When another motorist crashed into the back of Daniel Beauchesne’s car on U.S. 19 in St. Petersburg four years ago, a friend recommended a personal injury attorney named Christopher Reynolds.
“He didn’t have any problems with him,” said Beauchesne, 66.
But after Beauchesne hired him, Reynolds kept coming up with excuses for why his case had yet to be resolved, Beauchesne said. Then, in early 2023, a friend reached out to Beauchesne with troubling news: Reynolds had been arrested, accused of stealing more than $800,000 of settlement money from his clients. Beauchesne would learn that he was one of them.
Investigators determined that Reynolds used the money for credit card bills, Amazon purchases and adult content subscription website OnlyFans, among other personal expenditures. Meantime, Reynolds was leaving some of his clients’ medical bills unpaid and never sent them leftover settlement money as promised.
Two years later, the case has ended with a prison sentence for Reynolds and an order to pay back his clients.
Reynolds last week was sentenced to 15 years in prison followed by five years of probation after pleading guilty to 17 counts of grand theft and two counts of money laundering.
As part of the deal approved by Judge Philippe Matthey on April 9, Reynolds was ordered to pay restitution to 11 parties totaling $716,000, court records show. They include individual clients as well as the Florida Bar, which has a fund that reimbursed some of his victims, and Progressive Insurance.
Three of the former clients are owed sums in the six figures, including one for $148,750, a second for $140,000 and another for $100,000, court records show.
But records show Reynolds’ bank accounts were nearly empty at the time of his arrest. Now he’s headed to prison and won’t be gainfully employed for at least a decade.
“It’s not like he’s ever going to be able pay anybody back any money,” Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney Bruce Bartlett told the Tampa Bay Times.
Bartlett said the prison term is in the range set by state sentencing guidelines and appropriate for an attorney who stole money from victims he was supposed to be representing. He said Reynolds’ defense attorney tried to get a lighter sentence, but Bartlett held firm on the 15 years.
”These people got injured by him,” Bartlett said.
Reynolds attorney, Donald Tinny, did not respond to two messages left at his office.
Reynolds, 46, opened his private practice in Seminole in 2015 and primarily represented clients injured in vehicle crashes, according to information previously released by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.
The sheriff’s office first learned of the allegations in October 2022, when one of Reynolds’ clients reported that her insurance company told her that her lawsuit had been settled months earlier for $100,000. But the woman said she hadn’t received the money.
By then, the Florida Bar had already begun investigating complaints against Reynolds.
That same month, Reynolds posted a picture taken in Asheville, N.C., on his business Facebook page, which boasts that the St. Petersburg native is “one of the burg’s most trusted personal injury lawyers.” Many of the comments on the post were written by users claiming that Reynolds stole money from them.
Investigators learned that Reynolds had forged the woman’s name on legal documents and collected the settlement money, but he didn’t use it to pay her medical bills.
By early 2023, more than a dozen clients had come forward who said they’d hired Reynolds for a standard fee of about one-third of whatever settlement money was received, according to a charging document. Reynolds was to take care of any medical bills related to their cases, and as part of the agreement would receive whatever money remained after Reynolds took his fee.
Clients said Reynolds eventually stopped responding to them, and medical providers began to reach out to them about unpaid bills. Some clients went to his office on Park Boulevard and found it dark. The clients would later learn from third parties — in some cases, insurance companies who’d already sent checks, or other attorneys the clients had hired to investigate — that their case had been settled.
Between the summer of 2020 and the fall of 2022, Reynolds misappropriated nearly $809,000 in settlement money, the charging document states. He deposited the money into his own trust account, then moved the funds to another account in his name.
Reynolds used settlement money to pay for nearly $398,000 in PayPal purchases, about $164,000 to Capital One, roughly $74,000 for Amazon purchases, more than $30,000 on the OnlyFans site and another $24,000 on the ridesharing app Uber, the charging document states.
In November 2022, Reynolds’ wife told a detective that they were in the midst of a divorce and he’d told her that he had no money and was “six figures in debt,” the document states.
Reynolds was suspended by the Florida Supreme Court in December 2022 as a result of the allegations, court records show. A summary of the suspension order posted on the Florida Bar’s website states Reynolds “abandoned his law practice without notice.” His license was revoked in September 2023.
Matthew S. Carney, partner with Clearwater law firm Carey Leisure Carney, and his colleagues represented several of Reynolds’ victims.
In the cases in which Reynolds had settled the cases without his clients’ authority, Carney’s firm was able to get the insurance company to send another settlement check, Carney said.
“Unfortunately, there were situations where he had their authority to settle, but then they had not received the benefit of that settlement, and their recourse was through the criminal process,” Carney said.
He called the case unfortunate not just for the victims involved.
“Given that people are already skeptical of the legal system, for him to use the trust of his clients, this was the appropriate result,” Carney said of the sentence.
Beauchesne said his hospital, chiropractor and car repair bills eventually got paid, but the court determined Reynolds should have paid him $11,000 that was left over.
Beauchesne said “he’s not holding his breath” while waiting to get repaid money, and he feels bad for other victims who are owed many times that amount. He was shocked by the details about what Reynolds used the money for.
“That’s unbelievable that you could spend that kind of money on that kind of stuff,“ he said. ”I was like, holy smokes.”
He said the prison sentence is appropriate.
“Taking money from people who have been in car crashes is pretty low,” he said.
After his arrest, a judge set Reynolds’ bond at $825,000. He never made bail and will receive credit for the 773 days he’d served in the Pinellas County Jail.