A local basketball coach facing 13 charges in connection with allegations of inappropriate touching of at least eight teenage boys pleaded not guilty in court Friday.
Jeremy Andre Haggerty, 34, is charged with eight counts of sexual battery, four counts of lewd act upon a child and one count of attempted lewd act upon a child.
He appeared at the Foltz Criminal Justice Center on Friday, when he entered his plea, said Ricardo Santiago, spokesman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
Haggerty was scheduled to appear back in court Oct. 29 to set a date for a preliminary hearing.
Sgt. Brian Hudson of the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department Special Victims Unit said at a press conference last week that detectives identified victims “going back as far as 2008.”
At the time of his arrest, Haggerty was living in Orange County and working at a school there.
Haggerty worked at two schools in the Santa Clarita Valley as a basketball coach.
He is accused of sexually assaulting eight victims over the course of nearly a decade, who ranged in age between 14 and 17 years old.
If convicted as charged, he faces up to 14 years in state prison.
Detectives said last week they found no evidence the alleged incidents occurred on a local school campus, and all of the alleged incidents reportedly took place in one-on-one training sessions involving the coach and the player-victim.
Hudson confirmed initially the suspect, Haggerty, briefly was involved with the Trinity Classical Academy as a coach, and also worked with several other schools in the area.
Before Trinity, Haggerty was an assistant coach at West Ranch High during the 2012-13 season, and he spent nearly eight years on-and-off as an assistant at Canyon High, according to previous reports in The Signal.
Haggerty was a star shooting guard at Canyon before graduating in 2002.
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