Man accused of sexual assaults in multiple national parks has been arrested

While over 325 million visitors passed through the country’s 63 national parks last year in search of everything from deserts and canyons to remote arctic environments, the remote locales are precisely what can cause certain dangerous situations.

In the last year, there have been incidents of visitors taking fatal missteps on steep surfaces, getting lost and then running out of water in extreme heat, and getting caught off guard by wild animals — all while help, due to the remote areas in which they found themselves, was too slow in coming.

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The risk of sexual assault, for women and female-identifying people in particular, is also a risk not often talked about beyond several high-profile incidents.

On Oct. 30, police in the Californian city of Pacifica arrested 38-year-old Jason Crist on 28 counts of felony sexual assaults that, according to local police, included attacks “in various U.S. national parks.” He was arrested at his Pacifica home.

While the police report does not say at which national parks the attacks occurred, the suspect was booked into Maguire Correctional Facility in Redwood City; nearby national parks include Redwood National Park, Yosemite and Pinnacles. The man has been released on bail after posting a bond of $500,000. Some of the attacks also reportedly took place in the city of Pacifica.

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Working with the wider San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office and the National Parks Police Service (NPS), the Pacific Police Department said that it has been investigating the suspect since January 2022 when the first victims were identified. The crimes being investigated occurred between March 11, 2019, and Oct. 14, 2023.

The three agencies are yet to release a formal statement on the arrest. The outdoors magazine Climbing reported that Crist was at one point a brand ambassador for outdoor apparel company Arc’teryx and an employee at a Presidio rock climbing gym called Movement San Francisco.

Witnesses interviewed by the magazine described how Crist reportedly built rapport with women he took on climbing trips as a guide before beginning to impose himself on victims “in ways that are not O.K.”

“Everyone knew,” one of the women in the northern California climbing community interviewed by Climbing told the magazine. “But none of the other guys in the community would tell a girl, ‘Hey, Jason’s creepy, don’t hang out with him.’”

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Another California rock climber, 40-year-old Charles Barrett, was sentenced to life in prison at the end of May 2024 after being found guilty of two counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact at Yosemite National Park.

As national parks are federal land, the charges were prosecuted at the federal level in a high-profile case in which numerous victims and witnesses shared brutal accounts of women being led to remote parts of Yosemite before what were often attacks of a very brutal and aggressive nature.

“This defendant used his renown and physical presence as a rock climber to lure and intimidate victims who were part of the rock-climbing community,” U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert said in a statement on the ruling. “His violent sexual assaults were devastating to the victims, whom he later threatened in the lead-up to trial.”

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This story was originally published November 4, 2024, 11:35 AM.