Famous “Shower Boy” Alleged Sandusky Victim, Dead at 39
Allan Myers, the “Unknown Boy” in the Penn State Shower Case, Dies at 39
Allan C. Myers of Pottersdale, Pennsylvania, died at home on Sunday, May 10, 2026. He was 39.
The obituary placed by his family with Wetzler Funeral Service in Bellefonte tells one story. Marine Corps sergeant. Honorable discharge. Husband to Jessi. Father to Aspen and Savannah. Owner of two German Shorthaired Pointers and a husky. Loyal to the Philadelphia Eagles. Lover of the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. Supporter of Angel Tree, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and Paralyzed Veterans of America.
The obituary names his mother, Tina Blackwell. His stepfather, father, brothers, sister, stepbrothers, nieces, and nephews.
It did not mention that Allan Myers was “Victim 2,” the anonymous 14-year-old that former Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary claimed he had seen in a Penn State shower one night in February 2001.
Nor did it mention that, years later, Penn State would pay Myers $6.9 million as part of the civil reckoning that followed the conviction of Jerry Sandusky.
The Defender
Myers was born on February 28, 1987, in rural central Pennsylvania. He met Sandusky as a fourth-grader through The Second Mile, the charity Sandusky had founded for troubled and at-risk children.
Sandusky
Sandusky was Penn State royalty — the famous defensive coordinator for 30 years under head coach Joe Paterno.
By Myers’s account, the house he grew up in was marked by violence. He recalled watching his father threaten his mother with a gun. A school guidance counselor recommended The Second Mile. Allan was nine.
As the years passed, he stayed at the Sandusky home overnight on many occasions. The Sandusky’s had six adopted children. He traveled to California with the Sanduskys twice.
Whatever the world later said about Jerry Sandusky, the young Allan Myers once moved through that family as naturally as a son or nephew moves through the home of people he trusts.
On Senior Night at West Branch High School, Myers asked Sandusky to walk beside his mother onto the football field. As they crossed beneath the stadium lights, before the town, the announcer introduced Sandusky in a single word that carried the weight of years: “Father.”
Later, Myers invited Sandusky to speak at his high school graduation. Sandusky came and spoke.
He spent the summer after graduation living with Jerry and Dottie Sandusky, working jobs, and taking classes. When Myers married, Sandusky attended the wedding. When Sandusky’s mother died, Myers drove twelve hours across the country to attend the funeral. He joined the Marine Corps as a young man, rose to the rank of sergeant, and when his service ended, he received an honorable discharge.
Sandusky and Myers
Press Revelation
On March 31, 2011, reporter Sara Ganim of the Patriot-News published the first article revealing that Sandusky was under grand jury investigation for child sexual abuse.
At the center of it was one explosive allegation: that former Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary had witnessed Sandusky sexually assaulting an unknown boy in the Penn State showers. The accusation struck the public imagination with almost biblical force — the trusted coach, the locker room, the silent institution, the unseen child.
The allegation transformed the case into national hysteria.
One month later, on May 1, 2011, Myers wrote a letter to the Pennsylvania Attorney General and to a local newspaper.
“I am one of those many Second Mile kids who became a part of Jerry’s family,” Myers wrote. “He has been a best friend, tutor, workout mentor and more. We’ve worked together, competed together, traveled together and laughed together. I lived with Jerry and Dottie for three months. Jerry’s been there for me for 13 years; and stood beside me at my senior parent’s football night. I drove twelve hours to attend his mom’s funeral. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
The State Police
On September 20, 2011, Pennsylvania State Police officers Joseph Leiter and James Ellis interviewed Myers. He told them he did not believe the allegations against Sandusky.
A 24-year-old Marine sergeant told them that Aaron Fisher, the first accuser, was “only out to get some money.” He said that at no time had Sandusky done anything that made him uncomfortable.
Myers later said the investigators were trying to put words in his mouth and were “clearly angry and upset” when he would not say what they wanted to hear. His final words to them were: “I will never have anything bad to say about Jerry.”
Linda KellyPennsylvania State Attorney General Linda Kelly speaking at a press conference on November 7, 2011
On November 7, 2011 — two days after the grand jury presentment became public, Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly stood before television cameras and addressed the country directly. Near the end, Kelly stated that the boy described by McQueary in the Penn State shower incident — “Victim 2” — was unknown.
She said, “We encourage that person, who’s now likely to be a young adult, to contact investigators.”
Forty-eight days earlier, the boy in the shower had already spoken to state police and told them that Sandusky had never abused him.
On November 9, 2011, Myers arrived at Sandusky’s attorney, Joe Amendola’s, office, accompanied by his mother. He met with Curtis Everhart, a former FBI agent working as an investigator for the defense. Myers told Everhart that he was the boy McQueary claimed to have seen in the Penn State showers.
