Former Sumner coach guilty on 19 counts of sex crimes against players
By Ryan Simms - KOMO News 4 | Follow the link to access the online article
SUMNER, Wash. — After a single day of deliberations, a jury found a former Sumner High School boys basketball coach guilty on 19 sex-crime counts, including rape and molestation, related to eight boys that prosecutors said he groomed and manipulated.
Jacob Jackson, the former head basketball coach for Sumner High School, pleaded not guilty to the charges against him in May 2023. Tracked with an ankle monitoring bracelet, he had been under house arrest ever since. At that time, he wasn't allowed to come into contact with any minors or the victims, only his children.
According to prosecutors, the abuse of his teenage players happened for at least four years from 2018 to 2022, and involved boys as young as 14 years old.
After police launched an investigation into the allegations against Jackson, he was put on administrative leave before being fired from Sumner High School in October 2022.
Sumner police began investigating when they received the first report on August 31, 2022, after one parent found secret messages between Jackson and their child on that teenager's phone. Some of the victims then told police they met Jackson as early as the sixth grade while attending Jackson’s basketball camps and compared their relationship with Jackson to a second father figure growing up.
Multiple players then reported that Jackson consistently asked for inappropriate pictures and messaged them continuously on Snapchat. Others reported they did yard work at Jackson’s home, where some of the abuse also reportedly happened.
At the time of Jackson's arrest, an attorney for the victims told KOMO News that many of Jackson's accusers thought he would never be punished for his inappropriate and illegal actions.
“It’s been horribly difficult for them, their fear this entire time that he would not be accountable in any way, that simply no charges would be filed, so they’ve had to sit and wait and wait,” said attorney Loren Cochran in May 2023.
At the time of his arrest, court documents detailed some of the abuse, where Jackson urged players to keep quiet about the abuse, saying phrases like “to the grave," "lifelong," and "this stays between us.”
Cochran also told KOMO News that through their investigation, they’ve found evidence there were complaints about Jackson’s inappropriate behavior long before it was initially reported to police in 2022.
“There were complaints regarding Jackson back in 2018,” Cochran said, “There were concerns about him individually texting players, there were concerns in 2020 that were brought up to the school district and the WIAA that he was Snapchatting kids, and to the best, we’ve been able to find, no one intervened to stop him.”
