VIRGINIA
Daily Progress
Posted: Thursday, January 28, 2016
By Dean Seal
A former youth pastor at a Charlottesville church has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a teenager in his care and will spend 30 days behind bars.
Jacob Daniel Kepple was arrested in December 2014 on two charges of taking indecent liberties with a child. The 36-year-old appeared in Charlottesville Circuit Court on Thursday to plead guilty to one of those charges as part of a plea agreement with the prosecution, which dropped his second charge.
The prosecution said in court that between 2009 and 2011, while Kepple was a youth minister at First Baptist Church on Park Street, he spent increasing amounts of one-on-one time with a high school sophomore who attended First Baptist that grew increasingly inappropriate, though the two never engaged in sexual activity.
Prosecutor Elizabeth Killeen said that over time, Kepple began hugging the victim for long periods of time, grabbing the victim’s buttocks and putting his hands down her shirt, though all contact was over the victim’s clothing.
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