By: Patti Weaver
(Stillwater, Okla.) — An arrest warrant has been issued for a Texas man accused of financially exploiting his 70-year-old father-in-law by illegally obtaining a total of $20,500 from the Stillwater man’s personal and business checking accounts and depositing the funds in his own bank account.
If apprehended and convicted of two counts of exploitation of an elderly person, Christopher James Brown, 38, of Wylie, TX, who previously lived in Fairfax, OK, could be imprisoned for as long as 20 years and fined $20,000, court records show.
The victim said that his daughter “is about to be going through a divorce,” Payne County Sheriff’s Deputy Jacob Secrest wrote in an affidavit.
The victim’s son-in-law “had gotten a hold of some of (his father-in-law’s) checks for both his personal and business accounts; (the victim) said Christopher further filled out some of those checks to himself and cashed them into his own banking account by forging,” his wife’s signature, the affidavit alleged.
The victim said he found this out at about 3 pm on Nov. 21, 2020, while he and his daughter were at his lake house in Jay, OK, near Grand Lake, the affidavit alleged.
The victim said his daughter, “utilized her mobile banking account to check the balance of her joint account with Christopher and was able to see where he had been depositing roughly $30,000 worth into their account. (She) said the app shows her a photocopy of the checks and she was able to see that Christopher had forged her signature,” the affidavit alleged.
The victim said he had worked with his bank in Stillwater to give permission to his daughter “to write checks for both accounts in the event something should happen to him, so she could pay (her father’s) bills. (He) said Christopher has never been given permission to utilize the checks. (He) also said Christopher would know they were (his father-in-law’s) and to which accounts because the checks have (the father-in-law’s) name and business information on them,” the affidavit alleged.
The victim said, “It was only at the first of the month (November) that (he) learned of alleged domestic violence,” between his son-in-law and daughter when his daughter moved back in with him “on short notice with only a few personal belongings and her children,” the affidavit alleged.
His daughter “had been unable to remove the checks from the safe in her and Christopher’s residence in Texas at the time, which is how Christopher was able to obtain them. (She) had never given Christopher permission to use the checks either,” the affidavit alleged.
The victim’s bank statements show “Christopher cashed seven checks total to (his father-in-law’s) personal account. Christopher cashed two separate checks twice; each time Christopher had mutilated the check in a manner as to make it difficult or outright impossible to tell which check it was without comparing it to the non-mutilated one. Christopher did similarly with the business account cashing ten checks, which were really the same three checks just mutilated and re-deposited,” the affidavit alleged.
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