Youth coach accused of sexual assault gets day in court

34-year-old formally charged with eight counts of sexual battery among other charges

A youth basketball coach arrested Thursday on more than a dozen criminal charges alleging the inappropriate touching of at least eight teenage boys appeared briefly in court Friday.

Jeremy Andre Haggerty, 34, was formally charged with eight counts of sexual battery, four counts of a lewd act upon a child and one count of attempted lewd act upon a child, said Greg Risling, spokesman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.

Haggerty’s arraignment on the charges took place inside a courtroom at the Foltz Criminal Justice Center and is expected to continue on Sept. 21. His bail set at $1 million.

Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson of the Sex Crimes Division is prosecuting the case.

Haggerty worked as a high school basketball coach and as a personal basketball trainer, Risling said.

Over the course of nearly a decade, he is alleged to have sexually assaulted eight victims who ranged in age between 14 and 17 years old.

If convicted as charged, Haggerty faces up to 14 years in state prison.

The case remains under investigation by the Special Victims Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department

Haggerty, who was born in Los Angeles County, attended Canyon High School.

At the time of his arrest, however, he was listed by deputies as living in Tustin.

“My understanding is that he was living in Orange County and he was working at a school there,” said Sgt. Brian Hudson, declining to release the name of the Orange County school.

“Our fear is there are more victims,” Hudson said Thursday, “due to the timeframe… we’ve identified victims going back as far as 2008.”

Hudson confirmed initially the suspect, Haggerty, briefly was involved with the Trinity Classical Academy as a coach, and also worked with several other schools in the area.

Detectives say they have found no evidence the alleged incidents occurred on a local school campus, and all of the alleged incidents reportedly took place in one-on-one training sessions involving the coach and the player-victim.

Before Trinity, Haggerty was an assistant coach at West Ranch High during the 2012-13 season and he spent nearly eight years on-and-off as an assistant at Canyon High, according to previous reports in The Signal. Haggerty was a star shooting guard at Canyon before graduating in 2002.

He played a year at Community College of Southern Nevada, but the school discontinued its basketball program after the 2003 season. After that, he played a year at Eastern Arizona Community College.

After taking a break from playing while assisting under the head coach at Canyon High, Haggerty returned to the court to play out two more college seasons at The Master’s College in 2007-09. He was announced as Trinity’s coach in August 2014 and resigned in 2016.

Officials with the William S. Hart Union High School District did not respond to a request for comment as of the publication of this story.