BELLEFONTE, Pa. — A police detective who investigated Jerry Sandusky in 1998 says he still believes charges should have been filed then, but the district attorney did not do so.
Ronald Schreffler testified today he interviewed Sandusky in 1998 after a woman complained about her 11-year-old son and the former Penn State assistant football coach showering together.
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Schreffler says he felt charges were warranted, but Ray Gricar, the DA at the time, didn’t agree.
Gricar disappeared in 2005 and has been declared legally dead.
Earlier today, the alleged victim in that 1998 encounter described Sandusky lathering him up and lifting him under a showerhead to rinse his hair.
Under cross-examination, the man acknowledged staying in contact with Sandusky for years.
The man, a 25-year-old identified by prosecutors as Victim 6, told jurors that Sandusky lathered up his back in a Penn State locker room shower, hugged him chest-to-chest then lifted him closer to a showerhead to rinse his hair.
The man said the shared shower happened after a brief workout at a campus gym — even though he hadn’t broken a sweat. His mother went to authorities when she saw her then-11-year-old son come home with wet hair.
The man was the sixth accuser to testify at Sandusky’s sex abuse trial. The ex-coach faces 52 criminal counts involving alleged assaults of 10 boys over a 15-year span. He denies the charges, which brought disgrace to Penn State and led to the ouster of both the school’s president and Hall of Fame football coach Joe Paterno.
On cross-examination, the man testified that in recent years he and Sandusky exchanged text messages, sent notes for holidays and special occasions and met for lunch last summer. He also told the court that Sandusky and his wife, Dottie, had supported a mission trip he took to Mexico.
When asked why he had decided to testify against Sandusky, the witness said he had been approached by investigators and asked to think more about the 1998 encounter.
“As I started to go over it in my mind I quickly realized, my perception changed thinking about it as an adult as opposed to an 11-year-old,” he said. “That was inappropriate, what happened to me.”
Asked if he was looking for financial benefit from coming forward, the man replied, “Zero.”
The trial is in its fourth day and jurors have heard from young men who claim Sandusky had inappropriate contact with them, sometimes at his State College home or in the showers of a campus locker room.
Testimony through the first three days of the trial painted Sandusky as a man who used his fame as a top assistant to Hall of Fame coach Joe Paterno to hold sway over boys.
One accuser, a foster child at the time of the alleged abuse, said Sandusky pinned him down and sexually abused him then threatened to keep him away from his family if he told of the encounter.
Later, the accuser said, Sandusky said he didn’t mean it and loved him.
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