Everhart took a statement. Myers explained that after a workout in the Penn State gym, he and Sandusky had showered in the public locker-room showers and that the noises McQueary later interpreted as sexual assault had been nothing more than horseplay — slap-boxing, snapping towels, and sliding on the wet locker-room floor. He denied that any sexual conduct had occurred.
“Never, ever, did anything like that occur,” Myers told Everhart. “Jerry never violated me while I was at his home or anywhere else. I felt very safe and at ease at his home, whether alone with Jerry or with others present.”
The Flip
By the autumn of 2011, Myers had troubles of his own. Attorney Andrew Shubin was representing him on a driving-under-the-influence charge stemming from a rollover crash on September 3 of that year. Myers’s mother worked at Shubin’s law office.
Shubin had been advertising for Sandusky victims and had at that time found two other men who claimed Sandusky had abused them. Both men, like Myers initially told police that Sandusky had never abused them. Shubin worked with them and even got them repressed recovered memory therapists to help them remember that Sandusky did abuse them.
A 24-year-old Marine sergeant stood at the center of converging pressures: a pending DUI prosecution, a lawyer controlling his criminal defense, a mother employed by that lawyer’s office, and the sudden possibility of millions of dollars, almost unimaginable money for a boy from a hard Pennsylvania childhood, flowing from an already announced Penn State settlement fund.
Allan Myers changed his story.
The Sassano File
For several months after Shubin took Myers on, the lawyer obstructed the Commonwealth’s ability to develop Myers as a witness. According to sworn testimony at the 2016 PCRA hearings, Shubin at one point hid Myers in a remote Pennsylvania hunting cabin while state investigators attempted to locate him.
According to lead investigator Anthony Sassano, Shubin told him that Myers had been to Sandusky’s house “over 100 times” and had suffered “both oral and anal sex.”
Shubin allowed a law enforcement agent to interview Myers on Febuary 28, 2012, for three hours. Myers described no allegations of abuse. A second interview on March 8 produced the same result.
The third interview took place on March 16, 2012, inside the police barracks. At last, Myers described a single incident. During a trip to Erie, Pennsylvania, he said, Sandusky had placed a hand inside his pants and touched his penis.
Sassano asked if Sandusky attempted to place Myers’s hand on him? No, Myers answered. Had there been oral sex? No.
Myers said there had been perhaps ten incidents. Yet he could not recall the first incident, could not remember dates or frequencies, and could not elaborate in detail. He added that he had not previously shared such allegations with anyone, including his own attorney.
“This is in contrast to what Shubin told me,” Sassano wrote in his report of Myers being raped and subjected to oral sex.
In an official investigative report, Sassano wrote that Shubin had misrepresented what Myers said happened.
On April 3, 2012, Myers was scheduled to meet again with Sassano and Postal Inspector Michael Corricelli. He never arrived. Instead, Shubin produced a three-page written statement purportedly describing Myers’s sexual encounters with Sandusky.
Sassano did not accept it.
“I did not want a copy of a document that was suspected to be written by Attorney Shubin,” Sassano wrote.
He closed his investigation of Myers. “At this time, I don’t anticipate further investigation concerning Allan Myers.”
The Trial
By June 2012, the Sandusky trial had commenced. The trial was the most heavily covered Pennsylvania criminal proceeding of the era. Centre County was crawling with reporters. Inside the courtroom, both sides knew the shower boy was Allan Myers. Neither side called him.
That fact was kept from the jury and the media.
The prosecution could not safely place him on the stand because the young man had already denied abuse repeatedly and had failed, even under extensive questioning by the state’s investigators, to produce a stable narrative of victimization.
The defense faced its own dilemma. By the time trial began, Myers had become a client of Shubin.
The jury was told about a boy McQueary claimed to have seen in the shower. They were not given his name or his initial denials. They were not told that he had written a letter to the Attorney General six months before the trial defending Sandusky or that he had given a sworn statement to Amendola’s investigator denying abuse.
Joe McGettigan, the prosecutor of Jerry Sandusky
Prosecutor Joe McGettigan said in his closing argument, that the identity of the shower boy was “unknown to us, ” and “known only to God but not to us.”
McGettigan knew perfectly well who the boy in the shower was. Yet, before 12 jurors, he declared that he was known only to God.
The jury convicted Sandusky on 45 of 48 counts. The court sentenced him to 30-60 years in prison.
There was, however, one charge on which the jury refused to convict Sandusky. They acquitted him of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse relating to the Penn State shower incident — the allegation built on McQueary’s account, with Myers absent and unidentified during the trial.
