ROANOKE COUNTY, Va. (WSET) — A man who was arrested by the FBI and accused by federal investigators of trying to groom a girl was a pastor in Roanoke County.
On Thursday, ABC13 received a report from the Department of Justice about 34-year-old Jacob Ryan Barnett, who was arrested by the FBI in North Carolina on Wednesday. According to the DOJ, Barnett contacted a 15-year-old girl on TikTok while pretending to be a teen boy himself. Eventually, he convinced the girl to send him an explicit video of herself.
We obtained the federal complaint against Barnett, which also details other accusations. The Department of Justice said that in addition to the victim whose story sparked the investigation, there were other times when he used social media to “solicit sexually explicit material from other children while posing as a teenager.”…