WARNING: The following content discusses child sexual abuse and may be upsetting to some readers.
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After decades of multiple police investigations, twelve survivors of child sexual abuse heard their abuser declared guilty following a North Vancouver Provincial Court trial, on April 3.
Former School District 44 teacher Brian Melicke Moore was found guilty of the indecent assault of eight of his elementary school students while on class trips to the Okanagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Eleven of Moore's Grade 6 students testified that he had indecently assaulted them between September 1976 and February 19, 1982, and a 12th survivor, who was not a student but related to a friend of Moore's, testified that he had also been touched sexually.
Each of the 12 charges Moore faced represented a different individual who had come forward, and all but one had a publication ban on their identities.
Judge Hamilton gave his decision on April 3 following further deliberation after a 31-day North Vancouver trial that stretched over 2024 and early 2025.
The offences against the students occurred on trips to Penticton, Vernon, 麻豆精选, Shuswap, and Kamloops. The settings for the offences included swimming pools, lakes, hotel rooms and campgrounds.
Moore would often get the Grade 6 boys to strip naked, and he would also present himself naked to them. Moore would go skinny dipping with the students, encouraged the young boys to masturbate, slept in the same beds as them during ski trips, and got students to either touch his own genitals or allow him to touch theirs.
Due to a lack of evidence, differences in police statements, and one instance where the alleged sexual conduct was too dissimilar to all the other allegations, three of the charges Judge Hamilton decided were not proven beyond reasonable doubt.
All of the testimony from the former students, despite being separated over six years of conduct, shared noted similarities, said Judge Hamilton.
"In my ruling, I described the pervasive insistence by Mr. Moore that the boys strip naked during different activities Mr. Moore engaged in with the boys," said Judge Hamilton. "I found Mr. Moore鈥檚 behaviour to be a form of grooming the boys for other more intrusive acts allegedly committed against the boys by Mr. Moore.
"Stripping naked with your 10 to 12-year-old classmates might, on rare occasions, seem acceptable, but stripping naked with your Grade Six teacher is unimaginable."
The judge noted that the similarities in testimony while differing on specifics and certain details such as the name of a hotel or who exactly went on the trip together, added to the strength of the Crown's case.
鈥淭here is also a remarkable similarity in the evidence of the complainants as to the sexual touching alleged against Mr. Moore,鈥� Hamilton said. 鈥淪hort of some compelling evidence of collusion, it is very difficult to conclude that the complainants were inventing their evidence of what they say happened to them.鈥�
The 12th child, whose exact relation to Moore's friend was omitted from the court record, Moore babysat on occasion and the abuse occurred between September 2005 and September 2007.
The court heard that Moore touched the boy when he was seven or eight years old when Moore was taking care of the boy and his brother overnight at Moore's home. Moore claimed that it was the brother who reached under the covers on the night of the offence, which Judge Hamilton dismissed as "preposterous."
One survivor, Dennis Cooper, is the lead figure in a class action lawsuit against Moore and the North Vancouver School District in civil court. Cooper had his publication ban lifted on his identity.
The school at which Moore taught was omitted from the published decision, but other media have reported it was the Upper Lynn Valley Elementary School in North Vancouver.
Sentencing will occur at a later, currently unspecified date.