It was the central accusation of the case. The image of the shower encounter had ignited the scandal, consumed Penn State, and transformed Sandusky from a celebrated coach into a national symbol of institutional depravity. On the single count most directly tied to the case, the jury said no.
Under Oath, At Last
For the next four years, Allan Myers remained absent from public view. Penn State paid him $6.9 million from the institutional settlement fund established for Sandusky claimants. He never had to be sworn under oath. Penn State paid based on Shubin’s account of his abuse alone.
On November 4, 2016, Myers finally entered the courtroom in connection to hearing concerning Sandusky’s appeal
Sandusky, in his prison uniform, was there when Myers, 29, and a millionaire, walked in.
Jerry Sandusky
Sandusky said he barely recognized him — heavier now, bearded, withdrawn, carrying himself with the exhausted gloom of someone who had traveled a long way from the boy he once knew.
For the entirety of his testimony, Myers refused to say Sandusky’s name. Instead, addressing defense attorney Al Lindsay, he referred to Sandusky only as “your client.”
When Lindsay confronted him with his earlier denials — the letters, interviews, the statements insisting no abuse had occurred — Myers answered quietly: “That would reflect what I said then. Not what I would say now.”
Under hours of questioning, Myers could not describe a single sexual incident. He acknowledged that he had once regarded Sandusky as a father figure. He admitted living with the Sanduskys during the summer of 2005.
Asked why he eventually left their home, Myers replied:
“Because he was controlling.”
Not violent. Not sexual. Controlling.
Then came the prosecutor’s final question.
“Were you sexually abused?”
Myers answered: “Yes.”
But the prosecutor did not ask who had abused him. Allan Myers did not say Jerry Sandusky’s name.
Death
Allan Myers died at home on the morning of Sunday, May 10, 2026. The obituary says nothing about how he died.
People who knew Myers told Frank Report that alcohol played a role. There is a bleak symmetry to it. Alcohol was present near the beginning of the unraveling of his life — the rollover crash, the DUI charge, the entrance into attorney Shubin’s office.
Then there was the heavy descent into alcohol in the years following his windfall.
Myers became part of the machinery that helped send Sandusky to prison for life. Myers is dead. So is prosecutor McGettigan.
Sandusky remains in a Pennsylvania prison at 82 years old — having outlived both the accuser who would not name him and the prosecutor who claimed to speak for him.
A Closing Word
This publication has examined the Sandusky case for years. We believe the record shows that Sandusky was wrongfully convicted.
We believe Myers was a troubled man who carried pain and confusion throughout his life.
Sandusky was the man Myers once called his best friend. The man he treated as family. The father figure he honored beneath stadium lights and invited into the milestones of his adult life. Myers also became part of the process that condemned Sandusky to die in prison.
Men do not ordinarily drink themselves toward destruction at 39 because they are at peace with themselves. They do it because something inside remains unresolved, intolerable, impossible to silence completely.
And sometimes the cruelest punishment is not prison, public disgrace, or even death itself. It is the private hell a human being constructs slowly within his own conscience — a place carried invisibly through ordinary days, family dinners, sleepless nights, and quiet mornings.
Epilogue
The tragedy of the Sandusky story is not merely that an old man was destroyed. It is that nearly everyone who touched the case became morally corrupted by it.
Allan Myers was never the loudest figure, nor the cleverest, nor the cruelest. Others built the case and operated it. Prosecutors lied before the cameras and the jury. Lawyers cultivated memories.
Institutions protected themselves with settlements and silence.
Myers became the beneficiary of a system that rewarded betrayal and punished truth.
He was also the boy who once loved Sandusky openly, almost innocently. He called him “Father” beneath the bright lights of a Pennsylvania football field. He traveled with him, lived with him, mourned with him, and defended him.
Then, Myers discovered there was money in betrayal. He accepted the bargain. The millions came. Yet the conscience remained.
People who drink themselves slowly toward oblivion are often trying to silence something. Myers drank because he knew the difference between gratitude and treachery. He knew Sandusky had helped him, not violated him. He knew it every time he lifted a glass.
Alcohol became the refuge of a man who could not reconcile what he had done with what he knew.
A few months before Myers died, I sent an investigator to see him. The message was simple: if Allan wanted, even now, he could still tell the truth. He listened carefully. Then he said he needed to go inside for a moment.
He never came back out. Instead, his brother appeared and quietly said Allan would not be returning.
Allan Myers died the way he lived after 2011 — hiding from the truth. That, perhaps, was the final measure of the tragedy. Not merely that a man lied. But that in the end he lacked even the courage to speak before the darkness closed around him.
Allan Myers.
ARTVOICE ART
