LOCK HAVEN — While most of the attention in the Penn State child sex abuse scandal has focused on State College, the impact extends farther north, where some of the alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky still live.

Here, almost everyone knows someone who was affected by the scandal, and whether they felt comfortable talking about it publicly or not, Penn State’s pain is their pain, too.

The University Park campus alone has more students than the entire population of Clinton County, but ties to the university run deep, and the same shock and sadness hanging over State College also shrouds the boot-shaped county’s mountains and valleys.

“This is Penn State country,” said Jared Conti, a Lock Haven native. “You grow up with it.”

Conti, who attended Lock Haven University, said most local residents are die-hard Penn State fans.

“People think you’re weird if you aren’t,” he said.

At the heart and soul of this loyalty is football. Just open up the pages of the local newspaper, and multiple pages are devoted to football and the other sports played at the county’s two main high schools.

Bucktail High School, in Renovo, had a good football season this year, finishing 8-2. They’ve had even better years.

But from one end of the county to the other, everyone’s talking about what happened at Central Mountain High School in Mill Hall, where Sandusky, the former Penn State defensive coordinator, volunteered as a football coach for three years.

A 23-page report by a state grand jury investigating allegations that Sandusky molested at least eight boys over a 15-year period begins with “Victim 1.” Victim 1 testified that he met Sandusky as a participant in The Second Mile, a charity Sandusky founded in 1977 to help underprivileged and at-risk youth throughout Pennsylvania.

Victim 1, who was 11 or 12 when he first met Sandusky, testified that Sandusky cultivated a relationship with him, buying him gifts, taking him to restaurants and inviting him to sleep over in his basement.

The victim testified that Sandusky at first began physical contact during these sleepovers, blowing on the victim’s bare stomach or “cracking” the victim’s back.

Later, the victim testified, the relationship became sexual. Victim 1 told the grand jury that Sandusky performed oral sex on him more than 20 times, and that he performed oral sex on Sandusky once.

But it was very far from consensual.

“Victim 1 did not want to engage in sexual conduct with Sandusky and knew it was wrong,” the grand jury report said. Though this discomfort led Victim 1 to eventually break off contact with Sandusky, the report said, Sandusky persisted. An agent for the state Attorney General’s Office testified that there were 61 phone calls from Sandusky’s home phone to Victim 1’s home phone between January 2008 and July 2009.

The grand jury report said that Victim 1 ceased contact with Sandusky when he was a freshman at Central Mountain, where as a volunteer coach, Sandusky had “unfettered access.”

Sandusky would routinely call Victim 1 out of class to meet with him in a conference room, the grand jury report said, and no one monitored these visits. Steven Turchetta, an assistant principal at the school, told the grand jury that Sandusky was “controlling” in the mentoring relationships he established with Second Mile participants and called some of Sandusky’s behavior “suspicious.”

Turchetta learned of the sexual abuse allegations when Victim 1’s mother called the school to report it. School district officials subsequently barred Sandusky from school property and reported the allegations to authorities, as required by law.

Turchetta could not be reached to talk about the case, and several other employees of the school district declined to speak publicly, citing fear of discipline by school officials. The school district is the county's second largest employer.

Victim 1 has been forced to leave the school because of bullying, the Patriot-News of Harrisburg reported Sunday. Classmates were blaming him for the firing of Penn State head coach Joe Paterno, the newspaper reported.

One of Turchetta’s neighbors, who declined to give his name, said there were “rumblings” that “something was funny” about Sandusky around the time he started coaching at Central Mountain, but that few people took any of the rumors seriously.

In a statement emailed to McClatchy, the Keystone Central School District said “it would be inappropriate” to comment on the case, adding that school officials are cooperating with the investigation.

Sandusky’s charity focused on helping mostly lower-income youth, often from single-parent homes. Recent census data show that Clinton County is a place where many such children live. According to census figures, more than 20 percent of the county’s 39,000 residents are younger than 18. The county’s median annual household income is well below Pennsylvania’s. The county’s largest employer is a manufacturer of consumer paper products, and many of the county’s residents commute to work at Penn State.

The grand jury report doesn’t identify where all of Sandusky’s alleged victims live. McClatchy determined that at least one other victim also lives in Clinton County and attended Central Mountain High School. A woman who greeted a reporter in the driveway of the victim’s residence said that neither he nor his family was interested in speaking about the case.

“He doesn’t want to have anything to do with it,” said the woman, who declined to give her name.

Sandusky is charged with 40 counts of child sex abuse, and his preliminary hearing is set for Dec. 7. Two former Penn State officials, Athletic Director Tim Curley and Senior Vice President for Finance Gary Schultz, have been charged with perjury.

Because the state grand jury investigation continues, others could be charged. The headline-dominating scandal has seared Penn State’s storied football program and brought down Paterno and university President Graham Spanier. Paterno and Spanier learned of Sandusky’s alleged activities in 2002, and other Penn State officials knew about them as early as 1998, according to the grand jury report.

Much as in State College, people in Clinton County have mixed opinions about who should be held responsible for Sandusky’s alleged crimes.

Emily Burnworth, of Mill Hall, who graduated from Central Mountain, then attended college at Brigham Young University in Utah, called Paterno “a sideline player” in the scandal.

“It’s difficult to watch Paterno take Sandusky’s bullet,” she said. “The university could have extended a bit more grace to the situation.”

Barb Rauch, of Renovo, however, isn’t as quick to defend Paterno, who told his boss, Curley, what he knew about Sandusky’s alleged abuse, but didn't go directly to the police with it.

“I’m a mother,” said Rauch, who has four daughters and a grandson. “No excuses.” Rauch said it wasn't enough for Paterno to tell his superior. If a public school teacher were accused of abusing children, that wouldn’t cut it, she said. “This teacher still works here, but I told the principal?” she said. “It’s surprising to see such strong support for Paterno.”

People do generally agree on one thing, however: there’s a lot of blame to go around.

“Everybody’s passing the buck,” said a woman who was knitting with a group of friends inside a Lock Haven coffee shop but declined to give her name. She said it was time to move past the scandal and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“Help the victims first, then change the law,” she said.