Peter Recla and the Sex Abuse Scandal That Tore Nyack Apart

In the spring of 2007, Patrick D’Auria steered his Jeep toward the Hudson River. Twenty-five years old, he had short black hair, a shelf at home for athletic awards from high school and college, and a bachelor’s degree in communications that he didn’t quite know what to do with. The modest buildings of White Plains, where he’d just left work at an insurance company, receded as he navigated onto the New York State Thruway. Soon he reached the Tappan Zee Bridge, headed to Nyack, where he and I both grew up.

In the Nyack of my youth, it was sports that brought the community together. Pat and I were drafted in competitive baseball tryouts starting at age 9, and before All-Star games, we would gather at the D’Auria home to watch movies like The Natural and eat pasta dinners made by Pat’s father, whom we called Big Pat. To my eye, Pat was not our most naturally gifted player — that title belonged to my childhood friend Darren Beamon, a shortstop. But with the game on the line, you wanted Pat up. He took hundreds of hours of batting practice and played with a sense of duty that felt weighted by the generations of his family who had played ball in Nyack. He was also very fun. One summer, our team shaved our heads in solidarity; Pat went a step further, carving notches in his eyebrows after wins.

We all wanted to go pro, but Pat made it further than most. After starring at Nyack High School in baseball and football, he was recruited to play baseball at the State University of New York in Cortland, where he made the school’s hall of fame. But he hadn’t reached the pros, and after college he returned to the suburbs adrift and lacking purpose.

Baseball is built to betray — the higher you move within its ranks, the more inevitable the disappointment. But the pressure of playing for the Nyack Indians seems to have created abnormally deep scars for Pat and his former teammates. One of my friends was a preseason All-American. Then he suddenly began hurling balls into the ground. (“My brain broke,” he said.) Another called losing his spot on the team “probably the most impactful thing that happened in the course of my life”; without baseball, he retreated into drugs for years. Darren told me that what happened to him at Nyack High School derailed his life: “If what you’re doing leaves kids crippled, you have to wonder what is going on inside those walls.”

Not long after Pat returned from college, he moved into the home of a former high-school coach named Peter Recla, who had taken an interest in Pat beginning in eighth grade. Coach Recla had helped Pat buy his first car and his college books. After Pat graduated, he’d gotten him a job at the company where he worked, signed the lease on his Jeep, and offered him a volunteer assistant-coach position at his alma mater.

For years, teammates had made suggestive comments about Pat and Recla. Pat had always brushed it off, but that day in 2007, the ground had violently shifted. Pat had recently been rummaging through Recla’s house when he’d discovered pornographic videos the coach had made of Pat without his knowledge years earlier, when he was a minor.

As Pat crossed the bridge, he slowed down. Ever since he was a boy, he’d gone to the river for solace. Today, the water appeared ominous, choppy with whitecaps. His body in tension, Pat envisioned steering the Jeep through the guardrail and into the river. Then he considered his parents. And, he recently told me, another thought caused him to continue driving: “No one would even know why.”

The river defines the town. Broadway parallels it, Main Street descends toward it, and, at the north end of Nyack, a cliff rises above the Hudson. This is Hook Mountain, a rock wall created by quarrying companies that blew up the ridge during the 19th century. From its summit, you can see across the river to Westchester, south toward Manhattan, and into the town where I was raised.

On Friday nights, thousands of us descended on MacCalman Field, a half-mile from the water’s edge, to watch Pat and Darren lead the football team. The coach, John Castellano, was also a dean of students, and he carried immense power. “He was the pope of Nyack High School,” said Pat. The fealty was rabid, the talent great, the pressure extreme. The football team was supported by two teams of cheerleaders: the normal group and an elite dance squad called the Indianettes. That era has passed — the team is now called the Redhawks — but it produced enduring legacies and impressive infrastructure. From the Hook’s summit, if you are looking toward town, one feature dominates: a series of turf fields that appear to have been lifted from the Ivy Leagues, part of Nyack High School’s multimillion-dollar athletic facilities.

