Player who became face of a hazing case
Still awaiting trial, many see student as scapegoat
The arrests began around 11 a.m. on March 29, 2017, as Chandler police officers arrived at Hamilton High School and pulled five varsity football players out of class.
Police had planned the arrests for earlier in the day but held off because students were in the middle of statemandated testing.
The drama was captured in text messages and group chats that lit up the lock screens on the phones seized from the players who were arrested.
“Omg (redacted name) leaving the office in handcuffs,” one student said in a group text quoted in a police report that would later chronicle the arrests in minute-by-minute detail.
As police took the players into custody, someone sent out a screenshot of a television news tweet reporting that
students had been arrested.
“It’s the fire alarms y’all,” someone replied.
“No, it’s the raping.”
Rumors had been buzzing around Hamilton for weeks that police were asking questions about the school’s football program, interviewing players and coaches, meeting with parents at home.
The allegations would rock the school. Authorities would tell a story of violent hazing rituals carried out by a group of older players, assaults that would sometimes involve fingers or objects inserted into a younger player’s rectum. Police would portray school administrators as willing to look the other way, and some parents as indifferent to the practice.
Parts of at least two of the attacks were captured on cellphone video and shared on Snapchat, though neither depicts the sex acts the victims and witnesses described in the police investigation.
Five players were arrested at Hamilton that day. Police later sought felony charges against three school officials — the coach, principal and athletic director — who investigators said failed to act when they were aware of the assaults. Those three men were never charged.
One other player was arrested, but he wasn’t at Hamilton that morning. While he was a member of the football team, he wasn’t a full-time Hamilton student, taking most of his classes at Chief Hill Learning Academy, a charter school about 3 miles from the larger Chandler campus.
But everyone knew who he was. In the days and weeks that followed, his mug shot was plastered all over the evening news and the internet, his dazed stare peering out from beneath the dyed-orange hair of a high school kid who wanted to stand out in order to fit in.
That single photo made him the public face of a scandal that rocked the storied Hamilton High School football program.
Of the six players who were arrested, only one was named publicly and only one was charged as an adult in the case, despite the fact that one of the other players had already turned 18 when he was arrested.
“Read what it says and one chief hill learn in academy student,” a Hamilton student texted along with one of the tweets from a TV station. “That’s Nate.”
❚❚❚
The trail of damage from that morning would be long and for some life-altering. Sordid details of the private lives of high school students would be exposed, and players would seek transfer waivers to put distance between themselves and the once-storied football program.
There would be lawsuits and plea deals and questions of who knew what and when they knew it.
Parents who could afford it would spend thousands of dollars on lawyers; those who couldn’t would try to navigate the legal system themselves.
During the past three years, many of those students and adults involved have managed to get their lives back on track.
Except for one.
❚❚❚
Nate Thomas was in math class at Chief Hill Learning Academy on the morning of March 29, 2017, two days after his 17th birthday. He knew something was up when the principal called him out of class and told him to bring his backpack. He would not be returning.
Thomas took most of his classes at Chief Hill, an alternative “credit recovery” school where struggling students can catch up. He took only two classes at Hamilton: Spanish and football.
Chandler police Officer Stephen Watters was waiting in the office. He placed Thomas under arrest, put him in the back of his squad car and drove him to the Chandler police headquarters.
At least two of the players who were arrested that day waived their Miranda rights and agreed to speak with investigators. Thomas refused to answer questions and immediately asked for a lawyer. He also asked to call his mother, which he wasn’t allowed to do for hours.
About six hours after his arrest, he was transferred to the juvenile detention facility at the Maricopa County Superior Court’s southeast Valley judicial complex and was told he would be arraigned the following day.
He was then told he was going to be tried as an adult and transferred to the Fourth Avenue Jail in downtown Phoenix, then to the Lower Buckeye Jail, where he spent more than a week as his mother tried to raise the $25,000 bail.
Thomas said the experience was a nightmare.
