‘Predator’ ex-pastor gets 40 years after MIA arrest reveals child exploitation online, at church

MIAMI — A former youth pastor who flew through South Florida in 2025 already carrying a sordid past now has a bleak future ahead of him, federal prosecutors announced on Wednesday: 40 years in federal prison.

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Jacob Melvin Hart, 46, of San Juan Capistrano, California, was sentenced by a Miami federal judge “for sexually exploiting children by secretly recording minors through spyware installed on laptop computers and directing children overseas to produce child sexual abuse material.”

Hart, then 45, was arrested at Miami International Airport on June 21, 2025 after customs officers found child sexual abuse videos on his phone. He was going through a border checkpoint after arriving on an Eastern Air Express flight from Cap-Haïtien, Haiti on a Christian mission trip.

Authorities said they found 33 illicit videos in a “hidden, password-protected folder” of his iPhone showing girls as young as 10, “including images and videos that he had directed minor children in Russia to create at his request.”

“Law enforcement also observed what appeared to be over approximately 160 artificial intelligence (AI) images and videos depicting nude prepubescent and minor females,” the complaint states.

Hart had been previously convicted in 2006 for “for placing a hidden camera in the girls’ bathroom/shower room at a Christian camp” in Oregon, authorities said.

But prosecutors said he later managed to find work at a church in Southern California in spite of that.

Court documents state that law enforcement learned that while he working an an information technology consultant at Crossline Community Church in Laguna Hills, California, where prosecutors said that “provided laptops equipped with spyware to several children, allowing him to remotely activate the computers’ cameras without the children’s knowledge.”

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“Using the spyware, Hart secretly recorded at least eight minor victims and possessed sexually explicit depictions of those children,” prosecutors said.

According to the Orange County Register, that church is now being sued, with victims alleging that “Crossline Community Church officials were aware Hart had been convicted in Oregon,” yet hired him anyway.

Hart’s attorneys, in a memorandum seeking the mandatory minimum 30-year sentence following his guilty plea, tried to paint him as “a thoroughly broken man” and past victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a neighbor, triggering an “illicit addiction.”

But prosecutors, in a news release, said a judge “described the scope of Hart’s conduct as ‘extraordinary’” while handing down the 40-year sentence.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quinones said the sentence means that Hart “will likely spend the rest of his life in federal prison.”

“It protects children from a calculated predator and demonstrates that we will pursue those who produce and solicit child sexual abuse material, whether their victims are here at home or across the world,” he said in part.

Records show a restitution hearing is scheduled in Miami federal court for Sept. 1.

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