Ex-Teacher Sentenced in Molestations

A former Los Angeles schoolteacher, who hid out in a Ventura River homeless encampment for a year to escape prosecution, was sentenced Monday to 14 years in prison for molesting several of his female students.

Don Ray Moore, 57, was captured in Ventura last summer on a tip from a Southern California Gas Co. district manager who identified the fugitive from a profile on the television show “America’s Most Wanted.”

Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Barry A. Taylor’s sentence followed Moore’s May 6 guilty plea to six of 21 felony molestation counts and to committing a lewd act with a child under 14 while in a position of trust. Moore had faced a maximum 18-year sentence.

The victims were sixth-grade students at the 97th Street School in South-Central Los Angeles, an inner-city public school where Moore taught for 16 years.

After his capture last July, four of Moore’s victims--now 18 to 21 years old--testified about the offenses committed between 1981 and 1984 when they were 10- and 11-year-old students.

“Fourteen years seems appropriate for the crimes he committed against these children,” Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Ryan Rainey said. “It is one of the most devastating crimes when a priest or a teacher, who children want to respect and trust, abuse them under that cloak of authority.”

Marty de los Cobos, who turned Moore in to police, applauded the sentence Monday.

“That’s one person we don’t have to worry about taking any more young victims,” said de los Cobos, the gas company’s Ventura County district manager. “It’s a shame, all the young people he hurt so for such a long time.”

Moore, who could be eligible for parole in seven years, was first implicated as a child sex offender in 1986 when five of his students went to the school principal.

He jumped his $25,000 bail in August, 1987, on the day he was to be charged with the 21 felony sex offenses. He left behind his wife, children and grandchildren.

Authorities said Moore worked briefly as a cook on an oil rig platform off Santa Maria before turning up in the Ventura River bottom homeless community in 1989. Moore, who called himself John Anderson, told his river-bottom neighbors that he was an ex-engineer whose wife had died recently. He said that tragedy caused his world to collapse and landed him among the homeless.

De los Cobos encountered Moore in December, 1989, shortly after a pipeline under repair released a fine spray of oil onto the riverbed encampment. De los Cobos, in reimbursing those who lived in the encampment, met Moore under the Main Street Bridge to pay him $30 for his ruined clothes and camping gear.

De los Cobos said Monday that he recalled “John Anderson” while watching a rerun segment of “America’s Most Wanted” seven months later because “he stood out. He was very articulate and intelligent and made a point of stressing that he was not like everyone else living in the riverbed.”

Rainey pointed out Monday that Moore was indeed quite different from his neighbors. “Child sex offenders,” Rainey said, “are the lowest of the low, whether you live in a homeless camp or anywhere else.”