Don Reinhard was arrested after forcing a 3-year-old to eat feces as a form of potty training punishment.
PANAMA CITY — A one-time prominent member of the Tallahassee business and sports communities has been sentenced to five years in prison for forcing a child to eat feces as a form of potty training punishment, according to court records.
Don Warner Reinhard, 56, pleaded no contest Thursday to aggravated child abuse in the case. He was arrested in February after the Panama City Beach Police Department learned he had forced his girlfriend’s 3-year-old son to eat feces as punishment during toilet training. Reinhard has been sentenced to spend 60 months in prison and was ordered to not have contact with the victim, court records stated.
Just last month, Reinhard was sentenced separately to prison for five years for violating his probation after shoplifting in Tallahassee. Bay County court records indicated the sentences will be served concurrently at Bay Correctional Institution.
PCBPD received the report involving the 3-year-old on Feb. 2, 2017. Two independent sources corroborated the accusation to police, and the child’s mother told investigators she witnessed the abuse, officers reported.
The child’s mother said she personally witnessed it happen twice between August and September but did not report it "due to fear of an argument escalating between she and" Reinhard, officers wrote. Reinhard was arrested Feb. 10 but posted a bond of $200,000 shortly afterward.
Reinhard had at one time been a chairman of the Florida State University Seminole Booster board. He was revered at FSU football games, where he sat in a private skybox, drove luxury cars and owned beach houses.
All the while, though, Reinhard was the subject of an FBI investigation into his financial advising company, Magnolia Capital Advisors Inc., in Tallahassee. He was charged after a two-year investigation found he falsified tax returns and concealed assets in bankruptcy filings. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission found that "through all this activity, Reinhard’s clients and hedge fund investors lost more than $6 million," according to the federal complaint.
In October 2009, Reinhard was sentenced to 51 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to several fraud and money laundering-related charges. It wasn’t until February that he again appeared on law enforcement’s radar. Reinhard then posted bond but was later arrested for shoplifting in Tallahassee after stealing about $700 worth of merchandise at an unidentified store.