Jury Finds 47-Year-Old Palm Coast Man Guilty of Cyber-Stalking and Soliciting Girl, 14, for 18 Months

Defendants faced with overwhelming evidence of their crimes sometimes come up with the sort of rationalizations that require jaw-dropping suspensions of disbelief. Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse has seen its share.

There was Michael Bowling, the now-52 year old serving 20 years in prison for molesting an underage girl in his own daughter’s room’s closet during a sleepover, who claimed that his semen and DNA found there was the result of an amorous encounter he’d had in the closet with his wife. He’s serving 20 years in prison.




There was Tonda Royal, the 54 year old man who claimed that his semen was found in an underage girl’s vagina because she had acquired one of his used condoms from a previous encounter with someone else and planted his semen inside her. He’s serving 12 years in prison.

There was Leon Wiley, the 55-year-old man who raped, tortured and impregnated his stepdaughter for years from the time she was 12, who claimed that it all stopped “as soon as we crossed the county line” into Flagler from Volusia. So he shouldn’t be convicted in Flagler. He is serving life in prison.

Today, Jerome Byron Malerba joined that brotherhood.

The 47-year-old Palm Coast man closely befriended a girl for a year and a half, starting when she was 14. He lived near her in the B Section. He spent $8,500 or more buying her gifts, pot, booze, lingerie, bikinis and a vibrator. He claimed he was her mentor, though he smoked pot with her and drank with her.




And he wrote her a string of sexually explicit, vulgar, often vile texts describing what he wanted her to do with her, what he wanted her to do with him, “with one intention, and that was to get her in bed with him,” as Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark put it.

Not so, Malerba claimed. He said he sent her all those vile texts on purpose–not to have sex with her, but the opposite: to get her mad at him so she would break off their “friendship.”

“I’m fully ready to take you and show you a fucking real man,” “drop the panties,” “I want to have some oral pleasure,” go some of the milder lines. “I said those things on purpose because I knew it would make her angry,” Malerba told detectives.

“Come on, you thinkx this is my first day?” one of the detectives told him.




Malerba claimed the girl told him early on in their relationship that she would not tolerate sexual talk. So he gave her sent barrages of explicit texts, come ons, seductions, descriptions of aggressive acts, all to provoke her into breaking it off.

That’s the defense Malerba presented to the jury today as he testified toward the end of his two-day trial. The prosecutor called it “ludicrous.”

The jury did not buy Malerba’s story.

After deliberating 70 minutes tonight, the jury of three men and three women found him guilty of cyber-stalking, of using a computer device to solicit a child for sex, and using a cell phone to criminal ends. He faces a maximum of 15 years in prison when he is sentenced by Circuit Judge Terence Perkins on Feb. 21.

Malarba’s head slumped as he heard the first guilty verdict, he shook his head as he heard the second, and dropped his hand to his knee as he heard the third. The verdict was read at 8:16 p.m.

Each of the counts against Malarba is a third-degree felony, each carrying a maximum penalty of five years in prison, though the bottom of the sentencing guidelines call for 33 months in prison. Anything less would require a “downward departure” that the judge would have to justify. It is also not yet clear whether the prosecution will seek consecutive sentences, as opposed to concurrent sentences, on the three counts.

The conviction for solicitation means Malerba will be designated a sex offender for life, resulting in numerous restrictions on his future employment, residency and other freedoms.




Perkins presided over the trial. For three days since Monday’s jury selection he’d promised to the jury that the case would be over by today. But Malerba’s testimony this afternoon ran long, and the defense did not rest until 5 p.m.–when juries are usually sent home. Perkins has rarely kept juries late. But since he’d made the promise, he gave the jury the option of staying or returning Thursday morning. The jury elected to stay. Closing arguments weren’t over until 6:45 and the jury did not go into deliberations until just past 7 p.m.

Malerba has been at the Flagler County jail on $150,000 bond since his arrest almost 13 months ago. What he described as a mentoring friendship of a girl had begun in 2021

Spencer O’Neal, the defense attorney, bifurcated his approach. On one hand, he disputed the authenticity of some of the texts the prosecution entered into evidence, essentially accusing the girl of fabricating texts. He showed screen shots of texts that he argued could not possibly be authentic, with dates not matching the sequence of events, and one text seemingly written before the two knew each other.

“She made up a record. And she doesn’t have the record besides screenshots that can be faked, as admitted by Detective Moy,” O’Neal told the jury, referring to Flagler County Sheriff’s detective Mark Moy, who analyzed some of the evidence. (The case was investigated by detectives Dan Laverne and James Crosbee.) “And they’re not backed up by the record that was provided within the actual cell phone records.”

On the other hand, O’Neal was not disputing the vile texts Malerba wrote–Malerba admitted he wrote most of them–but he was disputing their intent. O’Neal reiterated his client’s theory. The prosecution showed “a person that was hurt, a person that was angered, a person that lashed out in anger” (meaning Malerba). But, he said, “if you want someone to come and sleep with you, you don’t say disgusting things to them, and that’s not how that works.”

The girl used Malerba for his money, demeaning him along the way and blackmailing him if he did not do as she said. Malerba reacted. “He’s venting. He’s frustrated. He’s mad,” O’Neal said in his closing argument. “He’s not over there trying to get her to actually come and have sex with him. He’s exposing the fact that her behavior results in this manner. If you behave in this manner, this is how you get treated.”




It’s terrible, O’Neal said, “but it’s not solicitation.” He always expressed that “he desires friendship.”

But it was a “friendship” between an unmarried 47-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl who Malerba knew was vulnerable, depressed, of divorced parents, in a difficult relationship with her mother: “He saw that it was an easy target. And he took advantage of her, started to give her things to keep her close,” Clark told the jury. Eventually, “she wanted to end it. He would not let her go.”

He got angry, aggressive, and explicit: his investment wasn’t paying off. He wasn’t going to let it go that simply. “He was absolutely obsessed with her,” the prosecutor said.

The jury also saw or heard Malerba lie on the stand. In an interview with detectives, he’d not disputed that he’d bought a vibrator for the girl. He even told them that he’d done so in hopes that it would reduce her sexual activities with her boyfriend. “I thought she was being overly sexual” with him, he told the detectives. He said it had nothing to do with jealousy. Rather, the vibrator would “prevent her from wanting to do other bad things.”

On the stand, he said he didn’t buy her a vibrator, but a small hand-held “massager,” to go along with her interest in yoga. He said she might injure herself, and the massager would help. The dissembling had the same ring as his fundamental defense.




Malerba claimed the girl had wanted to keep the relationship secret. The girl testified it was the opposite: he’d insisted that nothing be said about their “friendship.” She did not make good choices herself, the prosecutor conceded–she should have stopped visiting him. But teens don’t make good choices. She got in over her head, didn’t know what to do, and finally told her mother, who eventually got an injunction on behalf of herself and her daughter.

“I was terrified, especially when I found out it was a man my age,” her mother testified today.

Clark batted away the claim that the texts were inauthentic, showing the jury precisely how the texts paralleled the “same exact terminology” he used in voice mails that were also recovered. The voice mails were all played for the jury.

“I’m in absolute love with you,” he told her in one of his voice mails. “I’m not letting go of you.”