To say we grew up loving sports would be inadequate. We grew up wearing Little League pants to Sunday school. At night, I threw a ball into the darkness above my bed between prayers. I left my first job, bussing tables, to play baseball. In Nyack, my commitment was quotidian. Pat’s was not. His grandfather had co-founded our Little League; Big Pat told the boy he stood on the shoulders of giants. In high school, Pat received extra attention from Dave Siegriest, the head coach, and his assistant, Recla. “You can see kids getting treated differently or being favored, and I thought it was that,” said another player, Robbie Woods, who is now a school counselor in South Carolina.

If Pat was the kid Nyack sports appeared built to serve, Darren, who is Black, was the one it seemed destined to fail. At the time, Nyack employed a tracking system that greatly disadvantaged Black students, entrenching many of them in low-performing classes. But Darren possessed generational talent — on television, announcers rhapsodized about “Steamin’ Beamon” — and he was allowed to slide by academically so long as he was delivering football triumph, including Nyack’s first state championship in 2000. Two longtime district educators told me that Castellano pressured teachers to allow academically struggling stars to play. Darren himself says that Castellano got his grades artificially raised.

Within Nyack’s sports hierarchy, football came first. And while Castellano had the ability to push Darren through multiple football seasons, neither he or the school could graduate a kid who had done almost no schoolwork. In the spring of 2001, right before a baseball game when the Mets and Pirates were to scout him, Darren was deemed academically ineligible. Darren was not drafted and did not graduate. To many of his teammates, the implication was clear: Now that Castellano no longer needed him, he was disposable. (Castellano did not respond to interview requests.)

Darren eventually got his GED and tried to return to baseball at a community college. But he faltered and fought addiction for years. Now that he is sober, he rejects a framework that puts the responsibility for his choices solely on his high-school experience. “I didn’t want to look at my own shit and come to the conclusion it’s me,” he told me. “It’s not everybody else. It’s my inability to cope with all that shit, me running from problems instead of facing responsibilities and dealing with them like a man.”  He added that, if he’d gone pro, he still could have been vulnerable. “If things had happened as I wanted them to, I could be dead.”

For a long time, I thought Darren’s story was the most damning one to emerge from Nyack sports. But then a few years ago, Darren and I got together over pizza. We talked about the seasons we played together before I left for a different high school, and he recalled his glory days with Pat on the field. Darren, however, said, that he’d recently learned something disturbing. An investigator had called him and other former Nyack ballplayers, inquiring about Recla. The rumors about Recla and Pat, he said, appeared to be grounded in reality, and the truth seemed far worse than any of us had imagined.

The D’Aurias lived on North Midland Avenue, in a two-story home next to others just like it. Big Pat sold insurance, while Pat’s mom, Nancy, was an ER nurse. The D’Aurias were seen as Nyack royalty, but that façade required maintenance. Though Pat had three siblings, the work of carrying the D’Auria name fell to him. “From a young age, it was seen that Pat would be the performer,” said Kaitilin Williams Newman, who grew up next door.

In eighth grade, Pat was invited to play a fall season with the high-school team. Coach Siegriest — or Siegs, as he was known — was by a day a gym teacher at Upper Nyack Elementary. A short, burly man, he had grown up in Nyack and starred for the baseball team. After taking over its leadership in 1993, in his early 30s, he said he wanted to operate it the way Castellano ran the football program. He could be caring, once sending flowers to the mother of a player when she became ill, but he was also volatile. A player who loved him said, “He expected a lot.” A player who did not love him said, “He had a way of picking you up and then he would hammer you.”