“I was begging, ‘Please, can I get a blanket?’ I started crying and said I just wanted to see my mom,” he said more than two years later. He has not spoken publicly about the case but agreed to an interview with The Arizona Republic.
Because of his emotional state, he was judged to be a suicide risk and was stripped and placed in a padded room with only a bare floor to lie on.
Questions to Chandler police about why Thomas was the only person charged as an adult were referred to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, which declined repeated requests to discuss the case.
Thomas’ attorney, Robert McWhirter, says he believes the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office under Bill Montgomery sought to build a high-profile case against the adults in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State.
“They found nothing, so they settled on these (six) kids, then picked the absolute lowest status kid to charge as an adult,” he said.
❚❚❚
The details of the Hamilton case as laid out in police reports and court documents are lurid and grotesque. According to the narrative, a group of as many as 10 older players calling themselves the “Tune Squad” and the “rape squad” preyed on a handful of freshmen players who had been called up to the varsity team.
The Tune Squad name came from the 1996 movie “Space Jam,” a live-action animated mashup starring basketball legend Michael Jordan and Loony Tunes characters. But though the defendants in the case and others dispute it, “rape squad” more accurately describes what police allege happened.
The assaults came to light after one of the boys who was targeted sent a text message to a friend he had played with on the freshman team.
That friend, the son of a Chandler police officer, told his father, who in turn alerted the Hamilton school resource officer and selected district officials.
Police identified nearly a dozen potential victims and almost twice as many potential participants in their investigation.
Eventually, they focused on six players they believed were involved in individual attacks against four younger teammates, at least three of whom were under age 14.
Investigators quickly zeroed in on Thomas as the ringleader.
His two juvenile co-defendants were charged with assault and kidnapping and took pleas. Each served less than 30 days in juvenile detention and was ordered to pay restitution. Because juvenile court proceedings are conducted in secret, their records are permanently sealed.
The other three who were arrested were released to their parents almost immediately, and their names were never publicly released. Although they were never charged with any criminal wrongdoing, they were named in a multimillion-dollar federal civil lawsuit filed against the district by five victims and their parents or guardians.
“They found nothing, so they settled on these (six) kids, then picked the absolute lowest status kid to charge as an adult.” Robert McWhirter Attorney for Nate Thomas
The district settled its portion of the lawsuit in October for an undisclosed sum. Several players have also settled, and only a handful of defendants remain.
The Republic knows the identities of all six players who were arrested as well as the reported victims, but their names are being withheld because the newspaper typically does not identify juvenile offenders or crime victims.
In addition to Thomas and the juvenile suspects, police also recommended felony charges against Hamilton Principal Ken James, Athletic Director Shawn Rustad and head coach Steve Belles because, detectives said, they failed to report the abuse to the proper authorities.
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute them, saying only that there was “no reasonable likelihood of conviction.” Belles, James and Rustad are also named in the civil suit, along with assistant coach Manuel Palomarez.
Then-Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, who was recently appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court, took an active role in the case, holding a town hall-style meeting with parents. He asked witnesses and other potential victims to come forward in two other public settings.
Amanda Steele, a spokeswoman for the County Attorney’s Office, declined to comment on the agency’s internal decision-making process and said the prosecutors involved would not grant an interview or elaborate on why the cases against the three adults were declined.
Deputy prosecutor David Irwin, who is handling the case, did not return calls or emails seeking interviews.
❚❚❚
According to the police report on the case, word of the investigation had begun to leak out almost from the minute officers set foot on campus. One of the reported victims, in an interview with detectives more than a month before the arrests, said Thomas had sent him a Snapchat message warning him not to say anything.
“If I’m expelled from Hamilton, you’re going to regret it,” the player said the message read.
Police also found that the night before his arrest, Thomas had Googled a definition for the word “sodomy” on his phone.
Thomas said word had been circulating around Hamilton for weeks that certain players had been interviewed by police.
“We all knew, but I didn’t think it was going to get that serious,” he says.
He says he feels betrayed by the people he thought were his friends, and he feels he was sold out by the school.
