I was 15 years old when Jerry Sandusky was arrested, and at that point I consumed news mainly in the form of watching nightly TV news with my family. The most vivid memory I have of this case is how upset my mom was over it. She’s very much interested in sports, but she also has a strong moral compass and wants sports to be used as something that can teach children, like me at the time, about life. Obviously, the Sandusky case epitomized the opposite and she was disgusted that a coach could do the things he did.
Reading this coverage was interesting primarily because it repeatedly laid out the timeline of the entire situation. I don’t think I fully grasped the scale of that when I was 15. For me, the most gut-wrenching part of the whole situation is how many people know and the inaction of those individuals. It reminded me of how in Spotlight the abuse in the Catholic Church was described in ways such as people “looking the other way” or that “everyone was just doing their job.” One of the most effectively crafted pieces of these stories was in the fourth article on the site that lists how “McQueary’s eyewitness account became watered down at each stage” as it was passed along to each individual.
In the second story in this series, a mother of one of the victims mentioned how so many other people saw Sandusky as a God. That struck me because it proved how investigative resources need to be used even regarding those who are perceived to be “good people.”