A man sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty this month to the murder of a pregnant Florida teen a decade ago and arranging police to dig up a field in rural Alabama in a long hunt for her body.
If the remains of Morgan Martin, 17, had been discovered, Jacobee Flowers, 34, would have obtained a shorter sentence of 25 years in prison, according to the Tampa Bay Times. He had told authorities in Pike County, Alabama, where to look earlier this month during their failed search.
Flowers, Martin’s unborn child’s father, was arrested on Tuesday and apologized for his actions during his sentencing on Thursday.
“I want you all to know that I am a human being. I’m not a monster, despite what you may think,” he said. “There’s not a day that goes by, in the last 10 years, that I haven’t felt the deepest level of regret.”
The teen’s mother, Leah Martin, was uninterested in his words.
“I hope that every day that you sleep, you have to see her,” the teen’s mother, Leah Martin, shouted at Flowers in court Thursday. “Do you understand me? I hope you see her face and the child that you killed. You didn’t only kill my child, you killed your own.”
According to court records, Martin left home one evening in 2012 to speak with Flowers and never came back.
Her disappearance was categorized as a missing persons case for many years, and Flowers was listed as a person of interest. It was eventually assigned to a cold case team, which discovered evidence connecting Flowers to her murder despite the fact that Martin’s body had not been discovered.
Flowers, who was in state custody on unrelated charges at the time, was charged with first-degree murder in the teen’s death. Six years passed before he pled guilty to second-degree murder this month.
Martin’s body was allegedly buried in an Alabama field, and Flowers agreed to help officials recover it in return for a lighter sentence on April 1.
Messages from 2012 show a strained relationship, with Flowers urging Martin to terminate the baby to avoid affecting his relationship with another woman. Officials said he was concerned about charges of having sex with a minor.
Martin chose Ja’Leah as the name for her baby girl, the newspaper reported.
