Girl and her father testify in Michigan man’s trial on sex charges

Prosecutors in the trial of a Michigan man accused of traveling 930 miles from his home to Bryant to have sex with a 12-year-old girl he met on the internet rested their case Tuesday in federal court after jurors heard from the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, the girl’s father and the girl herself.

Jeremy Robert Ward, 33, of Marine City, Mich., was charged in a federal criminal complaint filed Nov. 7, 2022, in federal court in Little Rock with travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct. A month later, a federal grand jury returned an indictment against Ward on the same charge. A superseding indictment returned last October added six counts of production of child pornography and one count each of receipt of child pornography and enticement of a minor.

Prosecuting the case are Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kristin Bryant and Amanda Fields. Ward’s defense attorneys are Toney Baker Brasuell and Robert Golden of Little Rock. Presiding over the trial is Chief U.S. District Judge Kristine G. Baker.

First on the stand Tuesday was the victim’s father — whose name is being withheld — who described the discovery by him and his wife that their daughter — referred to only as MV — had left their home on the afternoon of Oct. 15, 2022, without telling anyone.

“That was very unusual,” the father said, saying that he used a location app installed on his daughter’s phone to find her.

“She was two blocks away,” he said, “over in a part of the neighborhood that’s an open field.”

Driving to the location, he said, at first they saw nothing but as they got closer they saw their daughter with Ward crouched over her. When Ward stood up, the father said, he then saw that Ward’s pants were down.

“He had on a T-shirt, boxers and a roll of tape in his hand,” he said.

He described Ward as, “very disheveled,” wearing a blue T-shirt and blue-andgreen plaid boxer shorts. He said Ward stood up and began walking away, pulling his pants up, then began running toward a nearby wooded area.

The next day, the father said, he took his daughter to the Bryant Police Department to report the incident.

On cross-examination, Brasuell asked why he waited a day to go to police.

“My concern was taking care of her,” the father said.

MV, now 13, under Bryant’s questioning, admitted that she had lied to Ward about her age, telling him she was 17, and to police in Bryant as well, initially telling them she did not know Ward or why he had come to Arkansas.

On the stand, MV said Ward initially reached out to her on Instagram. Asked why she told him she was 17, she said, “I’ve always been the youngest but at that time I wanted to be older.”

Asked why she lied to the police in Bryant, the girl said she was scared and confused.

“I didn’t trust them,” she said. ” I was really scared when it happened and I was still trying to understand what was happening.”

During the encounter with Ward, MV said, she began recording with her phone because she was afraid.

“I was scared and didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I was overwhelmed … I thought something bad was going to happen.”

FBI Special Agent Mike Hudson spent just over 90 minutes on the stand Tuesday morning as Bryant painstakingly walked him through some of the 567 pages of Snapchat transcripts outlining messages and photos that Ward and MV had exchanged over a three-week period from Sept. 24, 2022, until Oct. 16, 2022.

Hudson outlined a series of messages between the two that ranged from talk about her problems in school to increasingly explicit conversation of a sexual nature, as Ward and the girl exchanged hundreds of text messages, photos and videos via the social media app.

“Three weeks and 500 pages?” asked Bryant.

“That’s correct,” Hudson said.

Hudson said that four days after the two first met over Snapchat, a contact for Ward was created in the girl’s phone with his photo and the contact name of Jeremy/ Husband, and a heart emoji. On the first day after Ward contacted the girl, Hudson said, he told her that he was 22 years old, 10 years younger than his actual age, and she told him she was 17, five years older than her actual age.

“You look younger,” Hudson said Ward responded, then, “You are really beautiful. Where are you?”

On Sept. 25, Hudson said, Ward began messaging the girl about coming to Michigan to live with him and having children together.

“How long have they known each other at this point?” Bryant asked.

“Approximately one day,” Hudson said.

On Oct. 4, Hudson said, Ward told the girl he was planning to drive to Arkansas to get her, “as soon as I have the money to get there,” then asked if she had shown her mother a picture of him. Told that she had, Hudson said Ward asked, “With clothes on or off? And what did she say?”

Although initially, photos exchanged by the two did not show up on the transcript, about 50 minutes into Hudson’s testimony, the transcript began to show dozens of photos of Ward, from the chest up, shirtless, with emojis like hearts, smiley faces and other artifacts superimposed on his face. In several, he could be seen wearing a red dragon necklace that appeared in a video the minor victim took of him on Oct. 16, 2022, when the two met face-to-face for the first time.

Jurors also saw a video and photos of MV nude in the shower at her home that Hudson said Ward had recorded while the two were on video calls with one another.

Later in the afternoon, over an objection by Brasuell, Hudson took the stand again to outline two other encounters he said Ward had with other underage girls he had met on the internet in the weeks before he and MV began communicating, considered as “prior bad acts” under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 404b.

One series of messages Hudson said that Ward engaged in over a 16-day period in June 2022 with a 13-yearold Michigan girl consisted of nearly 200 pages of transcripts outlining conversations that were primarily sexual in nature.

“These are conversations with someone who says they are 13, is that correct?” Bryant asked Hudson.

“Yes,” he replied.

The second conversation, which took place over two days in May 2022, was with a girl who said she was 15 and living in Michigan also. That transcript outlined an explicitly sexual conversation that concluded with Ward asking the girl if she wanted to have sex with him.

“No,” the transcript read. “You’re 22. Cops on their way. Bye.”

Brasuell asked Hudson if the FBI had investigated either of the accounts to verify that they belonged to underage girls or if any effort had been made to identify the account owners. Hudson said no attempt was made to identify the account owners, verify their ages, or to talk to them.

Following Hudson’s second round of testimony, Bryant and Fields rested the government’s case. Brasuell and Golden also rested the defense’s case after Ward declined to testify.

Baker told the jury to be back in court at 10 a.m. today for jury instructions and closing statements.

“That concludes the proof, but the case is not yours yet, it’s mine,” the judge said, admonishing the jury to refrain from talking about the case for one more day. “Nobody’s deliberating yet. That magic happens after instructions and closing.”