A New Jersey high school recently canceled its football team’s 2014 season over charges of player hazing. Now a parent is revealing the disturbing sexual nature of that alleged abuse.
Because of an investigation into charges of hazing, school officials canceled the 2014 season for the Sayreville War Memorial High School football team for all levels of the program–freshman, junior varsity, and varsity. The team had won their division’s state championship three years running from 2010 through 2012.
“This is a very sad day in Sayreville,” school superintendent Richard Labbe said during his Tuesday announcement of the cancellation.
Now the parent of a player is telling the media of the sexual nature of the abuse allegedly perpetrated in the locker room by team seniors on freshman players.
The parent told The Star-Ledger that the beginning of the attack would be a loud howl from a senior. Then the locker room lights would go off and seniors would surround a freshman, pin him to the floor, then someone would stick a finger into the freshman’s rectum. The same finger would often then be jammed in the freshman’s mouth.
“[For] 10 seconds, the lights would go off and they would grab a freshman and they would go on,” the parent continued. “Right on the floor. … It was happening every day. They would get the freshmen.”
“These parents here, they’re in shock,” the parent told the Star-Ledger. “We never expected anything like this to happen. Your kid, he’s going to school, school’s got to be a place where you think the kid is the safest.”
Neither the police nor school officials would release any further information or any results from the investigations, but when superintendent Labbe announced the cancellation of the 2014 season he noted that there was “enough evidence to substantiate there were incidents of harassment, intimidation and bullying that took place on a pervasive level, on a wide-scale level, and at a level in which the players knew, tolerated and in general accepted.”
While many parents protested the cancellation of the football season, others criticized coaches by asking how it was possible that they never knew this hazing was going on right under their noses.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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