Former high school coach pleads guilty to eight sex counts

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    KANSAS CITY, Missouri (KCTV) — A former Northland high school coach has pleaded guilty to eight felony counts for sex with a former high school student in Holden, Missouri.

Joshua D. Hood, 44, pleaded guilty to five counts of second-degree statutory sodomy, two counts of second-degree statutory rape and one count of second-degree child molestation.

As part of a plea agreement, Hood was sentenced to five years suspended execution of sentence probation. Hood could serve four years in prison for violating probation. He also agreed to surrender his teaching certificate.

Hood was a high school coach in Holden, MO, in 2003-2004, he allegedly had multiple sexual encounters with a high school student under the age of 17; as a result, multiple sex crimes were filed by the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker announced today. More recently, he has been a high school coach in the Park Hill School District.

Park Hill School District issued the following statement:

We take any possible harm to students extremely seriously, so we suspended Josh Hood without pay in December, as soon as we learned of the allegations against him. Since he voluntarily surrendered his teaching certificate as part of this plea, we will not need to take steps to get it revoked, and this will officially terminate his contract with Park Hill.

The charges against him were from his time working in another school district, back in 2003 and 2004. We are not aware of any reports or allegations about Josh Hood of any kind of similar misconduct here in the Park Hill School District. He has been in Park Hill since 2013.

According to court records, in April 2020, the Missouri Highway Patrol opened an investigation into allegations from a victim that she had been the victim of sexual offenses at a variety of locations in Jackson County, MO, in 2003 and 2004. She identified the offender as Hood. The victim told Missouri Highway Patrol investigators that Hood had engaged in sexual intercourse and other sexual acts when she was less than 17 years old, in the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004. The defendant was then a teacher and a coach at Holden High School and about 26 or 27 years old.

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