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.
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…