San Jose police close case on sexual assault claims at Presentation High

“They didn’t try their hardest,” said Kathryn Leehane, who alleges she was sexually assaulted at Presentation while a student there decades ago.

SAN JOSE — The San Jose Police Department won’t bring any charges after closing its investigation into whether Presentation High School officials swept child sexual assault allegations against staffers under the rug instead of reporting them to authorities.

Police leaders say the criminal probe, which lasted more than a year and a half, didn’t turn up sufficient evidence to establish a criminal pattern of Presentation administrators not reporting alleged sexual assaults to police, or a conspiracy to conceal sexual assault from law enforcement.

“We just don’t have even the foundation yet for a case, along (conspiracy) lines,” Lt. Brian Anderson, the head of the police department’s Sexual Assault Unit, said Thursday in an interview.

What police found simply didn’t rise to the level of a “smoking gun,” Anderson said. And in some cases, the alleged crimes happened so long ago that the statute of limitations had expired, precluding prosecution where evidence may have existed. 

That conclusion frustrates and angers an alleged victim who says police did a “sloppy” job in handling the investigation, which stemmed from charges that administrators and staffers assaulted Presentation High students from the mid-1970s into the early 2000s.

“They didn’t try their hardest,” said Kathryn Leehane, who alleges she was sexually assaulted at Presentation while a student there decades ago.

Leehane wrote a letter in the Washington Post in October 2017 at the height of the #MeToo women’s rights movement about her assault, opening a floodgate of similar complaints about abuse from other former Presentation High students.

Leehane said she’s “insulted” by the department’s claim that there isn’t enough evidence because she doesn’t feel investigators tried very hard to find it, adding that some victims found it difficult to contact investigators and nearly impossible to get a status update on their cases.

In a letter to Leehane dated Nov. 14 and reviewed by this news organization, Police Chief Eddie Garcia said the claims had been “thoroughly investigated,” and no evidence of a cover-up was found. The letter to Leehane was first reported by San Jose Inside.

But Garcia’s letter didn’t mention anything about a statute of limitations, and Leehane sought a December meeting with Anderson, a deputy district attorney, and Deputy Police Chief Heather Randol, where she says she was told the statute of limitations was the primary reason no charges would be filed.

She chalks it all up to a pattern of “extremely poor” communication between the police department and her dating back to early 2018, as well as “sloppy police work.”

“I feel that the San Jose Police Department gave false hope to an already victimized community and they retraumatized victims of childhood sexual abuse for no apparent reason,” she said.

Leehane said that early last year, then-Sgt. Brian Spears encouraged her and others who claimed they were victimized to come forward and report their stories to support the investigation, but wasn’t clear with them that the investigation could ultimately be derailed by the statute of limitations.

Anderson said an “unfortunate reality” of police work is that people are disappointed when their expectations are dashed, although police always make it clear there are no guarantees of arrests or prosecutions when taking reports.

“People get their hopes up because we’re taking a serious look at it. But when there isn’t the result that they want, there’s the letdown as the result of that,” he said.

“Something went wrong and if they would just say, ‘You know what, we could’ve handled this better,’ but no, they will never take the blame for anything,” Leehane said of the department. “It’s always an excuse.”

Told about Leehane’s confusion over Garcia’s explanation about why no charges would be filed, Anderson said, “As a police department, if there’s things we could phrase better, we’re always open to the feedback.”

Leehane said she plans to begin working in the new year with state lawmakers to better address the issue of sexual assaults and the laws that govern how they can be prosecuted.

“It’s pretty sad to me that there are dozens of victims of childhood sexual abuse, and there’s a very clear pattern of coverup and failure to report by the administration, and there’s no way they can be held accountable,” she said.

Meanwhile, an external investigation into claims of abuse launched by Presentation officials in September is ongoing, though Principal Holly Elkins didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story about its status.

The school settled a lawsuit this month with one former student, Danielle Wood, who claimed she was sexually assaulted in 2004 by the school’s former theater director Jeff Hicks, according to an NBC Bay Area report. Wood was 15 at the time of the alleged assault.