AUGUSTA — A Belgrade man convicted of robbing three convenience store gas stations in Augusta as a teen pleaded guilty Tuesday to having unlawful sexual contact with three children under the age of 12, all in 2014.
For those new crimes, Jacob Uriah Hastings, now 28, was sentenced to six years and three months in prison.
As the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Frayla Tarpinian, described the evidence to support each of the charges, several people watching the proceedings at the Capital Judicial Center used tissues to wipe at the tears in their eyes.
After the Hastings’ hearing concluded, one woman yelled out to him, “Admit what you did to my baby,” and followed that with several expletives. Then she stormed out of the courtroom, loudly slamming the doors behind her. About 10 other people who had been sitting with her and the victim-witness advocate left in her wake.
About 40 other people who were there for other cases witnessed the scene.
Hastings also pleaded guilty to assault and criminal trespass charges from Sept. 5, 2016, in Waterville as well as to a number of probation violations.
Tarpinian told Justice William Stokes that two victims of the unlawful sexual contact charges were sisters and that the offenses occurred between Jan. 1, 2014, and Dec. 31, 2014, in Augusta. “He asked them to touch his genitals and he touched theirs,” she said, adding, “One of the victims at one point told him to stop.”
The third offense occurred at a swimming pool on Aug. 6, 2014, in Unity. Tarpinian said the victim in that case was a boy. Tarpinian said Hastings admitted the offenses when interviewed by Augusta police Detective Tori Tracy.
Tarpinian said because of the early acceptance of responsibility, the state took nine months off the seven-year sentence it was recommending.
Tarpinian told the judge that the parents of two sisters who were victims were in the courtroom but did not want to say anything.
“They are disappointed,” she said. “They think the sentence should be longer.”
The parents of the boy in Waldo County did not want to be present, she added.
Once Hastings has completed that prison term, he will serve three years of probation from a sentence imposed back in 2006 for one of the robberies. That sentence was 10 years in prison, all suspended, with three years of probation.
Hastings’ attorney, Robert Ruffner, told Stokes that Hastings also faces charges in York County and is scheduled to be in court there Friday to resolve that case.
Hastings was arrested Sept. 8, 2016, in Old Orchard Beach by the Old Orchard Beach Police Department on warrants charging him with violating probation on the Kennebec County robbery convictions.
An affidavit by Old Orchard Beach police Officer Brian Pratt said Hastings was wanted by his probation officer for failing to report to probation, and that “an intelligence bulletin” about Hastings from the Maine Information and Analysis Center indicated Hastings was “a violent offender, a known member of the Aryan Brotherhood, and has committed a robbery and is a suspect in an unlawful sexual contact case involving a child under the age of 12. The report also states Mr. Hastings has threatened to kill as many police officers as he can.”
In that incident, Hastings reportedly described himself as “a savage” and fled from police twice, once by kicking out a cruiser window while the vehicle was in motion.
In the earlier Kennebec County case, Hastings, who had come from San Bernadino, California, was 17 when he robbed Valero and Irving Mainway on Western Avenue and Puffin On the Run on Bangor Street in Augusta in early March 2006. One of those robberies was at gunpoint, and he had a gun at a second. Hastings then escaped for a day from a youth center in Charleston. He agreed to be treated as an adult in the criminal justice system and was sentenced to four years in an adult prison in Maine, followed by a series of fully suspended sentences and probations.
At the time, then-District Attorney Evert Fowle said Hastings had an extensive record and several outstanding warrants for his arrest in California and was AWOL from a juvenile facility in California.
Hastings was arrested again in 2009 in Farmington and convicted of burglary, aggravated assault and reckless conduct, offenses that occurred days after his release from prison.
For those offenses, a judge sent him back to prison to serve an additional four years of the original suspended sentence.
Hastings later served an additional six-month probation revocation after being convicted of burglary, theft and aggravated criminal mischief charges in Penobscot County.
Stokes suspended the $300 fine accompanying the most recent assault conviction, saying he would rather have Hastings pay toward the $7,000 restitution from previous convictions.
Betty Adams — 621-5631
Twitter: @betadams
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