When Siegriest got the Nyack job, he brought Recla with him. Recla had a trim build, black hair, and spoke with a local inflection: vowels rounded. Among the Nyack athletes I’ve spoken with, everyone’s memory of him is different. Some saw him as the good cop on the coaching staff, others the brains of the operation. To some, he was quiet and awkward, but Pat said, “He had this ego and swagger.” (Recla declined an interview request.)

Recla was known to throw pool parties at his home, a two-story house on a dead-end street in Valley Cottage, following summer-league games. Christopher Rosenbluth grew up on the same block, and while he often saw shirtless young men drinking beer, he never joined: He wasn’t invited, and his mother had forbidden him from going over. When he made the high-school team, he had to find his own way to get to games. “My parents didn’t tell me, ‘Don’t take a ride with Recla,’” he recently said. “But it was, ‘Don’t be alone.’”

When I asked why his parents hadn’t raised their concerns publicly, Rosenbluth cited the broad homophobia of the time. “When there was a homosexual relationship, I think there was an expectation or a prejudice that it was deviant,” he said. (His parents did not speak with me.) It was as though, lacking any understanding of healthy queer relationships, my community couldn’t spot an abusive one.

This wasn’t the case in Pat’s family — he was close with a gay uncle — but he was vulnerable in other ways. By the time high school arrived, Big Pat and Nancy were separating, and both were burdened caring for relatives with cancer. The kids were largely left to their own devices. But for Big Pat, Nyack sports represented an unambiguous harbor. He worried about his younger son going into the city, but he did not concern himself with threats from home. “I felt like I was in this fortress of Nyack,” he told me.

During the summer after eighth grade, Pat and Recla began to speak on the phone. They discussed baseball, and Pat bragged about his sexual exploits with girls. On those calls, Pat claims, Recla told tales about intimacies with college women. In documents Pat later submitted in a civil case against the school district, Pat referred to those calls as “tantamount to having phone sex with a fourteen-year-old.” But at the time, it seemed like a weirder version of conversations he had with buddies. Besides, Recla’s attentions validated his athletic ambitions. Pat wanted to go pro, as his grandfather had done.

By March of Pat’s freshman year, he was assigned to junior varsity. But the varsity coaches considered bringing him on an annual spring-training trip to Florida — at least until the school administration found out about a party Pat had thrown at his house. It was the kind of thing that could result in severe discipline. Pat’s girlfriend at the time, a softball star who got dangerously drunk at the gathering, was suspended for multiple games, but Pat only received a citation and several mandatory sessions with the school counselor.

The punishment was delivered by Cas and Siegriest, but in Pat’s account, the idea for leniency came from his most attentive coach: “Recla came up with the idea that I should be allowed on the varsity trip to Florida to keep me engaged — otherwise I’d fall down the path of drugs and alcohol.”

Pat soon started going to Recla’s house at his coach’s invitation. He called Recla during school, from a pay phone, to have the coach pick him up. At his house, Recla served Pat alcohol, played pornography on the television, and asked the boy to shave his back. Recla gave Pat a key to his home, allowing Pat to bring girls there. Pat once showed up to practice in a shirt reading “Recla.”

On the team, it was acknowledged that Recla was occasionally inappropriate — numerous players recall him lying on a bed in briefs during a team meeting. But it’s also true that, among players I’ve spoken with, a sentiment prevailed: Pat, who was incredibly strong, could take care of himself. Rosenbluth and another player made up a demeaning song about Pat and Recla. “I don’t remember anybody ever doing it to Pat’s face, which makes it worse,” said Rosenbluth. “It was a way to bring Pat down, because he was the golden boy.” The girls in Pat’s social circle reverted to derisive humor — Recla’s gay; Recla’s obsessed with Pat.

The adults, meanwhile, looked away. Michael Hughes, who coached the Nyack junior-varsity baseball team for years starting in 1997, lived across the street from Recla, and he told me he saw high-schoolers partying there. When it came to the parties, he said, “It’s a small community. Everyone was aware of what was going on.” But, he also said, “that was his business. I didn’t really care what he was doing over there.” (Hughes later denied seeing students partying at Recla’s house.)

