A Lee County grand jury has indicted a former Marine Corps recruiter on nearly a dozen sex charges involving two high school students interested in joining the military.
Brady Patrick Dean, 25, of Tupelo, faces a total of five counts of sexual battery and six counts of child exploitation in the two indictments handed down earlier this month. He is currently in federal custody, held without bond, facing four separate felony sex crimes.
The new state charges, issued Feb. 7 and made public Thursday, list two separate victims, both 17-year-old girls who were high school students being recruited for the U.S. Marine Corps.
The first victim approached authorities in early September 2024. She told police that Dean had provided her alcohol on multiple occasions inside Dean’s residence on Woodlawn Street in the Joyner neighborhood. She said she passed out and woke to find a naked Dean on top of her, pressuring her to have sex.
That indictment accused Dean of three counts of sexual battery between September 2023 and May 2024. Because Dean was in a position of trust over the victim, he was charged with sexual battery. In the eyes of the law, it does not matter if the relationship was consensual.
At some point, Dean started sending the first victim pictures of his private parts and asked for her to send him nude pictures, which she did. She turned her phone over to police and investigators quickly found the images. A NCIS investigator said officials recovered about 45 pictures and 3-4 videos.
The images led to him being charged with four counts of the exploitation of a child to produce sexually explicit images.
Dean was arrested by the Tupelo Police Department on Sept. 20, 2024 and charged with a single count of sexual battery. After news of the arrest became public, the second victim came forward with a similar story.
In the second indictment, Dean is accused of two counts of sexual battery and two counts of child exploitation, for requesting she send him nude or sexually explicit pictures or videos. The charges involving the second victim happened between May 2024 and his September 2024 arrest.
Under Mississippi law, sexual battery carries a sentence of up to 30 years on each count. The exploitation charges each carry a minimum sentence of 5 years and up to 40 years in prison.
While the state officials looked into the allegations last fall, federal officials completed their investigation and presented their case to a federal grand jury. That led to Dean’s Dec. 4, 2024 indictment on two counts of the sexual exploitation of a child and two counts of receiving child sexual abuse material (pornography). He is accused of asking or enticing the two minor victims to engage in sexually explicit conduct to be filmed or photographed, one on March 12, 2024 and the other on Sept. 11, 2024. He is also accused of receiving child pornography in June and September of 2024.
The exploitation charges carry a minimum sentence of 15 years and up to 30 years in prison apiece. The child pornography charges carry sentences of 5 to 20 years each.
He is currently scheduled to go to trial in May before U.S. District Judge Mike Mills.
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