That is so terribly sad. All he did was report something that someone else said that he had no firsthand knowledge of.
What else was he supposed to do?
Realistically, there isn’t much he could’ve done. He could have encouraged the actual witness to follow up with police (which he may have done - we don’t know). We know that he got the witness together with the police commissioner. We don’t know what happened after that.
Reasonable people (read: *not* most of his critics in this thread) wanted him to “follow up” more than he did. There might be some merit to that. I don’t know. It’s very difficult to say what you should or shouldn’t do if you aren’t a witness. Paterno had no idea what actually happened. He did exactly what he was *legally* supposed to do.