Former China man on trial for 23 counts of child sex offenses

AUGUSTA — A man who allegedly had a woman send him sexually explicit photographs and a video of a then 6-year-old girl went on trial Monday.

State prosecutors opened the case by arguing Jared Jandreau, 36, formerly of China, should be found guilty of 17 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, five counts of unlawful sexual contact and one count of solicitation to commit a gross sexual assault.

Prosecutors said Jandreau was an accomplice who was able to get Jessica Cox, 32, of Augusta, to take and send him sexually explicit photographs and a video of a 6-year-old girl.

Assistant Attorney General Paul Rucha said Jandreau, in a text message, said he wanted Cox to make a video with the young girl. Allegedly in response to his requests, Cox sent Jandreau several sexually explicit photographs of the girl she had taken and one video.

A number of times, according to police, Jandreau also allegedly asked Cox to have sexual contact with a boy, who at the time was less than 14 years old. That was the basis for the solicitation to commit a gross sexual assault charge against him. Though that act, according to police, didn’t end up happening.

Police became involved after they discovered one of the images of the girl on Jandreau’s cellphone, while they were investigating another case.

Rucha said police later “found a number of images of that little girl,” on Jandreau’s phone, and also found 342 text messages between phones belonging to Cox and Jandreau, which allegedly included texts from Jandreau to Cox seeking sexually explicit images of the girl.

Jandreau is charged under Maine’s accomplice liability standards, in which an accomplice in a crime can be charged with the same crime as the primary actor in that crime.

Jandreau’s two lawyers, Tim Zerillo and Darrick Banda, said Jandreau never even met the victim in the case.

“There is only one person in this case, and this is undisputed, that photographed the minor that’s involved, and that is not Jared Jandreau, that is … Jessica Cox,” Banda told the 14 jurors. “And there is only one person in this case that had any sort of physical contact with (the girl), and that’s not Jared Jandreau, that’s … Jessica Cox. Jessica Cox, for her own reasons, created (and produced the imagery that unfortunately you are about to witness.”

Cox, 32, pleaded guilty in early June to nearly 20 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and five counts of unlawful sexual contact.

Cox was sentenced to 10 years in prison, with five of those years suspended, and six years of probation. If Cox complies with the conditions of her probation, she will serve only the five nonsuspended years. If she violates those conditions, she could face the full 10-year sentence.

She is expected to be called to testify in Jandreau’s trial Tuesday.

Zerillo, in debate which took place without the jury present, questioned the use of text messages between Jandreau and Cox the state police computer crimes unit extracted from Jandreau’s phone as evidence. He noted that the state’s reproduction of the messages did not include any of the hundreds of emojis — symbols used while texting — which he said were included in the messages between the pair.

The text messages are not accurate with text only, Zerillo said, because people use emojis to convey information. He urged Justice William Stokes to not allow them to be admitted as evidence.

“That changes the meaning of the words within the text, rending the texts not accurate,” Zerillo said. And if they are not accurate, then they can’t be admitted.”

When it first took Jandreau’s phone, Rucha said the state didn’t have the authority in its search warrant to look for messages between Jandreau and Cox, because the warrant was from a different case. He said the phone was given back to Jandreau and then seized again via another search warrant, but by then the texts were gone. Computer crimes forensic examiners were able to find some texts from the data they originally extracted, but those did not include the emojis because the software used by the state to extract the data did not capture the emojis.

Dawn Ego, a forensic analyst for the state computer crimes task force, said the state would not now be able to retrieve the emoji’s from Jandreau’s phone. He said the content of the messages between Cox and Jandreau regarding the girl were clear regardless of any missing emojis.

“All the originals are lost or destroyed,” Rucha said, who later suggested Jandreau may have deleted the texts.

Stokes, after sending the jury home for the day and considering the issue, ruled the evidence of the texts could be admitted. He said the text versions with the emojis were lost or destroyed, but were not destroyed by the state acting in bad faith.

“I think emojis are not another language, emojis are such a speculative thing, in terms of what they mean and why they’re put on there,” Stokes said. “The text messages themselves are there, they are accurate.”