BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
The Mountain View Whisman School District is headed for a trial, defending itself from allegations made by two former students who said they were victims in one of the biggest child sex abuse rings in Bay Area history, busted by police in 1974.
The former students said they were groomed and sexually assaulted by teacher Nathaniel McCray starting when they were 12 years old.
McCray taught science and sex education at Graham Middle School. The former students said other teachers and the principal knew about McCray’s behavior — he had blackout curtains in his classroom, and a teenage boy sat in his Ford Mercury in the faculty parking lot all day, the lawsuit said.
“During lunch, McCray would typically eat his sandwich with one hand and look at gay pornographic magazines with the other,” the students said in their lawsuit, filed in December 2022. McCray gave students questionnaires at the beginning of the school year that asked if they had a father living at home. The school is by Moffett Field, so many of the students had fathers in the military that would leave home, the suit said.
“This would increase male students’ vulnerability to grooming and sexual abuse by predators including McCray,” the suit said.
McCray took his male students to ball games, parks, picnics and parties without other adults, the suit said.
The former students said McCray designated them as his assistants and then sexually assaulted them in his classroom during lunch and at his apartment after school.
Suit says district should have known
The district “should have known of McCray’s dangerous propensities but nevertheless hired, retained and failed to properly supervise him … and failed to spot and respond to obvious red flags,” the former students said in their suit.
McCray was arrested in 1974 for operating a child sex and photography ring involving hundreds of young boys along with three associates, including Roger May Murray, a photographer for the Santa Clara Unified School District.
Officers found tens of thousands of photos of young boys in Murray’s apartment and bank safety deposit box, and Murray admitted to destroying at least four times more, the suit said.
The sex ring lasted 10 years and involved hundreds of young boys from Palo Alto, Los Altos, Campbell, Cupertino and Santa Clara, the suit said.
McCray was sentenced to prison in April 1975, according to a newspaper report at the time. He was 35 then and would be 86 now. No information is available online or from court filings about his current circumstances.
Abuse lingered years later
The former students said they’ve been anxious, depressed and suicidal because of the abuse. They’ve struggled with trusting and interacting with other people, including family members, according to their lawsuit.
The district has argued that McCray’s abuse wasn’t foreseeable. The lawsuit “contains a number of factual statements which demonstrate questionable behavior, but none which would show the district’s knowledge of the alleged harm,” attorney William Ash said in a motion to dismiss the case in June 2023.
The school board discussed the lawsuit behind closed doors Thursday. The case is scheduled for trial on Aug. 24.
One of the former students died in an accident in Los Gatos in February at 70 years old. His estate is still pursuing the case, court records show.
Longer statute of limitations
The former students and their attorney Craig Momita are relying on the California Child Victims Act, passed in 2020 to expand the statute of limitations for child sex abuse cases.
The law opened a three-year window from 2020 to 2022 for victims to sue for older abuses, regardless of expired deadlines.
Under the same law, the district was sued by two former students who said they were molested from 1970 to 1975 by Steven Myers, a former teacher and vice principal at Crittenden Middle School.
Myers allegedly lured boys into his traveling summer school program. On their trips, Myers gave boys drugs, touched them inappropriately and encouraged them into sexual acts, the suit said. The district should’ve known that Myers was grooming boys because he tickled them, gave them back rubs and invited them to spend time with him outside of school, the former students said in their lawsuit.
In response, the district argued the boys weren’t molested on campus, but rather at Myers’ summer program that was separate from the district.
The school board agreed to pay $1.6 million to the students in May 2025 so they would drop their lawsuit rather than going to trial.
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