Click here for linkVictim 1's gut wrenching story. Kids blamed him for Paterno losing his job. He dropped out of high school this month.
For a Reported Penn State Victim, a Search for TrustSTATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Two years ago, Thom Hunter, a volunteer coach at Central Mountain High School in Mill Hall, Pa., saw something special in a 15-year-old boy at the school: a remarkable natural running ability.
“There’s not anyone tougher than him when he runs,” Hunter said of the teenager. “You see other people start out too hard like he does, and they just collapse. It’s amazing to watch him just push through it.”
In Hunter, it seems, the young high school runner saw something that felt just as rare: a coach he could trust, an adult male who would neither abandon nor harm him.
The boy had had enough of that.
On Nov. 5, Pennsylvania prosecutors, in charging Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State University football coach, with 40 counts of sexual abuse of children, outlined the narratives of eight young victims.
The young high school runner at Central Mountain High was identified as Victim 1.
The assertions by prosecutors are terrible and terrifying: the boy was 11 or 12 when he first met Sandusky. Sandusky also victimized the child repeatedly over many months in Sandusky’s home.
Late in 2008, concerns about Sandusky’s possible abuse of the boy made their way to the authorities, and over the ensuing months, the boy, high school officials and at least one other coach at the school testified under oath about Sandusky.
According to Hunter, school officials, once aware the boy might have been molested by Sandusky, took some degree of care, telling Hunter he should not be alone with the boy, but never saying exactly why. Hunter, whose relationship with the boy deepened through months of coaching and the boy’s recovery from a serious car accident, was ultimately let go by the school.
The boy, according to friends and others, was taunted by classmates after it became widely known this month that he had testified against Sandusky as part of a case that ultimately caused Joe Paterno, the longtime football coach at Penn State, to lose his job.
Hunter said the boy confronted school administrators recently, angry about Hunter’s dismissal, and has never returned.
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