photo by: Contributed

Michele Collier is pictured with her son, Shawn Danger Collier. The Collier family chose to use their names and photos with this story.

A Lawrence teen who took and shared a nude photo of a special-needs student in a high school bathroom received the maximum possible sentence for his crime — six months of probation — after the victim and his family told a Douglas County judge how the incident had profoundly affected their lives.

“I felt scared and embarrassed, and I don’t know what to do anymore,” the victim, Shawn Danger Collier, told the court on Wednesday. “I have nightmares about getting embarrassed by this picture. … I’ve been struggling a lot at school and at home. I don’t know if I can take it anymore.”

Shawn has TAR Syndrome, a rare congenital disorder that affects his heart and immune system, as well as his arms, which lack radius bones.

The juvenile defendant took the photo in a bathroom at Free State High School on May 6, 2025, exactly a year prior to his sentencing on Wednesday. He then shared the photo, which showed Shawn’s buttocks as he urinated, on the social media platform Snapchat. Some kids at the school then showed the photo to Shawn on their phones.

Shawn’s mother, Michele Collier, told Judge Paul Klepper how the incident had radically changed her son from a happy, social teen who loved school to a frightened, distrustful and isolated young man. He had thought the juvenile defendant was his friend, she said, but he was cruelly mistaken.

“Shawn is just not the same child,” she said, choking back tears. She recalled how he had transferred from Free State High School after the humiliation — which also included a crude nickname for Shawn — to Lawrence High School, but the bullying continued there. She now has to home-school Shawn, which has negatively impacted her ability to have a job and to contribute to the family’s finances.

At the time of the offense, Michele and her husband, Jerry Collier, requested that their family be identified in the newspaper to underline that they are real people — “people you may know.”

photo by: Contributed

Jerry Collier is pictured with his son, Shawn Danger Collier. The Collier family chose to use their names and photos with this story.

The juvenile defendant, a student-athlete who is graduating this month, provided a written statement to the judge as part of the pre-sentence investigation report, which is not publicly available. However, the teen did not speak during Wednesday’s hearing or offer an apology in court as Shawn and his family sat just feet away in the front row.

His attorney, Lindsey Erickson, requested that her client not be subjected to probation, which involves certain reporting requirements among other personal restrictions, telling the court that he had unilaterally participated in a restorative justice program, where he had sought to self-reflect and make amends, including by attending a special-needs class.

Soon after the bathroom incident a school administrator told the juvenile to write an apology to Shawn’s family, which Shawn’s parents have described as inadequate and generic. Shawn’s father told Klepper that the apology — which said the photo was not taken and shared “with the purpose of humiliating or making fun of anyone” — appeared to have been written by ChatGPT.

Erickson attributed the photo incident to “the stupid brain of a teenager” and emphasized that the goal of the juvenile system is rehabilitation — to learn and to do better.

“He’s done everything that the court could impose and beyond,” she said. “There’s nothing else that (he) or the community would gain by (his) being on probation.”

But Judge Klepper, without elaborating, disagreed. He sentenced the teen to six months of probation, which can be extended to 12 months should he violate probationary rules. The teen had originally been charged with a felony over the incident but pleaded in April to a Class A misdemeanor of unlawful transmission of a visual depiction of a child as part of a deal with the state.

Shawn’s mother said it was never her goal “to ruin” the teen defendant’s life.

“I just wanted him to be sorry,” she told Klepper. “It’s devastated our family.”

Shawn’s father said the bathroom photo was not an isolated event, and prosecutor Devin Canfield told Klepper that, judging by evidence on the teen’s phone, there “seems to be a pattern of bullying Shawn.” He did not specify what other evidence existed, and Erickson told the court that she was “disturbed” and “shocked, frankly” at the mention of this because no such evidence was in discovery or part of the case.

In pressing for probation, Canfield said that it was important to hold the teen defendant accountable, noting as an aggravating factor that he had victimized a particularly vulnerable individual.