MARTINEZ — Nicholas Moseby, the former Danville cheer coach and biology teacher who was accused of sexually abusing students, was convicted on Friday of most counts after a lengthy trial.

A jury found Moseby, 44, guilty of felony counts of committing a lewd act on a child and sending harmful material to a child, along with misdemeanor counts of annoying or molesting a minor and sexual battery of a girl.

Jurors acquitted Moseby of one lewd act on a minor charge, which involved allegations that he grinded against a 13-year-old girl’s backside. The jury also hung on another lewd act count involving alleged inappropriate touching of a 15-year-old.

Moseby worked as a biology teacher at San Ramon Valley High School and a cheerleading coach at Nor*Cal Elites at the time of the crimes. All of the victims were students who came forward after Moseby sent a video of himself masturbating to a teen girl on Snapchat, something Moseby described as a horrible accident since he maintained the footage was intended for an online sex worker.

The lewd act conviction stemmed from a teen girl’s testimony that Moseby groped her during a cheer practice. The annoying or molesting charges were related to lewd or inappropriate comments Moseby allegedly made to students.

Moseby was charged in 2022. His trial lasted six weeks, and ended last Tuesday. Witnesses included the alleged victims — some of whom required therapy animals while on the stand — and Moseby himself, who testified in his own defense at the trial’s end.

Moseby’s lawyer argued that he was subjected to a witch hunt and false accusations that came about after word spread of the Snapchat video. Prosecutors argued the victims — whose testimony was backed up by three other uncharged alleged victims — were telling the truth.

Moseby’s touching of girls’ buttocks coincided with his pornography searches online, showing an interest in not just things like “bubble booty” and sodomy but “high school” and references to teens, Contra Costa Deputy District Attorney Jessica Murad argued at trial. She said Moseby would flirt with girls, communicate with them on social media, talk about their bodies, then began groping one of the victims “under the guise of spotting for a back handspring.”

Moseby had been hired by both the San Ramon Valley Unified School District and the private cheer academy despite prior problems with the law, including a prostitution arrest in the Bay Area. Oakland police arrested Moseby in 2015, when he allegedly showed up to a hotel there after agreeing to pay an undercover officer posing as a prostitute $120 for sex, authorities said.

In 2010, Moseby was charged with being drunk in public in Santa Barbara. In 2009, he was convicted of a misdemeanor for providing alcohol to a teen in Arizona. Police had initially investigated it as a sexual abuse allegation because the teen reported being assaulted at a party after receiving alcohol from Moseby.

Moseby informed the school district about his 2009 case. For the prostitution sting, he received a deferred judgment. The 2010 drunkenness case never resolved; a judge issued a warrant for Moseby’s arrest after he failed to show up to his arraignment and that’s where things stayed. Similarly, in 2009, a judge in Arizona issued a warrant — which police there said was still active when he was arrested in 2022 — for failing to submit to fingerprint testing.

Moseby was the subject of multiple complaints by students at San Ramon Valley High School, including that he called girls “hot” and made other comments about their looks. The district’s response was to transfer him to Diablo Vista Middle School in 2022, according to records released to this news organization.

Several of Moseby’s alleged victims have filed a lawsuit against the school district, alleging officials failed to heed warning signs, leading to more sexual abuse. The suit is unresolved.

Before his middle school transfer, in early 2022, a group of freshman boys taped a poster to Moseby’s classroom door with the claim that he was a “pedophile.”

At the time, the school deemed the incident part of a targeted harassment campaign against Moseby. After his arrest, Moseby’s stepmother said in an email to this newspaper that students had a “vendetta” against him “fueled by racial hatred.” She said students had been disciplined for threatening Moseby and that at least one of the threats included a racial slur.