Hard drives of top Penn State officials among data U.S. prosecutors seek

Computer hard drives of top Pennsylvania State University administrators and information on payments the school's trustees made to outside groups were among the items federal prosecutors subpoenaed from the university this month.

That detailed list was released a day after Penn State acknowledged that its records had drawn scrutiny from yet another agency looking into child sex abuse allegations against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

"Penn State is fully cooperating with this request for information," spokeswoman Lisa Powers said Friday.

The subpoena, issued by U.S. Attorney Peter J. Smith, was dated Feb. 2 and gave Penn State officials until Wednesday to comply.

It requested the hard drives of Sandusky, former university president Graham B. Spanier, suspended athletic director Tim Curley, and retired vice president Gary Schultz, who oversaw the campus police.

Additionally, prosecutors are seeking information on payments members of the university's board of trustees may have made directly to Penn State or to other organizations on its behalf.

E-mails, complaints, and records of interviews regarding Sandusky or the Second Mile, the charity for underprivileged youths he founded in 1977, were also requested.

The subpoena orders the university to preserve all internal communications pertaining to Sandusky dating back to 1998, the year some officials at Penn State first learned of allegations about the assistant coach.

According to state prosecutors, Sandusky became the target that year of a joint investigation by Penn State and State College police and child welfare workers after a mother reported he had hugged her 11-year-old son while showering with him in the nude.

Detectives spent weeks looking into the claims, even eavesdropping on a conversation between Sandusky and the boy's mother in which the coach purportedly admitted to the shower, apologized, and said he wished he were dead.

But social workers ultimately determined that abuse claims were unfounded and campus police closed their case.

Several top university administrators, including Curley, have maintained that they were never aware of its existence, as did longtime football coach Joe Paterno, who died last month.

Still, the lengthy report on the incident generated by campus police has become a part of the state investigation that led to Sandusky's arrest.

In November, a state grand jury accused Sandusky of molesting at least 10 boys over a 15-year period.

According to the panel's findings, the former defensive coordinator met his victims through the Second Mile and abused many of them at campus athletic facilities or on officially sanctioned school trips.

At least one purported victim told grand jurors that Sandusky took him to the 1998 Outback Bowl in Tampa, Fla., and the 1999 Alamo Bowl in San Antonio, Texas, as part of the official Penn State entourage. Once there, the report says, Sandusky molested him in hotel rooms and threatened to send him home if he resisted.

Authorities in both cities have said they have launched their own investigations into whether prosecutable crimes occurred within their jurisdictions.

If Sandusky took the child across state lines for the purpose of committing a crime, those trips could also constitute a violation of federal law. Also, any contact Sandusky may have had with his purported victims over the Internet could come under federal purview.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania declined to comment Friday on the subpoena sent to the university.

Phone calls made to Gordon A. D. Zubrod, the assistant U.S. attorney whose name appears at the bottom of the letter that accompanied it, were not returned.

Zubrod was one of the lead prosecutors in the corruption trial of two former Luzerne County judges accused of jailing juveniles in for-profit detention centers in exchange for millions in kickbacks.

Sandusky, 68, remains under house arrest, awaiting trial on 52 counts of sexual assault. He has denied the charges.

Curley and Schultz face charges for purportedly lying under oath about their knowledge of a 2002 incident in which Sandusky was reportedly seen assaulting a boy in the football locker room. Both have said they were not made aware of the severity of the claim.