Rosenbluth is one of three players who claim that they heard Siegriest say he didn’t want to know what happened at Recla’s house, and according to Hughes, he never spoke to the head coach about the gatherings. But when I asked Hughes if he’d ever seen Pat leaving in a manner that raised concerns, there was a long, long pause. Then he said, “All I can say is Dave Siegriest was a good man.”

In a statement, an attorney for the Siegriest family wrote, “David Siegriest had absolutely no knowledge, nor reason to believe, that any one of his players or students was the victim of any sexual misconduct by members of his staff, school personnel, or the community.” The attorney added, “My clients offer their deepest sympathy to all victims of sexual abuse and specifically to the alleged victim in this case.”

On the field, Pat adopted a mantra that he would carry through life: Don’t quit. During his sophomore year, he batted .400 and got a hit that sent the team to the sectional championship, which Siegriest referred to as “the promised land.” They lost. The next year, he became an all-state player when leading Nyack back to the sectional championship. This time, they won. A photo of the celebration shows laughing boys in a pile with Pat on top. Behind him stands Recla, his face turned away from the camera.

To be anyone in Nyack, you needed a car. Before his senior year, Pat got a job digging ditches, earning a couple thousand dollars — almost enough for a Mitsubishi Eclipse. Then Recla offered to split the vehicle’s cost. According to Big Pat, when he asked Siegriest about the purchase, the head coach reassured him Recla was trustworthy: “He says, ‘Well, he’s a good guy. He’s been with me a long time.’”

With the car, Pat was liberated to explore Rockland County’s most desirable horizon — the Palisades Shopping Center, a hulking mall built on West Nyack’s marshland. For Nyack boys, myself included, the mall was the place to go for first dates, New Era baseball caps, soggy orange chicken, and enough cologne to overwhelm the sulfuric smell of the swampland beneath the building.

But the Mitsubishi also placed Pat more firmly under Recla’s control. By this point, he was playing in Recla’s summer league alongside an old boys’ club of Rockland stalwarts, including another of Nyack’s coaches at the time, whom I will call Joe. After league games, the players gathered at Recla’s, where Pat, still in high school, was often the youngest in attendance. Once, Pat told me, he awoke hung-over on the couch to Recla trying to take off his pants; the coach said he was trying to get Pat more comfortable. Still, Pat rationalized it. “Deep down somewhere I maybe knew something was wrong, but it just didn’t seem that way to me. I could explain it off: It wasn’t that.”

His juvenile logic of denial was partly rooted in Joe’s presence. The assistant coach had played for Recla when he was in high school. According to Pat, Recla also directed both of them in group masturbation sessions. Pat says he later asked Joe about the things that happened at Recla’s. “He was just brushing it off and not wanting to acknowledge it,” Pat said. (Joe declined to participate in this story.)

It wasn’t until Pat returned home, after college, that the illusion broke. In his final season, Pat led his team to the College World Series, belting a home run in his final at bat. But he was humbled when playing in a league for aspiring professionals. Frustrated after not being drafted, he moved into Recla’s, where Joe was also living. He also began working with them at the insurance company.

In 2005, Siegriest was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The coach continued to perform his duties until the end, and following his death, the school renamed the baseball field in his honor. After Siegriest’s passing, Recla got his job. Pat, who was still living with Recla, became a volunteer assistant.

One day, at the house, he stumbled across homemade videos in Recla’s closet. He put them in the television and saw bodies. Young bodies. Familiar bodies. His body. The tapes showed Pat entangled with girls; they had been filmed when he was in high school. He then found a peephole in Recla’s wall. Pat says he smashed the tapes and put a golf club through a wall. He grabbed his possessions and drove away, trying to flee but knowing he could not: “He’s manipulated every little thing: ‘Here’s your job, your house, your car.’”

