Teacher Convicted on 30 Sex Counts Involving Pupils

A teacher whose case sent shock waves through the Los Angeles school system and led to separate criminal charges against a school district official was convicted Tuesday of lewd acts and molestation involving 13 of his female third-grade pupils.

After deliberating four days, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Terry E. Bartholome guilty of 30 of the 45 counts against him. The panel acquitted him of five counts and was unable to reach a verdict on the remainder, including charges of rape and oral copulation with a first grader at the 68th Street School in South-Central Los Angeles, where Bartholome taught from late 1982 until his dismissal early last year.

A retrial is scheduled to begin Thursday for Stuart N. Bernstein, a Los Angeles Unified School District administrator accused of failing to follow lawful procedures for reporting the allegations against Bartholome. Bernstein’s first trial ended in May with a deadlocked jury.

Strongest Evidence

On Tuesday, Bartholome, 49, who has been in custody since his arrest last May 31, stared straight ahead as the clerk read the lengthy series of verdicts.

Afterward, jurors told reporters that the strongest evidence against Bartholome was his own testimony, in which he admitted that on two occasions he had masturbated in the classroom while students looked on, although he denied that he had ever touched the children in a lewd way.

While on the stand, the defendant portrayed himself as a man besieged by young girls with a keen curiosity about sex--a depiction jurors apparently found believable.

“We definitely thought that the kids after a while were taking control,” said Robert Warren, a 28-year-old city government worker from Studio City. “He had groups of girls jumping on him, pulling his pants down.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Kathleen Weast, one of the prosecutors in the case, said that as a result of Tuesday’s verdict, Bartholome faces a maximum of 44 years in state prison. “I’m very happy with 30 guilty counts, 19 of which are felonies,” she said. “We’re talking about a lot of testimony, a lot of different kids. To get 30 solid votes out of that, I think we’ve accomplished quite a lot.”

Defense attorney Sherwin C. Edelberg said he believes that his case was hurt by the judge’s refusal to allow him to tell jurors that 15 students and their parents had filed a $110-million lawsuit against the school district for failing to protect the children from Bartholome.

“I think that was a very important issue, especially when Rita (A. Stapleton, the original prosecutor on the case) started asking, ‘Why would these children lie?’ ” Edelberg said.

Despite the judge’s ruling concerning the suit, Bartholome himself alluded to the litigation against the school district while on the stand. Juror Roslyn Clark, 31, of Glendale, said it influenced her decision to vote for acquittal on one-third of the charges.

“We were dealing with a depressed socioeconomic area, and personally I thought a lot of the children were coached by their parents to make it as exaggerated as they possibly could, because you’re talking about $110 million,” said Clark, an operations supervisor for a pharmaceutical company.

Jury foreman John W. Kent, 37, a plastics fabricator at Lockheed Corp., said jurors had deadlocked 7 to 5 on the rape charge and 9 to 3 on the oral copulation count involving the first-grade student because some “couldn’t put the child and Mr. Bartholome there (in the classroom) at the same time.”

The alleged rape victim had testified early in Bartholome’s three-month trial that the crime occurred while she was alone with him in the classroom in May, 1983. The defense argued, however, that Bartholome was absent from school with a broken leg during that period, and that the child herself was seldom at school.

After declaring a mistrial for the 10 counts on which the jury deadlocked, Judge Fred Woods set sentencing for Aug. 4. Deputy Dist. Atty. Weast said a decision would be made by that time on whether to retry the defendant on those counts.

Weast had asked the jury to return acquittals on three of the counts for which no evidence was presented. The two other counts on which Bartholome was acquitted involved charges that he rubbed up against children in the classroom.