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Paterno statue taken down
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A statue of former Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno stands on the school’s campus. The statue was removed on Sunday, eliminating a key piece of the iconography surrounding the once-sainted football coach.
Associated Press
STATE COLLEGE, PA.
Cloresa Turner drove to central Pennsylvania from Virginia to see the statue of veteran Penn State football coach Joe Paterno.
When she arrived in State College on Sunday and saw that it was gone from its place outside the university stadium, she clasped her hand over her mouth.
“He’s done so much for this university. It’s sad,” said Turner, of Martinsville, Va. “To wipe it all away is like he meant nothing.”
Construction vehicles and police arrived shortly after dawn Sunday, barricading the street and sidewalks near the statue, erecting a chain-link fence and then concealing the 7-foot-tall statue with a blue tarp. Workers used jackhammers to free the statue and a forklift to lower it onto a flat-bed truck that rolled into a stadium garage bay as some of the 100 to 150 students and other onlookers chanted, “We are Penn State.”
The university announced Sunday that it was taking down the monument in the wake of an investigative report that found that the late coach and three other top Penn State administrators concealed sex abuse claims against Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted last month of sexually abusing 10 boys, sometimes on Penn State’s campus.
The NCAA, meanwhile, announced that it would levy “corrective and punitive measures” today.
Penn State President Rod Erickson said he decided to have the statue removed and put into storage because it “has become a source of division and an obstacle to healing” and would be “a recurring wound” to victims of child abuse had it remained.
The statue had become such a lightning rod for public opinion amid the child sex-abuse scandal at Penn State that even President Barack Obama weighed in. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told Washington reporters Sunday afternoon that Obama believed “it was the right decision” for the university to remove the monument.
Earlier, the Paterno family issued a statement saying the statue’s removal “does not serve the victims of Jerry Sandusky’s horrible crimes or help heal the Penn State community.”
Paterno’s widow, Sue, and two of the Paternos’ children visited the statue Friday as students and fans lined up to get their pictures taken with the landmark.
The statue, weighing more than 900 pounds, was built in 2001 in honor of Paterno’s record-setting 324th Division I coaching victory and his “contributions to the university.”
The family, which has vowed its own investigation, called the report by former FBI director Louis Freeh the “incomplete and unofficial” equivalent of a charging document by a prosecutor and said the only way to help the victims “is to uncover the full truth.”
“It is not the University’s responsibility to defend or protect Joe Paterno,” the statement said. “But they at least should have acknowledged that important legal cases are still pending and that the record on Joe Paterno, the board and other key players is far from complete.”