$9.5 Million Settlement for Three Former Students Sexually Abused by University Place Wrestling Coach
Won by Washington Law Center.
University Place School District agreed to pay $9.5 million to three former students sexually abused by volunteer wrestling coach David O'Connor, settling days before a scheduled four-week trial. Washington Law Center's Ashton Dennis served as co-counsel with Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala.
What happened
From roughly 2003 through 2010, David O'Connor served as a volunteer wrestling coach at Curtis Junior High and Curtis High School in the University Place School District south of Tacoma. Three of his former students, ages 14 to 16 and abused between 2005 and 2007, later said O'Connor used off-campus weightlifting sessions to isolate and abuse them, conducting what he described as 'medical checkups' both on and away from school grounds.
What the district had never flagged during O'Connor's tenure was a 1977 criminal conviction in Lewis County for indecent liberties against minors, after which a court had declared him a 'sexual psychopath' and ordered him not to have unsupervised contact with children under 15. That history remained undiscovered, or undisclosed, for the years he ran conditioning programs with teenage athletes.
The civil lawsuit, filed in October 2021, centered not on O'Connor's direct acts, he was no longer affiliated with the district, but on the district's failure to screen him adequately before allowing him recurring, unsupervised access to students.
Trial was set to begin May 22, 2023, with four weeks blocked on the court's calendar. Ashton Dennis of Washington Law Center served as co-counsel alongside Vincent Nappo and the team at Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala, who led the plaintiffs' case. Days before jury selection, University Place School District agreed to pay $9.5 million to resolve the three plaintiffs' claims.
The settlement followed a separate 2022 resolution of more than $4.2 million paid to six other O'Connor victims, bringing the district's combined exposure across both cases to nearly $14 million. Superintendent Jeff Chamberlin declined to speak on camera but issued a written statement; no admission of liability accompanied the payment.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Yahoo News / AP·Archived copy
- 2.KIRO 7: University Place School District settles near 20-year-old sex abuse case·Archived copy
- 3.FOX 13 Seattle: University Place School District pays $9.5M to settle student sex abuse claims·Archived copy
- 4.MyNorthwest: University Place School District settles sexual abuse case for $9.5M·Archived copy
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