Jury delivers verdict in sex-abuse trial of former Sumner high school basketball coach

The former head coach of boys basketball at Sumner High School was found guilty of 19 crimes Thursday in his trial over the sexual abuse of eight boys the coach was accused of sending explicit photos to, raping, molesting or sexually exploiting.

A Pierce County jury made up of seven men and five women deliberated for about a day and a half before giving the verdict, finding Jacob “Jake” Jackson guilty on all counts. That included three counts of third-degree rape of a child, three counts of third-degree child molestation, second-degree kidnapping, six counts of communication with a minor for immoral purposes, five counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and first-degree sexual misconduct with a minor.

For many of the offenses, jurors made special findings that Jackson used his position of trust to facilitate the commission of the crime.

About 50 members of the public filled the courtroom where the verdict was given, including parents of victims in the case. The gallery fell quiet when Jackson and his attorney first entered the room. As Judge Philip Sorensen read the verdict, hushed celebrations, crying and gasps could be heard in the gallery.

Jackson did not appear to react as the decision came down. After Sorensen polled jurors to ensure they agreed with the verdict, two Sheriff’s Department deputies entered the room, and one handcuffed Jackson behind his back. He was stoic but frowning as he was led out of the room. People hugged in the gallery, and one woman said “It’s a good day.”

A sentencing hearing was set for the morning of March 20.

Outside the courtroom, a woman who said she was there in support of the victims and their families but who declined to give her name told The News Tribune that the verdict felt bittersweet.

“It’s the most justice we can get for them, and I hope that this will help them be able to move forward, sleep through the night, know that they’re believed and they deserve to be heard,” she said. “But it still doesn’t take away everything.”

One of the eight victims in the case, Jaxon Cummings, a senior at Sumner High School, spoke to news reporters and gave permission for his name to be published. He said he felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

“It feels like I can start to take one step at a time forward and start moving on with my life,” Cummings said. “I know that I’m always going to have a foundation at Sumner to come back to. I’m always going to have family, friends, support from every single person. I mean the support I got even today from people that I don’t even know is just, it just really makes me feel confident and good about my life moving forward.”

Cummings said the verdict shows that justice will always be served and doing this to kids and vulnerable people is wrong.

“I just don’t want it to ever happen again,” Cummings said.

Standing on either side of Cummings were Brett McDaniel, a former Sumner High School basketball coach and Casey Adcox, a longtime Sumner High School teacher and former baseball coach. Both said they were proud of the courage demonstrated by each of the boys who came forward.

“We know that countless others would have been victimized had they not come forward, including my own son, who is now a member of the basketball team,” McDaniel said. “These boys came to play basketball, and they were taken advantage of by a gentleman they were just trying to impress.”

Adcox said he felt the whole case was a violation of the trust that parents and kids put into teachers and coaches.

Jackson’s attorney, Brett Purtzer, said in an email to The News Tribune that Jackson “understandably, is extremely disappointed in the verdict.” Purtzer said Jackson planned to appeal the decision.

Jackson used ‘playbook’ to target, groom teens

Prosecutors told jurors in closing arguments Tuesday that Jackson used a step-by-step playbook to target teenagers between the ages of 13 and 16 whom he largely met through basketball:

Over the course of months and sometimes years, Jackson groomed the boys to become comfortable enough to go from talking about basketball and their potential as players to texting him photos of their abdomens and later sending or receiving penis photos and videos.

During the trial, prosecutors showed jurors screenshots of one exchange where Jackson asked a boy to measure his genitals and send him proof, but no sexually explicit photos or videos were turned up in law enforcement’s investigation, making the trial largely hinge on the testimony of the eight boys.

Purtzer told jurors in closing arguments that there was a total lack of evidence in the case, challenging the panel to find anything of a sexual nature in years of cellphone messages admitted into evidence between Jackson and some of the players. He said of the 65,000 photos and videos searched on his client’s phone, there wasn’t a single picture of sexualized behavior.

The defendant was the head coach of Sumner High School’s varsity boys basketball team, the Spartans, from 2016 until August 2022. He was placed on administrative leave that month after law enforcement notified the Sumner-Bonney Lake School District of the allegations.

Before 2016, Jackson spent four years as an assistant coach for boys basketball at Peninsula High School, where he helped lead the team to its most wins in school history. At Sumner he coached the varsity team to a 6th-place finish in the state championship in 2020, the school’s best performance in nearly 50 years.

