Patriot News, Part 5 of 9: Chapter 5, The DPW Cover-Up

The Patriot News went as far as to pretend the 1998 investigation of Sandusky didn't exist in order to cover up the failures of the PA Department of Public Welfare.

By

Ray Blehar

The cover-up of the failures of the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (DPW) and Centre County Children and Youth Services (CYS) originated in the November 4, 2011 Sandusky grand jury presentment.  The PA Office of Attorney General’s (OAG) version of the incident involving Victim 6’s allegations of abuse in 1998 made little mention of DPW’s (Jerry Lauro’s) role in investigating and deciding the outcome of the case.  

The Public Welfare Code clearly states that investigations by law enforcement and child welfare officials may be joint, however, the welfare agency is solely responsible for determining if abuse took place.  The grand jury presentment obfuscated that fact and gave the public the impression that the 1998 investigation was conducted exclusively by the PSU campus police with the final decision of Sandusky’s fate in the hands of District Attorney, Ray Gricar.

The P-N dutifully reported the OAG’s deceptive story line, blaming Gricar for closing the child abuse investigation.  Later it would go a step further and treat the 1998 DPW investigation as if it never existed.  

It seemed that DPW was in the clear for not identifying Sandusky’s 1998 abuse for over a decade.  However, on March 23, 2012 the 1998 police report and the evaluations of Victim 6 were revealed to the public by NBC.  Remarkably, the P-N just so happened to conduct pre-emptive strikes about those reports in the two days leading up to NBC releasing this critical information to the public.   I hardly think this was a coincidence.

The Pre-emptive Strikes

On March 21, 2012, Ganim penned a column opining that Ray Gricar had closed the 1998 Sandusky investigation because of the evaluation of Victim 6 by unlicensed counselor John Seasock.  Seasock’s ’98 report would be released two days after that article ran.  Again, the timing of Ganim’s column was uncanny – as if she was told the Seasock report would soon be leaked to NBC.

Her assertion that Gricar closed the case based on Seasock’s report had flimsy support by the speculation of an unnamed source.   Conversely, DPW’s Jerry Lauro clearly told Ganim (in that column) that he had decided not to make an abuse finding because of a lack of evidence. 

  

“At that time, the information that we had wasn’t sufficient enough to substantiate a case,” Lauro said. “I don’t want [the mother] to think we didn’t believe their kid back then. We did, but we didn’t have enough.” 

However, the P-N ran the misleading story under the following headline:

Patriot-News exclusive: Psychologist's report might be reason Ray Gricar declined to bring charges against Jerry Sandusky in 1998

The column broke many rules of journalistic ethics, including: biased reporting, a sensational headline, the use of unnamed sources, reliance on speculative evidence, and reporting of known falsehoods.

At the time he evaluated Victim 6, Seasock was not even a licensed counselor, let alone a psychologist.  And, Lauro made it clear that it was his decision to evaluate the evidence to make the case or not against Sandusky.

However, Ganim and the P-N didn’t stop there.

Her March 22, 2012 column featured an interview with DPW’s Jerry Lauro who denied any knowledge of either evaluation of Victim 6.   But, Ganim had possession of the 1998 police report early in 2011 which revealed Lauro had actually arranged one of the evaluations.  Yet, she never called Lauro out for his patently false statement.  Instead, she knowingly regurgitated Lauro’s lie. 

Again, the P-N ran a further story under another misleading headline – this time blaming the PSU police for not sharing the reports with Lauro.  

Patriot-News Special Report: 1998 Jerry Sandusky investigator would have pursued dropped case if he had seen hidden Penn State police report

In familiar fashion, Ganim was one day ahead of the NBC leak of the police report to the national media.  And, as a result, the other media outlets absolved DPW and CYS of any responsibility for enabling Sandusky’s 14 year crime spree -- based on her (false) story that Jerry Lauro didn’t see any of the evaluations.

Interestingly enough, the evaluation by Dr. Alycia Chambers, which stated that Sandusky's behaviors appeared to be the "grooming" process typical to pedophiles, was never reported in any detail by the P-N.  In fact, the newspaper only mentioned Chambers by name twice during the scandal -- once in May 2012 when she was served a subpoena and in July 2011 when her car struck a deer.

Between the omissions in the grand jury presentment and the P-N’s false reporting, DPW made it through the scandal unscathed.  

The public never learned about DPW’s failures in 1998 and, as a result, believed that it was the lack of a PSU phone call in 2001 that enabled Sandusky to abuse children for 14 years.  The PSU “failure to report” story was strongly promoted by the P-N in op-eds regarding the strengthening of child abuse reporting laws.  These editorials also managed to avoid any mention that DPW had been called in three years earlier to investigate Sandusky and determined he was not a child molester.

As a result of the P-N’s reporting on the scandal, the public and the PA Task Force on Child Protection never learned about the true system failures that enabled Sandusky’s abuse.  None of the solutions offered by the task force attacked the problem of lack of adherence to procedures, which caused children to be harmed both times Sandusky was under investigation and which has led Pennsylvania to have one of the nation’s lowest rates of investigations per reported incidents of child abuse.

Go here for full report (18 pages). http://www.march4truth.com/ray-blehar.html

Next: The CYS Cover-Up