Pat moved out of Recla’s but continued to coach at Nyack. He told me his motivations were twofold: to avoid drawing undue attention and to observe in case Recla might be grooming other players.

After the end of the season, Nyack dismissed Recla. Parents and former players inundated the school with support for the coach. But the school held firm in its decision; news accounts attributed the choice to a desire, on the part of Nyack’s new athletic director and Castellano, to prioritize the hiring of district teachers. Within two years, Recla was coaching again at nearby Tappan Zee High School. Recently, when Castellano was asked, in a civil proceeding, if he knew why Recla had left, he said, “I do not.” But during the same deposition, he acknowledged that, around the time of Recla’s dismissal, he’d learned from Hughes that Pat was living at the coach’s house.

In 2019, the New York State Legislature passed the Child Victims Act, a law allowing survivors of childhood sexual abuse to seek legal remedy beyond the state’s statute of limitations, which required survivors of childhood sexual abuse to press criminal charges or initiate civil suits before their 23rd birthday. The act expanded the statute of limitations and created a two-year look-back window allowing victims to file civil suits no matter when the alleged misconduct occurred. At the time of its passage, Pat was living in North Carolina and drinking heavily. After moving out of Recla’s, he had tended bar and worked at a fish market, earning around $30,000 per year. But in 2009, he got a break when a friend of Siegriest’s secured him an interview with a big pharmaceutical company in North Carolina, where he got a job in sales. Far from the pressure of Nyack, he felt liberated. “I didn’t realize how much I needed that anonymity,” he said. Still, he continued to self-medicate, occasionally passing out on the beach after drinking.

In 2012, Pat reconnected with the girl he had taken to prom, Mara Stimac, a former Nyack cheerleading captain. As they developed a serious relationship, Pat disclosed to her what he had been through. Though he hadn’t seen her on Recla’s tapes, he had taken her to the house during high school. “With Mara I was able to say the things I couldn’t say to anybody else,” he told me. The two are now married. When I asked Mara, who works in financial technology, if she saw herself as a victim, she said, “Yes. For sure. But I think I’m more focused on the degrees to which it affected him.” She added, “I refuse to let the nice parts of our early romance be twisted. I refuse to let Pete Recla have that.”

Sometimes, at night, Pat obsessively researched Recla’s whereabouts. In 2018, upon discovering that Recla had been coaching at Tappan Zee High, he emailed Robert Pritchard, who was then the school’s superintendent. “Peter should not be around young boys,” Pat wrote, under a pseudonym. “He was inappropriate with me and abused me mentally starting at the age of 14. He introduced me to alcohol and pornography, and made me do things I did not want to do.”

Pritchard sent a curt reply to Pat’s email, saying Recla would not be coaching that season: “We will not be appointing him.” But Mark Stanford, the school’s baseball coach, said Pritchard did not alert him about the allegations and the school did not inquire about his players’ experiences with Recla. Stanford, who had hired Recla, told me there was no reason to do so. “There’s nothing to tell,” he said. “Our experience with him was great.” Through a spokesperson, the district declined to comment further.

In 2018, a hurricane nearly destroyed Pat and Mara’s home, and Big Pat moved in while trying to find a place nearby. (Nancy had already relocated to North Carolina.) With stresses mounting, Pat began seeing a therapist. One day, when both Big Pat and Nancy were at Pat’s house — though divorced, they remain friendly — he told them what Recla had done. When I asked Big Pat about that conversation, he described his physical reaction to the news: “It fades to gray, then to dark.” Nancy said she blamed herself for missing the signs. “You just never stop” thinking about it, she said.

Pat also told a handful of his closest friends. One proposed violence. Another suggested Pat look up the Child Victims Act. When it passed, Pat sought representation. He told me, “It boiled down to how I feel about most things: I need to pursue it to its end.”

