Former Youth Pastor at Stuart’s Grace Place Gets 45 Years in Child Porn Case

By Paul Ivice
TCPalm
May 12, 2016

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/crime/martin-county/former-youth-pastor-at-stuarts-grace-place-gets-45-years-in-child-porn-case-2e03adc2-cd4f-4a4a-e053--379242011.html

Jeffrey Mobley (PROVIDED FILE PHOTO)

The former youth minister of a Stuart church was sentenced Thursday to 45 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to coercing an underage girl into explicit sexual activity and then distributing photos of her on the Internet.

Jeffrey Bryan Mobley, 24, was youth minister at The Grace Place for about two years until he moved to Ocala in December 2014 with his new wife. Mobley came to the church in 2013 from Findlay, Ohio.

Arrested on Oct. 5 in Ocala, Mobley pleaded guilty on March 10 to six charges — four related to creating depictions on his cellphone of the 15-year-old girl in sexually explicit activity from Aug. 4 through Sept. 18; and two for distributing onto the Internet depictions of a minor engaged in sexual conduct in February and July.

Federal sentencing guidelines called for a sentence of 160 years but U.S. District Judge Jose Martinez quickly dismissed the possibility of a sentence that extreme, calling the penalties for child abuse and child pornography “draconian.”

Saying Mobley committed “a crime that was very, very despicable,” Martinez said he wanted to give Mobley a sentence that would also be an incentive for him to behave in prison.

Asking for a sentence closer to 20 years, Augustin-Birch argued that Mobley pleaded guilty, was cooperative, accepted responsibility and showed remorse. She also noted that the videos were sent only to the victim and not uploaded to the Internet and that the acts were consensual, not rape.

Martinez said, “But he did rape her because she is too young to give consent.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Carmen Lineberger said Mobley was “a sociopath” who should be incapacitated into his 70s or 80s.

Lineberger said authorities are still investigating the possibility that Mobley had relations separately with a second underage girl “and playing both teenage girls separately .” This activity occurred while he was engaged to the Ocala woman he later married — “a prosecutor who had to leave her job because she is married to a child molester.”

The Martin County Sheriff’s Office was alerted to the case in September 2015 by the 15-year-old girl’s mother, nine months after Mobley quit his youth pastor position at The Grace Place.

In a statement to the court Thursday, Mobley said he was pressured to resign for reasons unrelated to this case, and that he worried about his future.

Testifying on their son’s behalf, Mobley’s father, Jerry, and his mother, Jennifer McDaniel, spoke about sexual abuse from a baby sitter when he was 5, and that he had sex when he was 17 with the wife of the youth pastor at their church in Findlay.

“I had a moral failure,” Mobley told the judge. “I had a period of a few months where I let my guard down and let my emotions take control of me.”

Reading from a prepared statement, Mobley also apologized to the victim, who was not in court, and anyone else he hurt, saying, “I am deeply sorry for it, for the family who is involved with this, and that I hurt them.”