Judge sends South MS man to prison for 110 years for child sexual assaults
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Federal court sentenced Jason Rhodes to 110 years for child sex abuse crimes.
- Investigators found videos of assaults on minors and messages sharing the content.
- New federal indictment in Louisiana adds charges related to child exploitation.
A South Mississippi man will spend the rest of his life in prison after a federal judge sentenced him to 110 years in prison for producing and sharing images and videos of minors as he sexually assaulted them in Long Beach.
Judge Taylor McNeel sentenced Jason Leonard Rhodes, 48, to the maximum sentence for three counts of producing images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and one count of distributing images and videos of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. The judge sentenced him on Tuesday in federal court in Gulfport.
On Thursday, he was back in federal court in Gulfport, where he was served a new indictment for similar crimes in the Western District of Louisiana. He’s scheduled to return to court Friday for an appearance on the new charges.
He pleaded guilty in April to the federal charges in the case in Gulfport. That investigation began in February 2023 when federal agents and investigators with the cybercrime division in the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office searched the defendant’s electronic devices and found videos of Rhodes sexually assaulting the minors.
Authorities said Rhodes sometimes sexually assaulted the minors at his home, other times at hotels, and filmed the child sexual abuse using his phone or GoPro.
The investigators said Rhodes shared videos and pictures of some of those attacks with other minor victims and others over the Internet.
The videos revealed the brutality of the crimes. In one case, according to a federal agent, Rhodes forced a child to wear a diaper before filming the attack despite the child’s pleas for him to stop.
One of the attacks occurred during a minor’s visit to the Mississippi Coast to attend a funeral, a federal agent said.
Records also show Rhodes bribed some victims. In one instance, he gave a boy money to buy “V-Bucks,” the in-game currency for Fortnite, in exchange for sex.
During the investigation, a forensic examiner reviewing the electronic devices also found chats between Rhodes and others, during which he shared videos of the attacks as well as other videos of other children being sexually abused.
Rhodes confessed to his crimes after authorities first went to his home to make the arrest and perform a search there.
Rhodes is also facing state charges for felony sex crimes in Harrison County.
Rhodes was back in court Thursday because of a new indictment out of the Western District of Louisiana charging him with additional federal child sex crimes.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Glenda Haynes, Andrea Jones and Lee Smith prosecuted the case in federal court in Gulfport.
Long Beach police also participated in the investigation.
