Macon sex offender hid candy and cellphone in tree to lure underage girl, prosecutor says
A 57-year-old registered sex offender who hid candy and a cellphone in a tree near an underage girl’s Macon home last summer pleaded guilty and was sent back to prison last month for violating the terms of his probation in a statutory rape case.
James Edward Jenkins was convicted of statutory rape in February 2020 for a crime that happened the previous summer involving a Macon girl. He was sentenced to a year in prison and nine more on probation. Jenkins was released in September 2020 after serving about eight months behind bars.
Then early last summer, another girl — a teenager under the age of 16 — was walking in her neighborhood with her younger brother when they encountered Jenkins. Jenkins was thought to live nearby, but court documents do not mention what part of Bibb County it was.
Officials later learned that Jenkins, upon first meeting the young sister and brother, asked the pair if they wanted anything from the store where he was headed. Sure, the kids said, so Jenkins offered to get them some candy.
According to a transcript of Jenkins’ plea hearing on Jan. 12, prosecutor Shelley Milton described what happened next: “He advised (the children) that he would leave snacks in a bag in a tree. ... So that’s what he proceeded to do. He would go get snacks and leave snacks on a branch in a tree.”
The tree was apparently near the children’s home.
Milton said that before long Jenkins left the children a cellphone, which he placed in a snack bag and hid in the tree. He had saved his own phone number in the phone as “friend.”
He then began communicating with the children, Milton said, “mainly the female.”
When the girl’s mother first found the cellphone last June, her daughter initially did not disclose where she’d gotten the phone.
The mother, though, dialed the saved number in it and Jenkins answered. She asked who he was and why he had given her child a cellphone.
“He immediately started telling the mom, ‘I’m a young fellow, I’m a young fellow, it’s all fine and well,’” Milton said at the January hearing.
The mother soon called the police and also investigated the matter herself.
Jenkins had told her that his name was James, but he gave a fake last name. Even so, the mother, sleuthing on the internet, located his picture in the state’s sex-offender registry. Her children identified him as Jenkins.
Jenkins, who turns 58 later this week, has served five separate prison terms in Georgia since 1999. His criminal history includes past convictions for theft, forgery and cocaine possession in Savannah, Atlanta and in Florida, but there are no known sex crimes save for the 2019 statutory rape case in Macon.
For the matter involving the candy and the cellphone, Jenkins was arrested last year for violating terms of his statutory-rape probation because he was not supposed to have contact with children.
In court last month at the hearing where he pleaded guilty to violating his probation, Milton, the prosecutor, said the conversations Jenkins had with the Macon girl he gave the cellphone to were not sexual in nature.
“But there were situations where Mr. Jenkins did ask the (girl) for photographs and she would send things like selfies or full body pictures,” Milton said. “He did indicate a request for better pictures. He never explicitly said what better meant, but I do believe that there was some intention on his behalf to get more than just the innocent photographs that she was providing.”
The mother then addressed the judge at the hearing and said she was certain that Jenkins had intentions to do more than just talk to her daughter, that he was “grooming” the child. The judge concurred.
“When I spoke to this man on the phone,” the mother said, “and I told him this is a little girl (he was talking to), he said that is what he’s into.”
She asked the judge to sentence Jenkins to as much time as possible, five years behind bars as it turned out, “because there is some child out there that he will do this (to) again because this is what he wants to do.”
When the judge asked Jenkins if he expected the judge to believe he was contacting the child for merely “friendly stuff,” Jenkins said, “That’s correct.”
“I don’t believe a word of that,” the judge said, “not one syllable.”
Jenkins was sent to the state prison near Jackson on Jan. 25.
His maximum release date: August 2026.