Ex-Teacher to Stand Trial on 21 Counts of Child Molestation : Courts: At a hearing, four former students testify that Don Ray Moore performed sex acts with them when they were sixth-graders.

Veteran Los Angeles schoolteacher and former fugitive Don Ray Moore was ordered Tuesday to stand trial on 21 counts of child molestation after four young women testified that he had performed sex acts with them at a school in South-Central Los Angeles in the early 1980s.

The emotional, daylong preliminary hearing came nine years after Moore allegedly molested the first victim named in a criminal complaint and three years after he jumped bail.

In tearful testimony before Los Angeles Municipal Judge Elva Soper, a television camera and a scattering of court watchers, the women--now 18 to 20 years old--described sexual abuses they said took place when they were 10- or 11-year-old students at 97th Street School.

One 20-year-old woman said that Moore, who had been her sixth-grade teacher in 1981-82, repeatedly rubbed, hugged, kissed and importuned her with money and lingerie, and once took her to his beach home where he attempted to rape her.

The woman testified that he masturbated in front of her, forced her into acts of oral copulation and fondled her--sometimes in the presence of other students--in the back of the classroom, at her desk, in the coatroom and elsewhere at the school.

“He would just tell me that he loved me, he wanted to take me to heaven, he wanted to put me through school and just take care of me,” she said during questioning by Deputy Dist. Atty. Ryan Rainey.

She did not report the offenses, she said, because she thought they would go unpunished and because her mother used to tell her that “the teacher’s always right.”

A classmate, now also 20, told of being fondled by Moore “during reading group,” and said he called her at home and gave her letters that boasted of the size of his penis. Two 18-year-old women, who had been Moore’s students in a sixth-grade class in 1983-84, gave similar accounts.

Moore, a wiry man in jail blues who was handcuffed to a chair, remained expressionless as his former students testified. He spoke only to ask a cameraman if he was going to be on television.

But the witnesses were visibly upset. Their shoulders shook and they seemed to have trouble breathing. Occasionally their tears gave way to loud sobs, causing Soper to halt proceedings.

The judge set bail for Moore, 56, at $500,000 and set arraignment for Monday in Superior Court.

Moore was a Los Angeles school teacher for 20 years, most of them at 97th Street School. Allegations against him surfaced in 1986 when several students complained to a teacher and to the principal.

The city attorney’s office charged him in 1987 with misdemeanors, including molestation and illegal paddling, after the district attorney rejected the case for lack of evidence. The current felony case was filed several months later, after investigators tracked down and questioned Moore’s former students, by then in junior and senior high school.

Shortly after his arrest, Moore jumped bail and cut off contact with his wife and children. He was captured in July in a Ventura County homeless camp.

In a plea bargain arrangement, Moore pleaded guilty to molesting the four girls in return for a reduced sentence. But a judge refused to accept the deal. Moore’s attorney then said his client wanted to withdraw the guilty plea because he was innocent.