SAN JOSE, Calif. — A former Los Gatos mother accused of organizing alcohol-fueled teen parties that prosecutors said led to dangerous binge drinking and sexual assaults was found guilty Wednesday of 48 crimes encompassing child endangerment and sex offenses.

After a three-month trial, jurors convicted 51-year-old Shannon O’Connor of felonies including two counts of sexual penetration, 13 child endangerment counts and one count of dissuading a witness.

The sexual penetration convictions were the most serious, as prosecutors argued that O’Connor sexually assaulted the two girls by enabling them to become so intoxicated they could not legally consent.

Those convictions will require O’Connor to register as a sex offender. O’Connor faces at least 30 years in prison when she is sentenced, which is expected later this year.

For the two sexual assault counts, prosecutors contend that O’Connor acted more egregiously than simply providing the girls alcohol. One of the boys recounted O’Connor was present and urging him on when he drunkenly sexually penetrated a girl in a hot tub. The girl testified she was so intoxicated she struggled to keep her head above water during the encounter.

In another instance, a witness said O’Connor appeared unconcerned when a teen girl, identified at trial as one of several Jane Does, was sexually penetrated in a bedroom while intoxicated.

O’Connor has spent the past four-and-a-half years in Santa Clara County jail as her case dragged on through myriad delays, attorney changes, and an ensuing criminal indictment that added more charges. Since December, dozens of witnesses had testified at her trial, including 20 former teens who were either victims or attended the parties and observed the crimes.

“It was a long wait. It was a long trial. There was a lot of hardship and pain, and suffering. But with the jury’s verdict today, there is now justice,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said Wednesday outside the Hall of Justice. “It’s important to recognize the victims who testified and their families, their parents who supported them during this very difficult ordeal. This case does not happen if the children do not come forward and stop what this defendant was doing.”

For three child endangerment charges, jurors rejected felonies and opted for misdemeanor convictions after finding the children were not subject to great bodily injury in those instances.

Only one felony child endangerment charge yielded an unequivocal acquittal, and involved O’Connor’s son.

In court Wednesday, O’Connor, wearing eyeglasses and a dark blazer with her hair in a ponytail, sat stoically, taking notes without showing a strong visible reaction as the verdicts were announced.

Outside the Santa Clara County courthouse, O’Connor’s attorney, Stephen Prekoski, thanked jurors for rejecting or reducing four charges.

He emphasized that his client did not sexually assault anyone and called prosecutors’ theory for her liability on those counts “unusual” and that he had not seen such an argument in his three-decade career.

“She’s crushed,” Prekoski said. “She’s very very disappointed … I’m not going to say what she said to me, but she said some things to me as the verdicts were progressing that made me understand that she was deeply disappointed in the decision.”

Jurors waded through 20 felony counts covering child endangerment and 43 misdemeanor counts largely alleging that she furnished alcohol to minors over the course of a week of deliberations. Jurors were asked to decide in several instances whether conduct constituted a felony or misdemeanor. The 48 convictions reflect those decisions, plus one acquittal and three reductions.

“It’s terrible and heartbreaking,” said a parent of one of two Jane Does behind the sex assault convictions, whose identity is being withheld to protect the privacy of their child. “There is some sense of justice, but I prefer none of this ever happened.”

The parent said the convictions validate their long-held suspicions that O’Connor and other community members had tried to downplay.

“These horrible things happened to her,” the parent said of Doe. “The compelling testimony by my very brave daughter was irrefutable. This woman took advantage of them and manipulated them. It’s abhorrent and hurt young people and their families, and will hurt them for their entire lives.”

O’Connor did not testify in her defense, but offered a defense of sorts when in December, during a holiday break in the trial, she contacted this news organization from the Elmwood women’s jail in Milpitas to mount a rare public defense against the criminal charges. She objected to her portrayal to that point and said she was being used as a scapegoat for teenagers’ illicit behavior and that the minors conspired to incriminate her to cover up their own misconduct.

In the Dec. 23 jail call with The Mercury News, she accepted some responsibility for the parties, but framed herself as a concerned mother who knew about them yet failed to keep up with the teens’ scheming or intervene when they smuggled in alcohol.

O’Connor did not address, either at trial or in public, a raft of text and social-media communications between her and several girls who dated or were friends with her then-teen son and his friends who were thought to be the main beneficiaries of the parties, which occurred clandestinely either at O’Connor’s home or at far-flung cabins and lodges.

These communications dated back to her son’s middle-school years, and prosecutors portrayed O’Connor as aspiring to be a “cool mom” to bolster her son’s social standing, a bizarre pursuit that only escalated when the teens began attending Los Gatos High School.

In addition to being lax about their drinking, O’Connor reportedly pried into the girls’ romantic and sex lives in messages, subtly “normalizing” sex among the preteens and teens in the social circle. One teen testified that O’Connor pressured one girl into having sex with her son by warning that he could become suicidal if the girl did not sexually satisfy him.

While O’Connor largely denied the allegations, authorities pointed to numerous instances where she participated in antics that led to many teens getting injured as a result of their inebriation. One teen recounted nearly drowning in a bathtub at home after a night of heavy drinking. In another incident, a teen boy reportedly suffered a serious head injury after drunkenly hanging from an SUV then falling during a joyride in the high school parking lot with O’Connor allegedly behind the wheel.

In the latter instance, a teen recalled that she posed as the injured boy’s mother to ward off suspicion from a responding police officer, one of numerous claims of O’Connor trying to keep the whole scheme under wraps and intimidating girls she suspected of breaking the secrecy.

Despite those efforts, other parents grew wary after teens were coming home inexplicably injured or heavily intoxicated. As suspicion surged about her, O’Connor moved with her children to Idaho, where she was arrested in 2021. She has been in jail ever since.

“It’s very emotional because we’ve been pushing toward some kind of closure and justice during this very long journey,” Doe’s parent said. “I know who all those children are. It breaks your heart.”

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