A military vet with a Purple Heart got a MS Coast girl pregnant. He was 40. She was 14.

When a 40-year-old Moss Point man found out he had gotten a 14-year-old girl pregnant in 2017, he told her he would buy her a morning after pill.

“Don’t worry or stress. We can take care of it,” Jacob Blair Scott, a military veteran, said in a text to the young girl. He would end up purchasing many pills on his credit card in an attempt to terminate the pregnancy.

When the girl told the man she knew her as her “defender” and her ‘protector” she was pregnant, Scott immediately asked her where she had thrown out the positive test because he didn’t want anyone to find it.

The girl texted him back, telling him she had thrown away the test in an outdoor garbage can at her home. The test was just one of several the girl took to confirm the pregnancy.

After she first told him about the first positive test, a deputy said Scott asked the girl when she had taken the test.

“Last night,” the girl texted back.

“Are you going to tell your Mom?” Scott asked.

When the girl said she would and that “it really doesn’t matter,” Scott promptly reacted.

“Hell no,” he wrote, “it does matter.”

That and other testimony came out on the first day of Scott’s sex crimes trial Tuesday in Jackson County before Circuit Judge Kathy King Jackson.

Scott, now 45, is facing a possible life sentence if convicted on nine counts of sexual battery against a minor, four counts of touching of a minor for lustful purposes, and one count of child exploitation for allegedly filming the victim while engaged in sex acts.

The Sun Herald does not identify victims of alleged sex crimes or relatives of the alleged victims to protect the identity of the minors.

Military vet preyed on young girl, or did he?

District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath and Assistant District Attorney Justin Lovorn are prosecuting the case and pointed out early on that a DNA test confirmed Scott fathered the minor girl’s child.

Scott had entered into an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to some of the charges.

But days before he was set to enter the guilty pleas in the summer of 2018, Scott faked his death in Orange Beach, Alabama, and went on the run.

However, information about Scott faking his death and going on the run to avoid prosecution will not be introduced at the trial because Judge Jackson ruled that information was not necessary to prove the sex crime charges against him.

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Prosecutors said Tuesday that Scott preyed on the young girl and sexually assaulted her repeatedly at different times beginning around 2016 until her pregnancy and ultimately his arrest in 2017.

Scott’s attorneys, Tangi Carter and Victor Carmody Jr., argue Scott’s mental health and the medical ailments he’s suffered as a result of his decorated military service that included injuries that left him with mental health defects that clouded his judgment.

Scott received a Purple Heart after sustaining injuries during combat in Iraq and was later honorably discharged. He later worked as a welder at Chevron’s Pascagoula refinery, making as much as $140,000 annually.

Scott’s injuries and the darkness that followed him grew when he returned home and ultimately destroyed his marriage and relationship with his child, his attorneys said.

Carter and Carmody argued early on that a pharmacologist, a licensed psychologist, and a toxicologist determined Scott’s medical conditions and the treatments he receives for them leave him in “clinical distress” and with a “mental health impairment.”

The defense also took time out of their opening to seemingly argue that the victim and her family were to blame for the alleged crimes. Prosecutors shot down those allegations.

Pictures show repeated sexual assaults

Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy Sherwood Beckham, an IT expert trained to use computer software to retrieve information from smartphones, testified about the text messages that he discovered on the phones of both Scott and the victim.

Beckham said Scott had deleted the text messages between him and the alleged victim, but the deputy was able to recover them.

In addition, Beckham testified that he found pictures of Scott allegedly in the act of sexually assaulting the girl, with one photo showing Scott using a sex toy on the victim.

There were also nude photos of the girl on Scott’s phone, but her face was not in them. Still, Sheriff’s Lt. Eddie Clark said a witness was able to look at the pictures and positively identify the girl from her clothing, bedding and her body, and identify Scott as the alleged offender in the photos.

The alleged crime first came to light after the victim confided in her sister about her pregnancy. Once her sister confirmed the pregnancy through another test, she and her husband took the teen to the sheriff’s department to report the crimes.

Clark testified that the victim was taken to an area hospital, where she underwent a medical exam and another pregnancy test.

When the victim gave birth to the child, she agreed to allow authorities to obtain a DNA sample from her newborn to compare to Scott to determine paternity. The DNA test confirmed Scott had fathered the child, a then social worker who was with the girl at the time testified Tuesday.

Clark said the little girl’s mother didn’t find out about the alleged sexual assaults until the girl got to the hospital.

The mother, he said, was crying and screaming over what had allegedly happened to her daughter.

When Clark took Scott into custody, he said Scott immediately asked for an attorney and never spoke to investigators about the allegations.

Social worker Sarah Blakenship Ross said she took the young victim into protective custody once the crimes were confirmed and testified that the girl seemed relieved to finally disclose the alleged crimes.

Testimony in the trial resumes Wednesday in Jackson County Circuit Court.

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