In 2020, Pat sued the Nyack school district under the Child Victims Act, alleging that the school had failed to protect him from Recla. The school’s insurer in turn sued Recla, and he was added as a defendant. For months, lawyers interrogated Pat, Recla, and coaches and administrators including Hughes, Castellano, and Joe LaPorte, Nyack’s former athletic director. In those depositions, Nyack’s former athletic leaders proved elusive, sometimes to absurd effect. An attorney asked LaPorte, “Based on your understanding of district policy, would it be permissible for a coach to show pornography to a student athlete?”

LaPorte responded: “No district policy on that.”

In May 2022, the school district and Pat’s attorneys settled the suit, with the details hidden by a nondisclosure agreement. It seems that at no point between Nyack’s receipt of the complaint and the suit’s settlement did the administration alert police, and Recla was never charged with a criminal offense. James Montesano, the former superintendent of Nyack schools who received the suit, told me he could not recall alerting the police and added, “If we had either children — students in our care — or employees who were employed by the district who were named or seemed to be a part of this, our approach could have been a little bit different.” Nyack’s school board and its attorney subsequently declined interview requests.

Marci Hamilton, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania and the CEO of Child USA, a think tank seeking to prevent child abuse, called the district’s decision to keep the allegations quiet “a huge error.” She said, “The worst cover-up is to receive a complaint and ignore it, or threaten the child or the parents to stay silent. The next worst is what we’ve got here. Waiting for years is tragic because many perpetrators operate well into their elder years.”

Last fall, at the suggestion of a former teammate, Jimi Turco, Pat participated in a news story about his experiences. Amid the ensuing shock, a group of former players used social media to organize, calling themselves “Nyack Baseball Alumni for Truth, Transparency, and Support.” More than 100 players joined, Darren included. The group was led by Turco, Pat, and Spencer Witte, a close friend of mine; its aims included removing Siegriest’s name from the Nyack baseball field and creating a scholarship in Pat’s honor.

As the group’s members recounted their experiences, they also circulated hazy memories and aired old grievances. But one account surfaced that would prove determinative: Rosenbluth’s. He said that, during winter workouts in 2001, he entered the elementary school gym early to find Siegriest in a foul mood. In Rosenbluth’s telling, the coach revealed to him that Darren was on academic probation.

Rosenbluth, who considered Darren a friend, was upset. But he also smelled a story, one he hoped to pursue upon enrolling at Syracuse University’s Newhouse journalism school. He told Siegriest he found the timing suspicious: “It seemed obvious to me they’d run out of time they could slide him through, and they’d gotten what they wanted from him. I also know that Darren isn’t fucking stupid. When I told this to Siegs, he did not tell me I was wrong. The implication was that I was onto something.” Within months, Darren’s fate had been sealed; after the coaches announced the end of his career to the team, Rosenbluth confronted Siegriest. “I told him something like, ‘I’ve been trying to make sense of this story involving Darren’s grades,’” Rosenbluth recalled. “And I think I said there’s so much other shit that goes on. He asked what other things I saw, and the first thing I told him was that I think we all know what Coach Recla is doing with some of the players. And it’s weird. I think that took him back a bit. I don’t think he expected me to take it there.”

He brought up Recla’s parties and Pat. According to Rosenbluth, Siegriest responded, “Recla’s not gay.” Rosenbluth kept pushing, and at some point Siegriest’s demeanor changed. “He didn’t yell; there were no overt threats. It was, you know: ‘If people start talking about guys going over to Recla’s house, if people start talking about that,’ he said, ‘it won’t look good.’”

