CA: Former Basketball Coach, Jeremy Andre Haggerty, Charged With Sexually Assaulting 8 Teen Boys at Santa Clarita Valley High Schools.@AnOpenSecret— Dalton (@DaltonReport) September 14, 2018
He would get the kids alone for home sessions, have them disrobe, and massage them. https://t.co/HOIWYSsveH
KTLA News, Los Angeles local
written by Marissa Wenzke
Friday September 14, 2018
A former youth basketball coach at a number of Santa Clarita Valley high schools was charged with sexually assaulting eight teen boys he was training and coaching and was expected to be arraigned Friday, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
Jeremy Andre Haggerty, who has worked as a coach and personal trainer for the sport, now faces eight counts of sexual battery, four counts of lewd act upon a child and one count of attempted lewd act upon a child, according to prosecutors. He stands accused of assaulting a total of eight victims — who ranged from 14 to 17 years old — while they were under his coaching or training, the DA’s office said.
He’s expected to be arraigned Friday after being arrested just a day earlier.
Last month, detectives first started investigating Haggerty, 34, after one of the victims reported an allegation against him. Since then, investigators have come across another seven people accusing him of assaults dating back to 2008, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
News releases from the department and the DA’s office do not name the schools where the alleged assaults took place, but Sgt. Brian Hudson of the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station told the Santa Clarita Valley Signal authorities believe Haggerty was living in Orange County and working at a school there at the time of his arrest Thursday morning.
He declined to give the name of the school to the newspaper but said there could be other victims out there.
The crimes mostly took place inside the homes of the victims — when he was doing so-called training sessions that involved massaging the teens, Hudson told KTLA after Haggerty’s arrest.
Haggerty told parents that the physical treatment mirrored methods being used by college-level and professional basketball players, according to Hudson.
“He would tell them I need to perform some ‘body maintenance’ on you, and that was another term essentially for massaging,” Hudson told KTLA. “He would get the kids alone, have them disrobe and essentially perform massages on them that eventually led to him touching them inappropriately.”
It’s unclear where Haggerty has worked in recent years but an August 2014 article in the Signal describes him as the newly named head basketball coach for Trinity Classical Academy, a private Christian school in Valencia. At the time, he had been assistant coaching at Trinity after working as an assistant coach at West Ranch High, a public high school in Stevenson Ranch, for the 2012-13 season, the article states.
Before that, he worked as an assistant coach — off-and-on for nearly eight years — at Canyon High, a public school in Canyon Country where Haggerty was once a star player, according to the Signal article.
Trinity, a K-12 private school, appears to be the last school where Haggerty was publicly reported to be working. In a statement to parents, reported by the Signal, the school states Haggerty stopped working there in 2016 and the alleged assaults did not happen on campus but during private training sessions with Haggerty.
The statement also tells its readers “to pray for the situation” and “please refrain from any discussion” or posting on social media.
Haggerty was being held on $300,000 bail after his arrest, inmate records show.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated tuition costs for a school. The post has since been updated.
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