Sex Assault Case More than Hijinks

Ellis Henican

September 14, 2003

They are known as the Pirates, the high-spirited football players at Mepham High School on Long Island's South Shore.

Their mascot is a real swashbuckler too, right down to the glimmering earring, the rakish eye patch, the greasy-looking sideburns and the skull-and-crossbones hat.

"Aarrgh!"

This is the team that gave the football world Amos Zereoue, class of '94, who won Newsday's Thorp Award for best high-school player his junior and senior years. "Famous Amos" rushed for 5,360 yards, breaking a record then held by Manhasset's Jim Brown. Now in his fifth NFL season, Zereoue was just named a starting running back with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

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But these are more mundane times. Pirates went 4 and 4 last year. This season, with hard work and steely focus and an extra dash of school spirit tossed in, they were vowing to top last year's so-so record. That's what the Mepham Pirates' five-day, preseason football camp in northeast Pennsylvania was all about.

Now, even that burst of optimism is suddenly gone.

Two thousand and three will not be the year the Pirates bring winning football back to Mepham, no matter what the scoreboard says. It'll be the year of the alleged sex assaults.

Such is the power of a story like this.

Mark Zimmer, the district attorney of Wayne County, Pa., says he and the Pennsylvania State Police are investigating "what appears to be sexual abuse allegations in what is supposed to have been a hazing."

And if the allegations can be confirmed, this was a whole lot more than high-school hijinks that went too far.

This wasn't Biff and Chip at Pledge Week. It was Justin Volpe on the football team.

And just as the Abner Louima torture case came to tarnish a whole Brooklyn precinct, the football-camp allegations will hover disturbingly over Mepham High for a good long while, fairly or not.

No one has been charged. So we have to step lightly here. But three varsity players, ages 15, 16 and 17, have already been suspended from the football team. Investigators are interviewing potential witnesses. These are major felonies the authorities are talking about, with lengthy prison terms. And family members of the alleged victims have begun providing some disturbing details. At least three junior-varsity players, they say, were assaulted by older players at the camp. The alleged acts included sodomy with a broomstick.

Equally troubling? Suggestions from school officials that some players and their parents seemed reluctant to submit written statements about the alleged incidents.

My Newsday colleagues Karla Schuster, Bob Kessler, Keiko Morris and Jason Molinet have been all over this difficult story, and properly so.

This will get a whole lot uglier before we're done.

Exactly how such a series of assaults could have occurred in such close quarters remains a bit of a mystery. Sixty players and five coaches were at the camp, which was conducted at Camp Wayne for Girls in Preston Park, Pa., just across the state line from Binghamton.

Didn't the coaches hear anything?

Didn't the players talk?

And what could the older students have been thinking?

All those questions need to be asked.

Thomas Caramore, the Bellmore-Merrick schools superintendent, said the coaches had their own cabin, separate from the players. Said Caramore: "I am confident that the coaches didn't know anything might have happened" until one boy's parent complained later to the school's principal.

Give the superintendent some credit for taking the allegations seriously when they were raised. "We don't allow hazing, period," he said.

But in the end, this case cannot be thought of as any example of hazing. If the allegations are even close to true, it belongs in the annals of twisted sexual assaults - not boyish pranks.

Mepham is a good school in a close-knit community in a part of the world where people care about kids and schools.

Football coach Kevin McElroy isn't talking publicly yet. He'd better have something interesting to say.