Thousands of people squeezed into the Bedford Central Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant on a muggy autumn afternoon, filing slowly down the aisles and toward the altar, stopping briefly at the coffin where the body of Larry Major rested, a black Yankee cap on his head, a gray Paul Robeson High School T-shirt draped over his chest.

They came from every corner of Major's world: his family, longtime friends, former players, fellow teachers, big-time college coaches. Scores of Robeson students, many wearing shirts with Major's picture on the front, hugged and cried and consoled one another under the blond-brick church bell tower. PSAL rivals affectionately swapped stories about the man they called "Maje."

"Remember when Maje shaved the Adidas logo into the back of his head for the Super Six at the Garden?" said Tilden coach Rock Eisenberg, recalling a 1996 tournament sponsored by the shoe company. "The kids went crazy! That was classic Larry. He'd do anything for the kids."

On that muggy afternoon, thousands remembered Major as a beloved teacher and fiercely competitive basketball coach who led Robeson to two championships during a 17-year career, the disciplinarian who molded tough city kids into successful men, the dad devoted to his 5-year-old son Vejay, the strong role model who cast a long shadow over Brooklyn's black community.

They thought Larry Major was a good guy, and that is why the people who loved and admired him are struggling to understand why he is dead, why he sat in his black 2002 Acura on Sept. 30 and pulled the trigger of a shotgun two days after he was arrested for allegedly raping a female Robeson student. It is also why they don't understand the account filed by prosecutors in Queens criminal court, the documents that say Major, 45, first called the girl at home when she was a freshman to talk dirty to her, then had sex with her at least once a month for three years.

For Major's friends, it gets even worse: Before he died, police were investigating allegations that Major had sexual encounters with at least one other underage girl, a law enforcement source told the Daily News.

"I never had a clue he was involved with a young girl," says Cardozo assistant coach Billy Medley, one of Major's best friends. "I've been racking my brain, trying to figure that one out."

Robeson students say they often saw the alleged victim chatting and laughing in Major's office - students say she was popular and active in after-school activities - but that is the only hint that they shared a secret life. His friends saw no clues that Major, who was also the school's athletic director, had violated the trust between educator and student.

"It is the classic scenario in my field," says Helen Friedman, a clinical psychologist who specializes in compulsive sexual behavior. "The stereotype of the man in a raincoat, the stranger who appears deviant, that's not how it works. It is people we love, trust and respect who are the molesters."

"He was a good person who helped a lot of kids," says hoops recruiting guru Tom Konchalski. "But with this student, if this is true, it's inexcusable. And bailing out on his 5-year-old son, that's inexcusable, too. He must have been driven to insanity."

The day after Major's death, about 40 of his former players met at a Brooklyn bar to raise a toast to Major. They represented practically every one of Major's teams. They were stars, role players, bench warmers. Jameel Watkins, a member of the team that won the 1994 PSAL Class B championship and later played at Georgetown, listened in by phone from South Korea, where he now plays pro ball.

Tyrone Sherrod, a 1991 Robeson graduate and now the principal at Holy Trinity Community School in Hollis, met Major when he was in the fifth grade. Sherrod's father had died and his mother was overwhelmed, left alone with 10 kids to raise. Sherrod was running with a bad crowd.

"I was in the fifth grade and Maje chased me until the eighth grade," Sherrod says. "I'd see him on the street. Every day he would say, 'When are you coming to the gym?' I finally broke down and went. He saw something in me that I didn't see."

"My mother is so grateful for that. I'm grateful she let me go with him. I'm a principal now. Maje showed us it could be a rewarding job," Sherrod adds. "You could see how he was changing lives."

Major grew up in Queens in a stable, middle-class family. His father was a school principal, his mother a teacher. "I think he became a teacher because he had a good life when he was young," Sherrod says. "He wanted to share that with other people."

Major played basketball and baseball at August Martin High School, but his best sport was football - he was a first-team All-City quarterback. Major earned a bachelor's degree from Maryland's Bowie State College in 1983 before returning to New York to get a master's in education from Brooklyn College and play football for the Brooklyn Kings, a semipro club.

In 1986, Major was hired as Robeson's head basketball coach, and he soon made Robeson a PSAL power. Robeson was promoted to the PSAL's Class A division after it won the Class B title in 1994, and it took Major only two years to win a championship at the higher level. More than 40 of his kids played at Division I colleges.

Major never married, but he did have a long-term girlfriend, Simone White, the mother of his son. "He loved his son so much," says former Robeson player Alan Griffin, now an assistant at St. Francis College. "Whenever you saw Maje, that little boy was running right behind him."

According to some friends, at about the same time he met the female student prosecutors say he victimized, Major seemed to hit a low point. His teams were involved in at least two on-court fights with opponents and he was suspended in 2002 after an incident at Boys & Girls High.

In 2003, Major turned over his team to Todd Myles, the fiery guard who hit a buzzer-beater to win the 1994 title, but kept his job as athletic director at Robeson. Major couldn't shake the coaching bug, though, and was supposed to begin his first season as the coach of the Class B Acorn High School team this fall.

Experts say there are many reasons why adult men and women sexually exploit children. They may feel a need to assert power. They may feel sexually inadequate, so they pursue young people, who are less likely to criticize their performance. They may use sexual behavior to anesthetize themselves from their own pain.

"The important thing to remember is that it's a crime," says Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea, a psychologist and author who specializes in treating adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. A 14-year-old is too young to give informed consent to sex with an adult, Frawley-O'Dea says. The scars can last a lifetime.

According to court documents, the abuse began in the fall of 2001, when the victim was a 14-year-old Robeson student. Major was the adviser of an after-school program she joined. She gave him her home phone number. He called her and "engaged in a conversation of a sexual nature," the documents say.

On Dec. 31, 2001, Major alledgedly picked her up in his car, drove for a while, then kissed her and fondled her breasts. A month later, documents say, he took her to his sister's Rosedale house, where they had intercourse. Major and the victim allegedly had sex at least once a month from January 2002 to April 2005, either at his home in Jamaica or at his sister's house. Major bought the girl a cell phone in the fall of 2002 "to facilitate contact between himself and the complainant," the court documents say.

The girl, now a student at an upstate college, told a friend about her encounters with Major. The friend then notified the police. The victim and her mother cooperated with investigators, a law enforcement source says.

Major was arrested at his home in Jamaica, Queens, on Sept. 28 and charged with second- and third-degree rape and endangering the welfare of a child. After spending a day in police custody, Major posted $25,000 bail and returned to his home.

He was facing seven years in prison if convicted and would have had to register as a sex offender. No matter the outcome of his case, his career would be in jeopardy.

Less than 12 hours later, Major's body was found near his sister's home in his car, slumped over the barrel of the shotgun that rested between his legs.

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