SAN JOSE, Calif. — One by one, former teens who attended unbridled, booze-soaked pandemic-era house parties hosted by a former Los Gatos woman — part of a bizarre obsession with boosting her teen son’s sex life — were joined by their parents in detailing the trauma from their experiences where binge drinking gave way to serious injuries and, in some cases, sexual assault.

Girls who went to the parties, seeking social acceptance and giving into unrelenting pressure from Shannon O’Connor — who pried into their personal and sex lives through direct texting and social-media messages meant to avoid their parents’ detection — described how they were manipulated into becoming sexual objects for the boys.

The anecdotes, some of which had been alluded to in trial testimony, were among the victim statements submitted or read as part of the multi-day sentencing hearing for the 52-year-old O’Connor, who was convicted March 4 of 16 felonies and 31 misdemeanors in connection with the clandestine gatherings, mostly at her one-time home in the South Bay. The sentencing proceeding, which began Tuesday, is set to last until Thursday.

A victim identified in court as Jane Doe 4 testified about being sexually penetrated by a boy who O’Connor supplied with a condom and egged on to join her in a room while she lay on a bed. She testified that she was digitally penetrated while she cried into a pillow; when she lashed out at O’Connor afterward for her complicity, O’Connor laughed.

“I genuinely cannot understand how someone could see a happy, innocent child and do what you did,” Doe 4 said in court Tuesday. “I have had to rebuild everything that you broke … The trauma shattered parts of me. You treated me like I wasn’t even a human being, like I didn’t matter, like I had no value at all.”

“Even after everything, I am proud of myself. I am proud of all of us. We have had to be strong, and we are still here,” she added. “Now we get to live, we get to grow, we get to find our passions … That is something you chose to take from others, and something you do not deserve to experience.”

Doe 4’s mother followed her, describing the experience of piecing together O’Connor’s scheme and then reporting it to police. She lamented the feelings of failure she endured from not detecting her daughter’s harm sooner, and called out O’Connor’s absence of accountability and remorse.

“These kids and their families will live with this the rest of their lives,” she said. “She is a deeply damaged adult whom kids and communities need protection from for the rest of her life.”

As the statements were read aloud in court Tuesday afternoon, O’Connor did not look up or in the direction of the speakers.

Victims also recounted O’Connor’s relentless badgering for all of the teens to keep quiet about the drunken gatherings she oversaw, even after the uncontrolled intoxication led to a teen falling off a moving vehicle or nearly drowning in a hot tub. She also kept them beholden to her with fabrications about her son having a terminal kidney disease, and proffering cancer lies about herself.

The jury in March found O’Connor guilty of crimes including child endangerment and furnishing alcohol to a minor, and dissuading a witness. She was also found guilty of two counts of proxy sexual assault on the grounds that two underage girls who were sexually penetrated at the parties got so inebriated under O’Connor’s watch that they could not consent to any of the contact. As a result, she will have to register as a sex offender with the state.

Peterson also signed off on aggravating factors for 11 of the child endangerment counts and two sexual penetration counts, finding that the crimes involved planning and sophistication, and that in the two sex counts, O’Connor induced a minor to commit a crime. Those factors gave the judge discretion to issue maximum prison terms for each crime, meaning that she could issue a sentence of more than 55 years. Prosecutors asked for a prison term of 41 years and 10 months.

O’Connor has been in Santa Clara County jail custody since October 2021, after she was arrested near Boise, Idaho. She moved there with her two children as other Los Gatos parents, and authorities, grew suspicious of the pandemic-era parties at her home and far-flung locations like lodges in Santa Cruz and Lake Tahoe.

One victim parent wrote in an impact statement to the court that O’Connor continued her depravity by throwing similar parties in Idaho; another parent wrote that O’Connor mocked the gravity of her transgressions by driving around in her new home state with a vehicle license plate reading “EXCAPEDCA.”

As the criminal case progressed, a portrait of O’Connor began to take form through the accounts of teens who attended the parties: A huge volume of text messages and Snapchat messages showed her to have facilitated the teen gatherings, taken their alcohol orders, and pried into the personal and sex lives of girls attending the parties. Those included girls who dated her teen son or his friends.

The communications dated back to her son’s middle-school years; prosecutors described O’Connor as adopting the persona of “cool mom” to bolster her son’s social standing, which escalated when the teens began attending Los Gatos High School. O’Connor was later accused of “normalizing” sex among the preteens and teens in the social circle. One mother decried how O’Connor gifted at least one of the girls lacy thong underwear.

O’Connor did not testify in her defense. At trial she conceded the claims of her furnishing alcohol to minors to focus on fighting the sex charges, and continues to object to the prosecution theory of her liability for those assaults.

Ultimately, jurors sided with prosecutors whose 2023 criminal indictment outlined numerous instances of teens getting injured as a result of their inebriation under her watch. In the instance that fueled the witness-dissuasion conviction, a teen boy, John Doe 2 reportedly suffered a serious head injury after drunkenly hanging from O’Connor’s SUV — driven by another teen — then falling during a joyride in the high school parking lot. Afterward, O’Connor reportedly shooed away bystanders threatening to call 911, told the injured boy to stay silent and posed as his mother to ward off suspicion from a responding police officer.

The boy’s mother submitted a statement to court that was read aloud by a victim representative Tuesday, describing continuing effects, including memory and academic struggles, from the concussion her son suffered.

“I can barely describe the horror of finding my child barely able to walk or speak, after the defendant simply ‘dropped him off’ in a state of life-threatening intoxication,” the mother’s statement read. “The defendant’s cold indifference — dropping a dangerously intoxicated child off like a piece of trash-shows a level of sociopathy that has left us all feeling vulnerable and constantly on edge.”

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