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Taxpayers cutting Sandusky a big check

HE MIGHT be the most despised man in Pennsylvania right now, but accused serial child molester and former Penn State football top assistant Jerry Sandusky is still getting paid by taxpayers.

HE MIGHT be the most despised man in Pennsylvania right now, but accused serial child molester and former Penn State football top assistant Jerry Sandusky is still getting paid by taxpayers.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News is reporting that the former defensive coordinator for the Nittany Lions - indicted last week on charges he molested eight boys over a 15-year period - continues to draw a $58,898 annual pension from the State Employees Retirement System.

What's more, the paper said that Sandusky received a $148,271 lump-sum payment from the system when he abruptly retired in 1999, not long after an early botched probe into alleged sexual abuse by the onetime heir apparent to football legend Joe Paterno.

The Harrisburg paper said Sandusky's pension pales in comparison to that of ex-university vice president Gary Schultz - indicted for his role in an alleged coverup - who received a lump sum of $421,847 in 2009 and gets roughly $331,000 a year in pension. Schultz was briefly back on campus in an interim role before the charges came down.

The pension news is just one of the many dangling threads as the bucolic central Pennsylvania college town continues to reel from the child-molestation charges that led to the Paterno's abrupt firing Wednesday night, the ouster of longtime school president Graham Spanier and a riot in the streets by several thousand angry students.

Gov. Corbett, who was the state attorney general when the probe that led to Sandusky's indictment was launched more than two years ago, went on NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday and said another coach who told the grand jury that he saw Sandusky molest a child in 2002 failed to meet "a moral obligation" to intervene.

Mike McQueary, who was a graduate assistant nine years ago and is now Penn State's receivers coach, missed the Nittany Lions' loss to Nebraska on Saturday and his future with the team is unclear. He is not expected to face criminal charges.

Corbett told the NBC show that McQueary met "the minimum obligation" of reporting what he saw to his superiors, who are required under Pennsylvania law to report such assaults to authorities. But McQueary "did not in my opinion meet a moral obligation that all of us would have," he added.

Corbett said he expects more allegations of abuse to materialize, a common occurrence in such cases.

"When the word gets out, when people understand that authorities are actually doing something about this, that they may be believed, then more people come forward," Corbett said. Authorities have asked for victims to contact them.

Meanwhile, a popular sports website is reporting that the Centre County judge who set more lenient bail for Sandusky last week than what prosecutors were seeking had been a volunteer for Sandusky's charity, The Second Mile.

Deadspin.com reported that District Judge Leslie Dutchcot reported charity work with The Second Mile in her online profile. She allowed Sandusky to be released on $100,000 unsecured bond. Prosecutors had sought $500,000 bail and a requirement that Sandusky wear a leg monitor.

- The Associated Press

contributed to this report