Court paperwork submitted this week claims that a former Westview football coach, who is also a Hillsboro police officer, had been drinking in the hours before he allegedly slapped and shook student-athletes at a camp.
Jamal Jones, 32, is currently facing 12 counts of harassment in Yamhill County after allegedly waking up players around 1 a.m. while the team was at Linfield University on June 25. Athletes and coaches both claimed that Jones was crawling over students, slapping and shaking them awake. Students gave police video to back up their accounts.
The probable cause affidavit, filed in court on Wednesday, also says Jones told officers that he drank four Coors tallboys between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. on the night of the incident. Tallboys are 16 oz., which is 4 oz. more than a standard can of beer. And students reported smelling what they thought was alcohol when Jones was around, according to the affidavit.
Jones told police that he was tapping the players on the shoulder and on the face and denied wrestling or climbing over the students.
McMinnville police were called to the school for a welfare check at 4:30 a.m. A parent called the police, reporting that their child told them that Jones was “smacking” his teammates and that one child may have been kneed in the chest.
This was corroborated by the testimony of an assistant coach in the affidavit. The coach claimed he was slapped awake at 2 a.m. and again at 2:30 a.m. by Jones and was told that students were packing up and leaving.
According to the affidavit, the coach walked Jones outside and asked him to sleep in his car. A little later, Jones was seen trying to climb a fence to get back into the area where the students were sleeping.
The coach added that Jones smelled of “booze” at the time.
Jones was in the field house at Linfield with the students to supervise because the space was shared by two teams, the affidavit says.
Jones told police that the teams were throwing tennis balls at each other in the middle of the night and hitting each other, so student-athletes were having trouble sleeping.
So coaches took turns monitoring the field house to make sure the student-athletes were sleeping during the night, Jones said.
But the affidavit alleges that Jones was the one waking student up.
“According to video footage, Jamal appeared to purposefully seek out kids that were asleep and then make sure other kids that were following him around were filming before he purposefully woke kids up,” the affidavit reads. “This appeared to be counter-productive to the goal of making sure kids were asleep during the night, and Jamal appeared to laugh (on video) at times before and after waking kids up by slapping/patting/hitting them.”
Jones told police he was doing it to “lighten the mood” with the group because the coaching staff had to “get on them tough” during the day since the Westview team was not performing well and not listening during the camp. He described his behavior as “joking” and called his team “entitled” because they are from the Bethany area.
The assistant coach’s interview with police states that he didn’t feel that Jones was being malicious with the student-athletes, but was being inappropriate. He added that in some of the videos that officers collected from the students, it was clear that Jones’ contact with the students was more than just a tap to the face.
Jones is a police officer with Hillsboro police department. He has been on administrative leave since the morning of the incident. He resigned as football coach at Westview on June 26, the day after the incident in McMinnville.
Jones turned himself in to McMinnville Police on July 10. His plea hearing is scheduled for August 29.
Jones is being represented by Bracken McKey, who was previously the chief deputy district attorney in Washington County.
McKey was placed on administrative leave (later reclassified as medical leave at his request) in September and Washington County officials opened a human resources investigation into a “workplace personnel issue.”
McKey retired from his position in April.
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