Purtzer said Jackson was a demanding but fair coach, and he was known to communicate with players individually to make them feel special. Purtzer said there was some “locker room talk,” between his client and players, but there wasn’t anything sexual about it.

“These are the future leaders of the team,” Purtzer said. “You want to have a positive rapport with these individuals so they can pass it off to the other players, and that’s exactly what he did. But the bottom line, he never sent any sexualized pictures or made any sexualized comments to any player.”

Prosecutors argued that the communications were all part of the playbook that Jackson used again and again.

“He was not hired to coach these kids to talk about how they’re sexy,” deputy prosecuting attorney Megan Winder said. “He was not hired to coach these kids to talk about penis size. He was hired to coach basketball.”

Only three boys got to the last steps of Jackson’s playbook, according to prosecutors, when the coach masturbated in front of the victims at his house on Lake Tapps. Two boys testified about having sexual contact with Jackson, including one instance where the coach was accused of kidnapping with sexual motivation for cornering a boy in his master bedroom closet and commanding him to take out his penis.

The other boy testified that sexual encounters with Jackson became routine. His family also lived on Lake Tapps, and they were close with Jackson’s family before the sex-abuse allegations surfaced.

Winder said the boy told jurors Jackson would pick him up on his Seadoo to go to his house, or he would go over after school to spend time with Jackson’s son. Then Jackson would take him to an upstairs guest bedroom where oral sex occurred on several occasions. Winder said the boy described one instance where Jackson took him to the room for oral sex while their families were having a Christmas gift exchange downstairs.

A search warrant executed at Jackson’s home led investigators to seize a carpet from a master bedroom closet where some of the sexual encounters occurred, but the only definitive find from DNA analysis was for semen from Jackson. In a rebuttal argument, deputy prosecuting attorney Richard Weyrich pointed out that a forensic scientist testified that there was “limited support” to exclude one of the boys from the DNA material.

The eight boys who came forward to speak to law enforcement didn’t all attend Sumner High School at the same time. One graduated in 2020, another in 2021 and a third in 2023. Three of the boys graduated in 2024, and two will graduate this spring. Winder told jurors that lack of connection meant they weren’t getting their stories straight, and it helped Jackson manipulate the boys into keeping quiet.

Each of the players were told to delete inappropriate messages and photos they got from Jackson, Winder said, and the boys who communicated with Jackson on Snapchat were told not to tell others they were using the app with him.

“He siloed each one of them by saying, ‘I don’t do this with other people,’” Winder told jurors Tuesday. “You heard multiple of these young men testify that they thought they were the only one.”

Witness credibility a focus of closing arguments

Jackson testified in his defense for two days, maintaining that he wasn’t interested in sex with his basketball players and never sent any of them sexually explicit photos or videos.

His ex-wife, Stacy, also testified, claiming she never saw him texting with players, and she never saw the boys at their home alone with Jackson. Prosecutors said Stacy clearly still loved and was committed to Jackson, and they told jurors it was up to them to judge her and Jackson’s credibility.

“Either she did see the defendant on his cell phone texting and messaging these players and didn’t want to incriminate him, presumably because she loves him,” Winder said. “Or he hid it from her, which meant that he knew it was wrong.”

Purtzer spent a lot of time in closing arguments working to discredit the testimony of the boys. He pointed out that one of the boys Jackson was accused of molesting stated that the defendant had Versace underwear with gold trim, but Purtzer said the underwear didn’t turn up in the search of Jackson’s home.

Questioning the truth of the boys’ testimony required Purtzer to dig into particularly personal details about Jackson, such as a mole next to his testicles that was shown in a photograph in court.

“If a person is performing oral sex on another individual and there’s a mole that’s right there next to your eye, you’re going to notice that, you’re absolutely going to notice that,” Purtzer said. “Not a suggestion that there was anything unusual about the situation. [The alleged victim] did not bring that up at all.”

The defense attorney asked jurors to question whether any of the boys might have an ulterior motive for bringing allegations against Jackson. He said five had pending lawsuits against his client or his company, Sterling Athletics.

“Lawsuits equal money,” Purtzer said.

Prosecutors pushed back on the idea that there was some sort of conspiracy among the boys during their rebuttal argument, asking jurors to consider why eight different people would testify that Jackson either sent them photos of his penis or touched them sexually.

“They testified to that because it happened,” Weyrich said.