A Dauphin County district court judge has ruled that two top Penn State administrators will be tried on charges that they covered up an alleged instance of child sexual assault involving Jerry Sandusky.
Penn State assistant football coach Mike McQueary said that he told Tim Curley and Gary Schultz in 2002 that he saw Sandusky in a locker room shower with a boy. He said that he witnessed something that was sexual in nature: extreme and wrong.
Curley and Schultz claim innocence.
Lawyers for the administrators said that Mike McQueary minimized what he saw, both to their clients and to head coach Joe Paterno.
Tom Farrell, lawyer for retired senior vice president Gary Schultz, said that what McQueary told his client was vague, and that it was not the kind of thing that warranted calling the police. Farrell said that the nine or ten days that passed between the locker room incident and McQueary's meeting with Penn State administrators support that.
"Next week and a half, what did Mike McQueary, his dad, and Coach Paterno do? No one called the police," said Farrell. "Look at the actions, folks. Look at the actions."
Marc Costanzo, spokesman for the state Attorney General's office, said that he doesn't agree with that interpretation.
"There were certain crude words in the English language that he wasn't going to use as part of his description to Coach Paterno, out of respect to Coach Paterno, but that he did in fact describe the nature of what he saw," said Costanzo.
Costanzo said that he expects head coach Joe Paterno to testify, whether it's in person or some other way. Paterno recently fractured his pelvis, and is being treated for lung cancer.
No date has been set for the formal arraignment of charges against Curley and Schultz.
