Wednesday, Nov. 9

The trustees glumly descended on State College for what they knew would be a long and painful day. Lubert said that he had trouble sleeping. Peetz recalled feeling as if she were an executioner going to the guillotine. Stephanie Nolan Deviney, a trustee and a partner at the law firm Fox Rothschild in Exton, Pa., remembered going to the bedroom of her 7-year-old to kiss him before she left for State College.

“I thought of the mothers of all those boys in the presentment,” Deviney recalled this week. “And I thought about what they must feel when they kiss their sons good night.”

The trustees gathered in a conference room at the Penn Stater at 7 p.m. In a rare occurrence, the governor joined the meeting by telephone for its duration. However, the soberness of the discussion was broken up by the clamor of tool-belted workers crawling around under the table trying to fix the telephone line. “Governor,” Surma asked every few minutes, “are you still with us?”

The trustees first discussed Spanier’s status. The trustees said that they sensed there was a consensus about Spanier’s future as the president. Earlier, Spanier had tried to submit his resignation, but Garban and Surma did not accept it. Garban told Spanier that the board felt it needed to deal with the matter itself. So, instead, the trustees paged through Spanier’s contract, and then decided to fire him. They named Erickson the interim president.

Then the trustees decided the fate of Paterno, who had come to Penn State as a young assistant coach in 1950 and who had helped build it into a national university, to which he donated more than $4 million. The 13 trustees interviewed Wednesday said that Paterno did not reach out to them before the Nov. 9 board meeting, and some said that it would not have mattered, because they did not believe that he could say anything to save his job.

Wick Sollers, Paterno’s lawyer, issued a statement Wednesday in response to the accounts offered by the trustees: “After learning of the alleged incident in 2002, Joe Paterno reported it immediately and fully to his superiors at the university. He believed these officials, who had the authority and responsibility to conduct investigations, would act appropriately. He did what he thought was right with the information he had at the time. Blaming Joe Paterno for the failure of administration officials and the board to properly investigate Jerry Sandusky is unjustified.”

On that Wednesday night in November, though, the only thing left for the board to do was to figure out how to carry out the firing. Could representatives safely show up at Paterno’s home amid the media frenzy? Was it realistic to expect Paterno, then 84, to meet with the trustees? The trustees decided to fire him by telephone, a decision that many board members interviewed expressed as their biggest regret.