Jurors have been deliberating now for two days in the Santa Clara County trial of Shannon O'Connor, the 50-year-old woman accused of providing alcohol to high school friends of her son, and hosting events where several girls say they were sexually assaulted.
The jury began deliberations on Monday afternoon, as KRON4 reports, and no verdict has yet been reached as of Wednesday.
The trial has been ongoing since mid-December, with three full months of testimony. O'Connor stands charged with 63 counts relating to child endangerment and providing alcohol to minors, as well as sexual offenses, and the jury heard testimony from 40 witnesses for the prosecution — including 20 teenagers who were around the age of 14 at the time of the alleged crimes. 18 of those teens are considered victims, and they provided lurid descriptions on the stand of the drunken bacchanals at O'Connor's Los Gatos mansion in 2020 and 2021, while their high school remained closed.
As KRON4 previously reported, one of those witnesses, identified only as John Doe 5, said he'd never consumed alcohol before when he drank eight beers in one night in September 2020. He said he and the other boys treated O'Connor like "a popular girl in the group," adding, "Looking back on it, it’s pretty weird."
Boys and girls testified that O'Connor would pressure them to sneak out of their own houses when their parents were asleep, and ply them with copious amounts of alcohol, assigning them bedrooms where they could hookup. Prosecutors described this as "grooming," and suggested that O'Connor got some sort of "sexual gratification" in the process.
There was also testimony that O'Connor watched the teens hooking up and took an "unnatural interest" in it, including one incident involving a nearly unconscious girl in a hot tub.
Parents of the teens also testified about what a beautiful home O'Connor and her husband had, with one mother saying she trusted O'Connor "100 percent" at the time. But some parents began ringing alarm bells, particularly after John Doe 5 came home extremely drunk one night, and one parent described finding Snapchat messages from O'Connor on their son's phone, using the handle "Nun."
As KRON4 reports, one girl testified that her friend, who was assaulted at one of these parties, descended into a period of depression and alcoholism as a result.
Steven Clark, a legal analyst and former Santa Clara County District Attorney, tells KTVU that the sticking point with the jury will likely be about the sexual charges.
"Is the jury going to believe that Ms. O'Connor crossed the line between bad supervision to committing a sex offense?" Clark says.
Clark adds, speaking to KTVU, "The prosecution wants Ms. O'Connor in prison and registered as a sex offender. And the defense fought very hard in this case to try and demonstrate to the jury that she committed violations, but she didn't go far enough to be a sex offender and violate those statutes."
In some strange mid-trial interviews that O'Connor offered to local outlets in December, she claimed that the teens accessed the alcohol themselves, saying, "Teenagers are sneaky. They find their way to things."
She added, "It's so unfair. A lot of these stories are just not true... These teenagers were... in a COVID lockdown, they were desperate for socialization. They were trying to find any outlet possible…They were experimenting with alcohol. Many parents knew this."
O'Connor has been held in jail without bail since her arrest in 2021. Many of the victims, including, presumably, her eldest son, have now entered college.
Previously: Testimony at Trial of Los Gatos 'Party Mom' Shannon O'Connor Just as Lurid and Gross as You'd Imagine
