JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — More than 20 years later, it’s the ribbons that stick out in Erika Brosig’s memory of the day when it seemed like the entire town showed up at the high school football game to support Dr. Johnnie Barto.

Though Brosig, who was 15 and a member of the Richland High School color guard, does not recall the color of the ribbons, she remembers with a still-sickening clarity the feeling when she pinned one on her uniform.

“I remember that ribbon burning a hole in my chest,” Brosig, 36, said.

A 65-year-old Johnstown mother, who asked not to be identified, said she also remembers being at Herlinger Field on that crisp fall day in 1998 and how she waved off a volunteer who tried to give her a ribbon.

Herlinger Field at Richland High School in Johnstown. The entire town showed up at the high school football game to support Barto in 1998. Justin Merriman / for NBC News

“There I am in the stands and I’m surrounded by all these people who think Barto is Mr. Wonderful,” she said.

Jennifer Goetz, 42, recalls being home from college and hearing about the ribbons and how the whole Johnstown area was rallying behind Barto, after three former patients had accused him of sexual abuse and the state had moved to suspend his license to practice medicine.

“I remember seeing the coverage on TV and I just wanted to throw up,” Goetz said.

All three women intend to be at the Cambria County Courthouse on Monday when Barto, 71, is sentenced to spend what’s likely to be the rest of his life in prison for sexually abusing a total of 29 children, including two relatives when they were minors.

HE COULD HAVE BEEN STOPPED DECADES AGO

Prosecutors say Barto has admitted to sexually assaulting more than two dozen children during the four decades he practiced medicine, and that most were victimized in the examination room of Laurel Pediatric Associates, his practice in the Johnstown suburb of Richland Township.

Barto was arrested in January 2018. Cambria County Prison / via AP

Brosig, Goetz and several other women interviewed by NBC News said it is time for the horrible truth to come out about the doctor who preyed on several generations of Johnstown children. They said it’s time for a reckoning for a man who fooled so many people for so long.

Brosig said she was 12 when she was assaulted by Barto in 1994 and remains haunted by what happened to her.

“He just stuck his hand down my pants, digitally penetrated me, and he moaned,” she said. “The sound of that moan will never leave me.”

The other Johnstown woman said her daughter was 11 when Barto assaulted her during an examination in the 1990s. She asked not to be named to protect her daughter’s privacy.

“I feel such guilt that I exposed my daughter to a pedophile,” she said. “But I didn’t know. I didn’t question what he was doing because he was a doctor.”

Goetz said Barto violated her in 1984 at his old practice in Johnstown when she was about 8. As a result, she said, she avoids male doctors. She said the time for exposing the secret that she has been hiding is long overdue.

Jennifer Goetz holds a photo of herself from around the time when she said Barto violated her. Justin Merriman / for NBC News

“He’s not getting away with it this time,” she said.

Barto pleaded guilty in December to multiple counts of indecent assault and endangering the welfare of children, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said.

It took accusations from “family members who were minors” to get Barto to finally own up to his crimes, the AG’s office said.

“Dr. Johnnie Barto used his position of authority — as the pediatrician who families relied on — to feed his own sick desires and take advantage of parents and children seeking basic health care,“ Attorney General Josh Shapiro said.

Barto targeted girls and boys, most between the ages of 8 and 12, Shapiro said. The youngest victims were a toddler and a two-week-old infant.

What continues to gall the survivors is that the State Board of Medicine was confronted with evidence against Barto almost two decades ago that investigators called a “pervasive and prolonged pattern of abuse” — and still chose to restore his medical license.

“We thought they got him,” Goetz said. “Instead, they let him go back to molesting children.”

Most of the assaults Barto is accused of happened after he got his medical license back after 2000, the AG’s office said.

‘HE GROOMED A COMMUNITY’

When a reporter visited Laurel Pediatric Associates recently, Barto’s name was no longer listed on the glass front doors.

“I could have been the last victim,” Lee Ann Berkebile, 29, of Johnstown, one of the first patients to file complaints against Barto in the 1990s, said in a brief telephone interview.

Other Barto accusers who just came forward, such as Amanda Dorich, 33, said she wishes now her family had filed a complaint back in the 1990s when she told them Barto assaulted her.

“The guilt weighs on me too,” Dorich said, adding she was 9 when she found herself in Barto’s examination room after suffering an asthma attack.

Dorich said Barto insisted that she undress so that he could check her for scoliosis and that he needed to check her for a possible vaginal infection. Afterward, she said, she told her mother what Barto did and the mom complained to the office manager at the practice. But they were stymied from the beginning.

“We just got blown off, they kept dismissing us,” she said. “I wish we had done more, gone to the police. When I think of all those kids who were hurt after me, that’s what kills me. All those kids.”

“You were just a child yourself,” Brosig comforted Dorich at a recent meeting with a reporter at Victim Services Incorporated in Johnstown, where Brosig is the clinical director.

Goetz, who was also at that meeting, said she told her mother that Barto hurt her but didn’t tell her how until after the first accusations against him were leveled in 1998. She said they didn’t dare tell anybody else.