“He was the least valuable kid,” McWhirter said, “and he’s being held to an adult standard for conduct that happened when he was 16.”
❚❚❚
Thomas’ case has become a cri de coeur for some in the African American community, a textbook example, they say, of the American school-to-prison pipeline that turns young black men into inmates while whites charged with similar crimes never see the inside of a penitentiary.
They see Thomas as a scapegoat, a fall guy for police, prosecutors, school officials — even his own teammates. Some, they say, were willing to sacrifice him to save their own skins, while others offered him up to prove they had a case worthy of the headlines it generated.
With Thomas, however, it’s difficult to make a case for racially motivated selective prosecution.
While the three adults police sought to charge are white, four of the five students who were arrested with Thomas were black, as were virtually all of the victims. Of the two players who took juvenile plea bargains, one is white and one is black.
But while Thomas’ race did not necessarily set him apart, it was clear that he was an outsider, that he didn’t belong at Hamilton.
First, he was not a full-time student at Hamilton. At Hamilton, Thomas bore the stigma of being the kid from an alternative school so much so that his coaches called him “Chief Hill,” he said.
Second, he was not from a financially well-off family; another name he said coaches called him was “street-corner kid.”
While Hamilton’s demographics approach the median family income for Chandler, the school also draws from several of the city’s wealthiest ZIP codes. Thomas is the son of a single mother who struggles financially. Unlike other families, she says she couldn’t afford to make the kinds of donations to the booster club that were expected of parents.
Finally, Nate Thomas was not very good at football. Hamilton had won five state championships in 10 years. Its alumni include NFL great Terrell Suggs and several other pro players, and its roster boasted the son of NFL Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice along with the sons and nephew of the late Arizona Cardinals safety Kwamie Lassiter.
Hamilton was a frequent conduit to Division 1 football scholarships for kids with skills, but Nate Thomas wasn’t on any recruiter’s radar. In years past, he certainly would have been cut. Hamilton, like many schools, doesn’t cut players.
But just because a player is on the team doesn’t mean he gets to play. Thomas was so lightly regarded that he was assigned a defensive lineman’s number even though he played cornerback, which he took as a snub. The sum total of his entire varsity career consisted of less than a minute of playing time.
Thomas had never played any sport before high school. When he got to high school, his mother insisted that he get a job or play sports to stay out of trouble. He was too young to find work, so he chose football. And his mother chose Hamilton because of the program’s winning reputation.
The irony doesn’t escape her. For nearly three years, Felisha Gillespie has watched her son struggle with depression and PTSD while he languishes on home arrest.
“As a mother, it’s the worst ... the worst. It’s so devastating,” she said.
“My life has been consumed with this case,” Gillespie said. “From the time I wake up to the time I go to bed, it’s all I think about.”
Everyone who was arrested with him went on to graduate from high school, though some were forced to transfer to other schools.
In the meantime, her son’s life is on hold, while the two teammates who served time as juveniles in the case are now playing college football, one of them at the NCAA Division I level.
Of the three players who were arrested but never charged, one is playing at a major Division I school; one is playing Division II ball; the third signed with a junior-college program but suffered a career-ending injury and never played. He has since joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
In the nearly three years since his release, Thomas has been allowed to leave his home only to visit his lawyer, attend court appearances and go to church or visit his mother. He works two jobs. Most of his paychecks go to pay his lawyer.
Thomas admits to “roughhousing” with his teammates and says the tradition of hazing at Hamilton was well established long before he got there. And even though the police documented several instances of players talking about “raping” freshmen players — which McWhirter chalks up to teenage bravado — Thomas says the types of sexual assaults described in the police report never happened.
He’s been offered a plea deal, but he says he refuses to admit doing something that he didn’t do. Unless he changes his mind and accepts the plea, his trial will start on Jan. 14.
“All I ever wanted was to graduate and make my mother proud of me,” Thomas says. “That’s something she was never able to do because she had to drop out when she had me.”
Thomas once had dreamed of becoming a pilot. He was six credits shy of graduating from high school the day he was arrested.
He is still six credits short.