Tennessee man gets 30 years for trafficking minor across state lines
A Greenville federal judge gave Terry Wayne Macon 30 years for hauling a 14-year-old Mississippi girl across state lines three times for sex.
Terry Wayne Macon, 29, of Grand Junction, Tennessee, will serve 360 months in federal prison after a Greenville jury found he transported a 14-year-old Mississippi girl across state lines for sexual abuse. Chief U.S. District Judge Debra M. Brown imposed the sentence Wednesday, July 1, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi.
The sentence also includes 5 years of supervised release and a requirement that Macon register as a sex offender. Federal prosecutors said the case turned on repeated trips, not a single crossing: court documents and trial evidence showed Macon met the teen online in July 2024 and, over the next month, drove from Tennessee to Mississippi on three occasions to pick her up and take her back to Tennessee. Prosecutors said Macon later admitted he engaged in sex acts with the minor. Macon was 27 at the time; the victim was 14.
The investigation stretched across agencies in Mississippi and Tennessee. On August 28, 2024, members of the FBI Child Abduction Response Team and the Corinth Police Department located the minor with Macon at a residence in Grand Junction, Tennessee, and safely returned her home. The case also involved the FBI Jackson Field Office, FBI Nashville, the Jackson Resident Agency, and other local Tennessee agencies, showing how quickly child exploitation cases can cross county and state lines before local families ever know the danger has moved.
Macon was convicted by a federal jury in December 2025 on all counts of transporting a minor in interstate commerce with intent to engage in unlawful sexual activity. A revocation proceeding after the verdict added another 24 months for supervised-release violations, to run concurrent with the sex-offense sentence, because Macon was already serving a federal supervised-release term when the abuse happened.
For Mississippi communities, the case is a reminder that online contact, repeated requests to travel, and efforts to isolate a teen from home or school can be warning signs long before a crime reaches federal court. It also shows why interstate child exploitation cases often land in federal court in Greenville: once a suspect uses state lines to move a minor, prosecutors can bring charges that reach beyond a single county and add penalties that include long prison terms, supervised release, and sex-offender registration.
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