Bolstered by Rosenbluth’s account, the transparency group pushed Nyack High School to rename its field, and this past January, the matter was debated at a tense board meeting. During the proceedings, former players stated that even if he didn’t know of the abuse, Siegriest bore ultimate responsibility for what happened in his program. (Pat told me that Rosenbluth’s account changed his view of Siegriest, whom he’d previously considered naïve.) Siegriest’s supporters cast the campaign as an extrajudicial persecution, pointing out that the coach was not alive to defend himself. Ultimately, the board voted to rename the field. For Pat, the support was deeply meaningful. For a long time, he and Mara had felt alone. “As bad as Nyack seemed with cronysim and inequities, the fact is we were still forged in this thing,” Pat said. “And here we are, all together, almost like it was yesterday. Maybe some of that Nyack stuff actually worked.”

Pat and Mara live with their three children in an airy home in Wilmington. Nancy and Big Pat are both within an hour’s drive away, and the D’Aurias occasionally gather with about 15 other family members who have relocated to the area. Pat takes his kids to a Brazilian-jujitsu gym he co-owns. He has a methodical, burdened way of moving, but his demeanor changes when he rolls out homemade pasta or arranges herbs from his garden on a steak. Then a huge grin breaks out — the grin of a kid who might shave notches into his eyebrows to mark a win.

Pat’s old life hovers above his new one. In his dining room, there is a photograph of his grandparents leaving St. Ann’s Church, in Nyack, after their marriage. Next to it hangs a mirror image of Pat and Mara at their own wedding at St. Ann’s. In a bedroom there is a framed drawing of Pat with his teenage crewcut: a gift from the school upon his induction to Nyack High School Athletics Hall of Fame in 2022. When he accepted it, he echoed the family line, saying that he stood on the shoulders of giants.

Big Pat is still involved in sports, volunteer coaching, and, in an effort to make some remedy for what he calls his past failings, watching for anyone who might be around kids for the wrong reasons: “I got my eyes open.” Though he says his affection for Nyack is gone — “That’s been killed” — he still sits on the board of both Nyack’s Athletics Hall of Fame and the Rockland County Sports Hall of Fame. (He aims to get Siegriest removed from the former and hopes Pat might be elected to the latter.) When I asked if he could separate Pat’s achievements from his abuse, he said, “What was accomplished by those players — you can’t take that away. It’s there. It’s in the box. It’s good. And it’s everything.” Nancy’s opinion is different: “So much of it just seems so tainted now.” Belief, she noted, can veer into complicity. I wondered aloud if the community was to blame; if this shame, ultimately, belongs to us all.

“Yes,” she said. “We didn’t question it.”

But some still prefer the willful naïveté that for so long buoyed Nyack sports. During my reporting, I’ve heard people try to discredit Pat’s supporters because of their language (too progressive, too confrontational) or because they are relying on decades-old memories. But in Nyack, it is not easy to assail Pat: star, captain, D’Auria. Instead, those inclined toward skepticism resort to linguistic hopscotch.

A former Nyack track coach said she both believed Pat and thought, “I feel as though if something like that was going on, something would have been said.”

Scott Muscat, the current Nyack baseball coach: “I don’t know what is and is not true.”

When I asked Stanford, the Tappan Zee coach, if he was skeptical of Pat’s claims, given his support for Recla, he sought shelter in a worn sports cliché: “Nothing but respect to both guys.”

No one in Nyack will say they think Pat D’Auria is a liar. But the doubt lurks: Did it happen?

If there is an answer, it lies in Recla’s own words. In February 2018, Pat called the office where he used to work, and that rounded voice answered:

“Peter Recla, claims. Can I help you?”

“Yeah. Hey, Pete. This is Pat D’Auria.”

In a transcript of the call that was included in Pat’s civil complaint, Recla seems momentarily taken aback — “Hey, hey, Pat” — and then the two settle into small talk. Recla said he had endured a health scare, and Pat said he was now a father.

“Wow,” said Recla. “That’s really nice.”

“My son was born,” Pat said. “And it really got me thinking, you know, a lot about our relationship.”

A pause. Recla said, “I’ve been thinking about it constantly too.”

Pat told Recla that what he did was wrong: “Watching from your closet, videotaping, showing me pornography before I was ready, you know, at, you know, 15, 16 years old. It just wasn’t right.”

