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Former Penn State assistant coach Kevin O’Dea denied an allegation he was aware of child sexual abuse by former Nittany Lion defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. The allegation that he walked in to a room while Sandusky was abusing a boy emerged in documents unsealed Tuesday morning from Penn State’s litigation with its insurer over settlements paid to Sandusky accusers.
Two other former assistant coaches, Tom Bradley and Greg Schiano, strongly denied any knowledge of abuse by Sandusky as was alleged in a deposition by another former assistant, Mike McQueary. A key prosecution witness in Sandusky’s 2012 child sex abuse trial, McQueary said that years after it happened and he reported it to Penn State officials, he told Bradley about seeing Sandusky allegedly abusing a child in a locker room shower. He claimed Bradley told him he had heard of previous previous incidents including one allegedly witnessed by Schiano. Both Bradley and Schiano say that never happened.
A man identified as John Doe 101 alleged in a deposition that Sandusky was improperly touching him when O’Dea walked into the room. The accuser said he was laying in only his underwear on a couch in a locked coaches area when Sandusky was rubbing his back and that O’Dea allegedly entered the room.
Risk management and insurance expert Raymond Wiliams, in a report for Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association (PMA) Insurance listed six Sandusky incidents that occurred over 25 years that he said Penn State should have reported to PMA. One of those was the incident allegedly witnessed by O’Dea, which Williams said occurred in 1988.
O’Dea, however, did not work at Penn State in 1988. He was a graduate assistant at the University of Virginia from 1988-1990 and did not join the Penn State staff, as a graduate assistant, until 1991. He was then an assistant coach at Penn State in 1992-93.
‘The anonymous allegation that I knew, heard or had information in 1988, or at any other time for that matter, of the behavior of Jerry Sandusky is a complete fabrication,’ O’Dea said in a statement. ‘To be clear, in 1988, I was not employed, interning, working or in any way associated with Penn State.’
John Doe 101 said when O’Dea allegedly entered the room, Sandusky tried to make it seem nothing inappropriate was going on.
‘Yeah, I mean, he always tried to play things in a different way than what was happening, yeah, for sure,’ John Doe 101 said when asked by a PMA attorney if Sandusky tried to cover up what he was doing.
John Doe 101 said that Sandusky would frequently change what he was doing when he heard the push button entry to the room being activated to make it appear they were wrestling.
After leaving Penn State in 1993, O’Dea spent most of the next two decades as an NFL assistant coach with seven different teams, most recently as special teams coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2014.
When some allegations first emerged in a May court order for the Penn State-PMA case that some coaches in the 1980s may have known about Sandusky’s abuse of boys, Solicitor General Bruce Castor said state investigators had looked into those accusations during their Sandusky investigation and found them to be without merit.
‘The reports turned out to be double and triple hearsay and of no value, with the coaches in question each denying they saw anything,’ Castor told the Associated Press. ‘So dead ends there all around.’
‘Although settlements have been reached, it also is important to reiterate that the alleged knowledge of former Penn State employees is not proven, and should not be treated as such,’ Penn State President Eric Barron said in a statement on Tuesday. ‘Some individuals deny the claims, and others are unable to defend themselves.’
