Former student sues Kent School District over sex abuse case

Published 12:45 pm Wednesday, July 1, 2026

A former Kentwood High School student has filed a civil lawsuit for damages against the Kent School District alleging district officials failed to protect her from sexual harassment and grooming by a former science teacher.

The lawsuit alleges that former science teacher Timothy Brennan engaged in a long pattern of sexually abusive conduct toward the student while she was enrolled as a student in the district from 2015 to 2017. King County prosecutors charged Brennan in January 2018 with two counts of communication with a minor for immoral purposes. He pleaded guilty to both counts in April 2019, according to court documents.

The former student, referred to by her initials in the civil lawsuit, filed the case June 29 in King County Superior Court. The suit seeks damages against the district for trauma, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, behavioral disorders, emotional distress, mental anguish, physical and mental pain and suffering, a decrease in her ability to enjoy life, past and future medical expenses, attorneys’ fees and costs, and other general and special damages, all in an amount to be determined at trial.

“Timing of the lawsuit is largely related to the victim’s own son nearing school age and her questioning if he would ever be safe at school,” said the woman’s attorney, Loren Cochran, of Tacoma-based Cochran Douglas, in a June 30 email. “It really caused her to look for the first time at the fault of the school district in her case. She realized that she was hypervigilant about who was watching her son, and that brought her back to her past abuse. That caused her to connect the district’s failure to supervise the teacher and to keep her safe to the harm that she suffered.”

The district placed Brennan, then 45, on administrative leave after officials first heard about the incident, according to a previous Kent Reporter article.

An 11th-grade student told a King County Sheriff’s Office deputy who worked as a school resource officer at Kentwood that a teacher had been inappropriately contacting her via Snapchat. According to the charging documents, the student told the deputy she was first contacted during her freshman year from September 2015 through June 2016.

She said someone by the username “Seanbee4” had contacted her via Snapchat and within a few days had begun to make sexually explicit comments and also sent inappropriate photos.

According to the lawsuit, Brennan used Snapchat to send the student sexually explicit messages, including pornographic images of himself, over an extended period of time. The lawsuit alleges that the communications continued throughout much of the student’s first two years at Kentwood High.

Court records detail how Brennan used an assumed name to reach out to the student anonymously with sexually explicit comments and a nude picture, according to the lawsuit. After the initial online contact, Brennan then engaged in regular communications and sent numerous photos of his penis and videos of him masturbating, despite the student’s pleas for him to stop.

The student ultimately confronted Brennan online about his position as a teacher when she recognized a jacket he was wearing in a picture, along with his distinctive red hair color, according to the lawsuit. When confronted, Brennan admitted to his identity but begged her not to report him because it would “mess up his marriage and his job,” according to charging documents.

The lawsuit further alleges that Brennan tried to convince the student to spend time in his classroom to complete schoolwork, and he even showed up at the student’s workplace on multiple occasions, according to the lawsuit.

The former student contends that Brennan’s conduct constituted sexual harassment and that the Kent School District failed to adequately supervise its employee and protect students from foreseeable harm.

“These should have been the best years of her life, and instead, her high school experience turned into a nightmare,” said Cochran, the woman’s attorney. “A school district’s most important duty is to keep students safe. If students aren’t safe from a sexual predator on staff, then everything else is meaningless.”

Cochran said the civil lawsuit comes amid continued scrutiny of school districts’ obligations to prevent and respond to sexual misconduct by teachers and other school employees. Washington law prohibits discrimination and sexual harassment in public schools and requires districts to take reasonable steps to protect students from this kind of harm.

The school district’s communications team issued the following response in a June 30 email to the Kent Reporter:

“Because this is a legal matter, the Kent School District is unable provide a comment at this time,” according to the email.

Cochran said the district has 20 days to respond to the lawsuit.

“But it will largely be a procedural filing, in which their attorneys file a notice of appearance along with a general denial of all the lawsuit’s allegations,” Cochran said.

Once that happens, Cochran said the process of discovery to exchange information about what was known to the district at the time, what policies and procedures were in place (or should have been in place) to protect students, such as his client.

A trial date of July 5, 2027 has been assigned by the court.

As for Brennan, he was sentenced to 364 days in jail, but the sentence was suspended, according to court documents. Brennan had to do 50-plus days in the King County jail, followed by supervised and unsupervised probation. That happened in April 2019. He is also required to register as a sex offender.