LOS GATOS — One by one, more than a dozen teens explained in detail how one Los Gatos mother — determined to make her son socially accepted and sexually prolific — hosted booze-soaked parties where she urged them to drink themselves into reckless oblivion.
The bashes, which spanned the first year of the pandemic, were mostly at Shannon O’Connor’s two-story home but extended to hotel rooms and lodges from Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, the teens testified. They were described as virtual grottos in which she pushed boys to be sexually aggressive and pressured girls to please them.
Girls, some as young as 14, testified last year before a Santa Clara County grand jury about how, in an inebriated fog and under O’Connor’s directive, they were sexually exploited by the boys, their classmates at Los Gatos High School. They told a jury that O’Connor, 50, paved the way for such behavior before the parties ever began by engaging in intimate Snapchat and text-message exchanges in which she encouraged them to make themselves sexually attractive during their middle-school years.
“She thought that sex, even at our age, was very important in a relationship, and she made that very clear,” testified a girl known as Jane Doe 7, who dated O’Connor’s son.
The accounts led to more than a dozen felony charges and three dozen misdemeanors in a criminal indictment against O’Connor. She is accused of brazenly providing alcohol to her teen son and his classmates at parties during which she also goaded them into having sex and engaging in reckless behavior.
The indictment — containing 20 felony counts, mostly for child endangerment and aiding and abetting sexual assault, and 43 misdemeanor counts accusing her of furnishing alcohol to minors — was handed down in November, two years after O’Connor was initially charged by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.
On Friday, more than 2,000 pages of transcripts from those October 2023 grand jury proceedings were released. They contain testimony from nearly three dozen witnesses, including investigators, parents, and the teens who attended the parties. The young people broadly described an aggressive manipulation effort by O’Connor to try to hide the illicit gatherings from her husband and the greater Los Gatos community.
“She would often bring up the idea of where, if we ever told on her, what’s happening, that she would go to jail and it would be … really bad — it would be bad for everyone, not just her but everyone else and, like, there’s no — there’s no option of us to not lie,” testified a teen known as John Doe 1, who was involved in the parties and was close friends with O’Connor’s son. “She really hardily persuaded us to lie numerous times.”
That prompted Deputy District Attorney Rebekah Wise to ask, “Did she ever tell you to lie to the police, for example?” to which John Doe 1 replied, “Yes.”
Multiple accounts from the teens portrayed O’Connor as having made her home a drinking haven for her son and his friends when they were still in middle school and ramping it up the summer heading into his freshman year.
By and large, the friend group of more than a dozen young teens, split mostly evenly among boys and girls, gave corroborating accounts of O’Connor encouraging them to drink alcohol and engage in sexual activity with each other, followed by her probing them about their experiences for — as Wise put it — her own sexual gratification.
Text messages read into the court record between O’Connor and her son discuss kissing and hooking up, showing “the defendant’s interest in (her son) and his sex life,” Christina Hanks, investigator for the sexual assault unit of the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, said in testimony.
In some instances, such as a New Year’s Eve party at her home in 2020, O’Connor was described by John Doe 1 as being present when he sexually penetrated an inebriated Jane Doe 3 in a hot tub.
O’Connor “was just, like, right outside the hot tub,” John Doe 1 testified. “Like, standing right next to all of us.”
Jane Doe 3 would later testify that she was nearly drowning in the tub at the time, struggling to keep her head above water. She firmly blamed O’Connor for “letting us get to that level of drunkenness.”
The mother of one girl, Jane Doe 4 — who in a police report and testimony reported being nearly passed out on a bed in the home when O’Connor gave a boy a condom and sent him into the room where she was sexually molested — told grand jurors that her daughter developed “a drinking problem that Shannon had taught her” and that resulted in time in a residential treatment program.
At an incident in December 2020 — contained in a preceding criminal complaint — John Doe 1’s brother suffered a concussion after falling off the back of O’Connor’s SUV during a joyride in the high school parking lot. Several of the teens who were present testified that they recalled O’Connor passing herself off as the injured teen’s mother when confronted by police.
The injured boy’s mother testified that her son nearly drowned in the family’s bathtub after O’Connor dropped him off with no explanation. She said when she later contacted O’Connor, the defendant claimed ignorance, saying she “just gave him a ride.”
Wise told grand jurors how as the police investigation closed in on O’Connor, the defendant’s Google searches started to include queries including, “Check to see if there’s a warrant for my arrest,” “Supplying alcohol to minors in a private home,” “Statute of limitations, California” and “Can I get prosecuted in California if I live in Idaho?”
In her closing arguments, Wise cited how O’Connor claimed that while the alcohol the teens drank was kept at her home, “she never handed them alcohol.” She said such a statement was exhaustively debunked by the teens’ testimony, then went further in citing anecdotes such as a time O’Connor rented a house in Santa Cruz for her son’s birthday and had alcohol shipped to the location.
“The evidence that we have shows blatantly that this is a lie,” Wise said in the transcripts. “If you look at Santa Cruz alone … she’s the only adult in that house. That is undisputed. The amount of alcohol that was ordered for that Santa Cruz party was literally out of control.”
O’Connor has been held in a Santa Clara County jail without bail since her October 2021 arrest in Idaho and accompanying revelations that sent shockwaves through the affluent Los Gatos community where she and her family resided.
Prosecutors turned to a criminal grand jury after bemoaning repeated delays leading up to a preliminary examination in which a judge would have been tasked with determining whether the charges would hold up for trial. O’Connor’s defense attorney at the time balked at the move, noting that grand jury hearings only hear prosecution evidence without cross-examination.
An indictment also bypasses the need for a preliminary examination, putting the case directly on track for trial. But the trajectory for a trial still seems far off, with O’Connor’s current attorney saying earlier this year that he did not expect a trial start in 2024, citing more than 40,000 pages of documents to review, including social-media communications and testimony from the month-long grand jury hearing.
The transcripts released Friday show that as word of the parties began to get out among parents, Jane Doe 4 described being the victim of aggressive intimidation by O’Connor, who began to suspect certain girls of breaking the secrecy. Jane Doe 5 testified to similar treatment, testifying that O’Connor falsely accused her of letting the word get out; despite the girl’s claims to the contrary, O’Connor still flooded her phone with calls and Snapchat messages and threatened to make her friendless.
When she heeded her mother’s direction to screenshot the Snapchat messages to document them, Jane Doe 5 said O’Connor got more aggressive because the phone app notifies users when their messages are screen captured. That harassment only stopped when the mother, supported by a mutual friend, demanded in an email that O’Connor stop contacting her daughter.
Still, the effects on the teen remained. The mother testified that her daughter suffered panic attacks from the ordeal, recalling her child saying, “I am so afraid. I am so afraid. I’m afraid she’s going to kill me.”
“I go, ‘I’m afraid too,’ ” the mother testified. “I don’t — I’ve never met anybody like her. I don’t know what she’s doing.”