Recla sounded curiously distant: “Yeah. How are you, how are you, how are you now?”

Pat spoke about the shame, the drinking. Recla, still with that distance in his voice, said, “I feel horrible, how everything was and how everything is and how — how you — you are. And any pain I caused. I feel it’s something I have to live with. And I feel terrible and will always. And I” — here he stuttered — “deeply sorry. I’m, I’m deeply sorry for it.”

“What are you sorry for specifically?”

“I’m sorry for causing you all the pain.”

In a prosecutorial tone, Pat accused Recla of having groomed two other Nyack players. In the transcript of the call, Recla is recorded as saying, “Well, not.” But in listening to the audiotape, the full phrase is inaudible; instead, what is seared into a listener is the moment when Pat says the other two names. Upon hearing each one, Recla takes a sharp breath inward.

“I’m by myself for a reason,” Recla said. “And that’s brought on by me, and that’s my torture.” He reconsidered: “I didn’t mean that sentence. It’s just what I decided I have to do. So I — I have to be the way I am now by myself and … And that’s it. This is the way I have to live my life until it ends.”

In June, Pat returned to Nyack for a memorial service. Beforehand, he and Darren met at the high school. Darren has been clean for nearly two years, attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings and living in a sober house. Numerous people have asked him to sponsor them in their recovery, and he has taken preliminary steps toward becoming a counselor.

Upon meeting Darren at the field, Pat initially felt survivor’s guilt: How had he ended up with a six-figure job in a beautiful house, while Darren was living paycheck to paycheck? But his perspective shifted as they spoke. Darren seems to live a life marked by gratitude. He quickly gives away whatever money he has to those in need. “I believe in interdependence rather than independence,” he says. Pat found Darren’s wish to help others invigorating and resonant — “Just the idea that I may be able to help somebody else who went through something similar. And maybe I’m strong enough.”

They went into town for brunch, but it took a while, because it was hard for Darren to move without being stopped by friends, family, and fans. After eating, they went to the town square, where Darren pointed to a man. “He was like, ‘You see that guy?’” Pat said. “‘He’s one of the best players on Cas’s ’89 team. He’s a crackhead.’ Darren took his last piece of chicken, walked over, and gave it to him.”

Before they left each other, Darren spoke to Pat about forgiveness. He hoped Pat would find that. “I can want accountability and I do,” Darren told me. “And I can also be graceful. I saw Cas at my dad’s funeral. That’s the love-hate — this guy is showing up for me. I don’t even know that he knows he fucked me royally. When you are so immersed in something, it’s an obsession. With obsession comes self-centered behaviors, where you’re not thinking about anything but yourself and how to gain something. So I understand that mind-set.” He forgave Cas. But he also clarified, “The forgiveness is for yourself. It’s not for the other person.” But, he said, his journey and Pat’s could not be compared. When it came to whether Recla could ever be forgiven, he said, “That’s for Pat to answer.”

The day before their meeting, when Pat first arrived in Nyack, he had taken a drive. He steered past the high school, then up over the Hook. He turned into Valley Cottage, then ended up at the house that looks like so many others. There he was: Recla, rolling trash cans to the curb. Pat wanted to scream, How is your life now? 

Recla left the cans and turned. Pat drove on. His body went into tension, as it had on that day on the bridge. He called Mara and asked if he should turn around to confront Recla. She said he should not. He drove on. Soon, muscle memory had delivered him to a riverside park. He walked to a bench dedicated to a friend who had been there for Pat when it mattered and who had died young. He sat down and looked out. Here was something Pete Recla could not take from him: the solace of the river. It was a calm day, the surface still. But the Hudson is tricky, its tides pulsing far inland. At first glance, it’s hard to tell which way it’s flowing. If you were to jump in, you would not immediately know whether it was carrying you away, toward some distant horizon, or bringing you back home.