By Emily Kaplan, The Philadelphia Inquirer –
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — At 10:31 a.m. on Tuesday, the large flat-screen on the first floor of Penn State’s student center flashed with a red breaking-news update.
The TV was streaming CNN all morning. Twelve miles away, Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant football coach who was found guilty of sexually abusing 10 boys in a scandal that rattled this campus, was about to hear his fate.
But here, in the HUB Robeson-Center, only 11 students sat facing the TV to hear the sentence. One of the students was napping.
“I was kind of expecting football-like attention,” said junior Travis Gray, parked in a sofa chair closest to the TV. He arrived at 9:40, an hour-and-a-half before his first class.
“Personally, I wanted to see it live because this is a guy who changed our entire school’s reputation,” Gray said. “I guess a lot of other students just didn’t want to think about it.”
In the two hours after Sandusky’s sentence — 30 to 60 years in prison — was announced, mostly everything on Penn State’s campus seemed routine.
The HUB was packed and noisy as usual. Hundreds of students stood in a line that snaked around the first floor. They were waiting to sign up for a 5K race to benefit THON, a student-run philanthropy that helps fight pediatric cancer.
“Most of us want to focus on something like THON, not Jerry Sandusky,” junior Cathy Guerra said.
Guerra sat about 200 feet from the main TV at the HUB. The veterinary science major was leafing through notes for her animal nutrition exam on Thursday.
“I literally found out about the sentence a couple minutes ago when some people walked past and were talking about it,” Guerra said. “With everything happening here, it just wasn’t on my mind.”
There was no commotion at the Lasch Football Building, the facility where Sandusky assaulted some of his victims in the shower. The Nittany Lions are in their bye week.
There was also no activity at Sandusky’s house, a brick home on the end of a cul-de-sac a few miles from campus. All would have been silent if a garbage truck wasn’t making its rounds.
There were no empty seats at the computer lab on the bottom floor of the Paterno Library.
“It just feels like any other day, really,” said sophomore Chris O’Hanlon, a public relations major. O’Hanlon stood in the Willard Building between classes and looked out the large windows.
A group of females with backpacks walked by, followed by a male on a bicycle, then another female who was texting.
“This is how it felt at the end of last year,” O’Hanlon said. “I wouldn’t say we’re trying to move on, but it’s like we’ve become immune to it.”
