He remembers hearing the popping sound from far away. He didn't know what it was so he followed the noise from the house on Avenue O. Half a mile Leeronnie Ogletree ran, the pops getting louder, the intrigue multiplying until he saw the stadium. He peered through a chain-link fence with a 10-year-old's wonderment. Baseball players in Winter Haven, Fla. Real baseball players in unblemished uniforms. Pitchers throwing, catchers receiving. Pop-pop-pop. It was the first day of spring training in 1973. Everything was pure.
A man asked Leeronnie if he wanted to meet the Boston Red Sox, maybe make a few bucks on the side cleaning around the clubhouse. Both knew what the answer would be.
"If you're a kid, you fall in love with the game of baseball," Ogletree says. "There's one in a million chance of meeting a professional ballplayer, let alone working with them. If kids like something, and if you say you're going to take that away, they'll do anything to keep what's good to them. I know what happened to me at 10 years old."
Today, Ogletree is 48. He can't forget about what happened when he was 10, not ever. So in September, after a long time away, he put a sign into his car and drove to a ballpark again. People would see what happened to him at 10 years old. And they never would forget, either.
*** Before Jerry Sandusky -- before he allegedly used the Penn State football complex to commit sex crimes with young boys and before the university spent more than a decade covering up his sins and before the grand-jury report revealed the appalling details of his abuse and before the campus rioted over legendary coach Joe Paterno losing his job amid it all -- there was Donald Fitzpatrick, the longtime Red Sox clubhouse manager who lured Ogletree and at least a dozen other young, African-American boys into two decades of systemic sexual abuse.
Not only has a serial child molester infiltrated sports before, he did so with one of baseball's most storied franchises. Should the allegations against Sandusky prove true, the two cases are strikingly similar. Both men seduced their victims with the lure of big-time athletics. Both bribed them with equipment and other swag. Both enjoyed watching boys shower. Both fondled their victims and engaged in oral sex. Both committed crimes in plain view and, despite getting caught, were swaddled by a power structure that buried the truth to protect those highest up in the organization. Both used threats and mind games to silence their prey for decades. And both ended up being exposed as predators far too late, after they had laid waste to innocent lives.
Unlike Sandusky, Fitzpatrick's shame did not make the nightly news and spur national discussions about moral responsibility vis-à-vis sex offenders. Outside of Boston and Florida, where his molestation of clubhouse assistants and batboys occurred, few knew of Fitzpatrick even after the accusations went public. He was the lead visiting clubbie at Fenway Park and Chain Of Lakes Park, the Red Sox's spring training site in Winter Haven, a no-name. Nobody protested against the team's inaction.
Never mind that the negligence dated back to 1971. One victim, according to a complaint filed by his lawyer two decades later, told Red Sox home clubhouse manager Vince Orlando that Fitzpatrick had abused him for the previous three seasons. Orlando fired the boy. Two sources, who asked not to be identified, said a Red Sox player caught Fitzpatrick sodomizing a boy in the shower, much like then-Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary did Sandusky. The player reported the incident to the team but not police. Fitzpatrick kept his job anyway.
And so the monster who tormented boys as young as 4 continued to parade them to his locations of choice: the private room at Chain of Lakes, the Holiday Inn, his Boston-area condo, even Fenway. Six of the boys remain unnamed. Seven wore Fitzpatrick's scars publicly. Myron Birdsong, Terrance Birdsong, Walter Covington III, Eric Frazier Jr., James A. Jackson, Willie Earl Hollis and Leeronnie Ogletree. Most were related by blood. All are bound by another's evil.
Some of the victims overcame the anguish and chaos sexual abuse portends. One is a doctor, another a minister. Most succumbed to drugs and crime and all of the mechanisms used to cope with the robbery of innocence, which is what makes widespread molestation cases so devastating and the Penn State case evermore frightful: the crime often doesn't end with deed. It resonates and reverberates years and decades later, the worst sort of wrong, one that can break a man.
Sort of like it did Leeronnie Ogletree.