “master deceiver,” sly enough to hide his true colors from everyone who cheered on the blue-and-white Nittany Lions.

“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State,” Freeh wrote. “The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized.”

When a graduate assistant actually reported seeing and hearing a sexual act inside a PSU locker room, the powers in charge of the school at the time decided not to alert authorities, but instead to confront Sandusky with the report.

They valued the school’s reputation more than the lives of the boys whose souls were bruised and battered each time Sandusky cornered them in a shower stall or the edge of a guest bed.

“They exhibited a striking lack of empathy for Sandusky's victims by failing to inquire as to their safety and well-being, especially by not attempting to determine the identity of the child whom Sandusky assaulted in the Lasch Building in 2001,” the Freeh report read. “Further, they exposed this child to additional harm by alerting Sandusky, who was the only one who knew the child's identity, of what (Mike) McQueary saw in the shower on the night of February 9, 2001.”

Sandusky faced no consequences, until his trial this summer, when a jury that heard testimony from several of his victims found that he continued the abuse, grooming young boys for his own sick desires in cars on road trips, inside hotel rooms, around locker room corners, across the hall from his wife’s bedroom and in his own State College basement. He even adopted at least one of his alleged victims and attempted to adopt another.

There’s no doubt that there’s plenty of shame to go around in this case, and Sandusky deserves most of it. But, the people who allowed him to continue his reign of fear and abuse must also carry their portions of the burden.

They knew there were children in their community, even in their buildings, who needed help; rather than taking them under their wings and protecting them, they allowed Sandusky to steal their youth, violate their trust and threaten their lives.

It remains to be seen whether courts will find these men guilty and hold them responsible for their inaction, but this report indicates they were far from innocent.

They were obliged to rescue these boys from the man who abused them, and they did nothing.

Tammie Toler is editor of the Princeton Times. Contact her at ttoler@ptonline.net.

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When any kid needs help, adults are obligated

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