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Superintendent: Tip led to hazing inquiry at C.B. West

The alleged hazing that roiled the Central Bucks School District and led officials to cut short the Central Bucks West High School football season occurred at an Aug. 16 picnic for players, coaches, and families, the superintendent said Friday.

A sign in front of the Central Bucks West stadium heralds the football team's state championships.
A sign in front of the Central Bucks West stadium heralds the football team's state championships.Read moreMICHAEL BRYANT / Staff Photographer

The alleged hazing that roiled the Central Bucks School District and led officials to cut short the Central Bucks West High School football season occurred at an Aug. 16 picnic for players, coaches, and families, the superintendent said Friday.

Administrators learned about the so-called initiation last week, when a parent reported hearing that a player had punched a team rookie who resisted getting his hair cut - a six-year-old tradition, Superintendent David Weitzel said.

School officials interviewed students and could not substantiate that allegation, but began to hear about more troubling activities, Weitzel said. What they heard, he said, "clearly defines hazing."

He spoke a day after canceling the rest of the season for the Doylestown team, and after police pledged an investigation.

As students grappled with the fallout from the decision, parents of the Bucks players were told Friday that detectives would interview all juniors and seniors on the team, as well as coaches.

The allegations include claims that rookies had their genitals groped while fully clothed, and that players were put in the showers with towels over their heads, a ritual students called "waterboarding."

Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler said he was not shocked that "you'd have upper-classmen-on-lower-classmen hazing of some sort." The challenge, Heckler said, is determining whether the activities were benign, worthy of school punishment, or crimes.

The allegations came to light Oct. 14, Weitzel said.

Last week, school officials talked to the boys who were supposedly involved in the punching incident and decided it didn't happen. That led West principal Jason Bucher to tell parents in an Oct. 17 note that no student had been mistreated.

But the more serious allegations emerged after school officials reinterviewed some of the players, the superintendent said. They also determined that most new players got hazed while coaches did nothing to stop it, he said.

Weitzel said he did not know how many of the program's 13 coaches were present for the hazing, which occurred at the end of the summer football camp. Discipline against coaches or students will not be decided until the police investigation ends, he said.

"I feel sorry for the boys," he said. "I think they did something wrong, something stupid. What I said to them yesterday was that good people do bad things sometimes, and we'll address that. But they're still our students, and we'll do our best to support them."

The teammates, he said, expressed "a lot of sadness and certainly understandable anger and confusion."

One student who described himself as a friend to some football players said the crotch-grabbing idea came from Tosh.0, a Comedy Central show that features viral Internet videos and is popular with male youths.

The hazing scandal was the second in the area in recent weeks. In Sayreville, N.J., seven students have been arrested and the football season canceled because of hazing allegations.

The Bucks, who had a losing record, had two games remaining on their schedule, including Friday night's Homecoming against rival Central Bucks East.

Rather than preparing for the biggest game of the year, students on Friday were left to discuss an uproar that has drawn national headlines. The Homecoming pep rally was postponed, students said, but most football players still wore their black jerseys or letterman jackets.

"It's fair to say the East-West game is the only game people care about," senior Jack Ardis said.

As school let out, students said classes had been abuzz with the news - rumors of walkout protests and other acts of defiance circulated all day, said junior Jithin Varghese, 16.

But when the afternoon rush of departing buses and cars subsided, the campus seemed to return to normal. A field hockey game took place at the stadium, a few students tossed a Frisbee on a nearby practice field, and straggling teens walked to their cars in the student parking lot.

The only hint of the scandal was the hum of nearby TV news vans.

And the lack of a football game Friday night.

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