Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Victim’s family asks why robber goes free
The morning that Billy James Lewis was supposed to go on trial for robbing a check-cashing store, one of the witnesses was shot dead in her home.
Lewis went to prison anyway in 2007, but was recently let out and the dead woman’s family is outraged. Her murder has never been solved.
Lewis had terrified Dorothy McReynolds by holding up the store she managed.
One of her daughters, Jessica Baskins, questions how this robber, who was supposedly sent away for life, could now be free.
Was her mom’s killing a random act of violence? Was it linked to Lewis because her mom was set to testify at his trial? Police had called Lewis a “a person of interest” in McReynolds’ death but stopped short of calling him a suspect. Baskins wanted to to know if police would question Lewis as he left prison this past weekend.
“I was shocked,” Baskins said, recalling the moment she realized Lewis was being freed. “I was literally shaking. We were told this man was going to be put away for the rest of his life.”
The robbery
McReynolds’ entire life changed the moment Lewis hunched over her and threatened to blow her away as he fled the check-cashing store empty
handed in Hollywood.
McReynolds was working as the manager of the Check-N-Go store on State Road 7 on April 6, 2004, when Lewis walked into the business and pointed a gun at her. He hauled her off to a back room where the safe was and handcuffed her. A customer came to the door, and Lewis pulled her in.
McReynolds hit the silent alarm and put in the wrong code for the safe, which jammed it. The man vowed to blow her head off and warned he knew where she lived, police said at the time.
Police surrounded the building and phoned the store. Lewis answered the phone call, telling the police everything was fine. He then opened the door and told the other woman to tell the police the same. He unlocked McReynolds’ handcuffs before escaping through a crawl space in the ceiling.
Hours later, Lewis was captured. He had been hiding behind a couch at a pool hall at the other end of the strip mall in Hollywood. White flecks from ceiling tiles speckled his dark hair.
Living in fear
No longer would McReynolds pass the mornings by drinking coffee and visiting with people at her husband’s work before it was time for her to go to her job at a check-cashing store.
“My mom was never the same after the robbery because she took [Lewis] at his word,” Baskins said about how the robber had threatened her mom. “She was jumpy. She didn’t want to go anywhere by herself. She would have nightmares. She was always looking over her shoulder.”
The day of the robbery, Lewis was arrested and held on a $75,000 bond. He made bail and for the next three years, McReynolds spent her life living in fear, Baskin said.
She moved. She changed cars. She got a cellphone in someone else’s name, her daughter said.
If her back was turned, her family had to announce when they walked in a room. Otherwise, McReynolds would jump and scream.
“It was rough,” Baskin said. “It was really really bad.”
The killing
Gene McReynolds brought a cup of coffee into his wife’s bedroom and left their Hollywood home for work before 7 a.m. on May 7, 2007, Baskins said. His son left 30 minutes later, Baskins said.
Kelly Brooks, McReynolds’ youngest daughter, had fallen asleep in the recliner when a commotion in her mother’s bedroom woke her at 8 a.m., the day Lewis was going to trial.
Kelly Brooks was heading into her mom’s room when the man grabbed her and flung her inside. The man asked about drugs and wore a dark hoodie, ordering Brooks to turn away every time she tried to see his face, Jessica Brooks said her sister told her.
The man stood over McReynolds and fired the gun into her head. He then shot Brooks, who was 19 at the time, in the knee. He tried to shoot her again but the gun jammed. Brooks survived. She declined further comment.
“We did everything in our lives to avoid this,” Gene McReynolds said at the time of the killing. “She was always fearful something like this would happen.”
An hour after the shootings, Lewis was in court when the prosecutor announced that the star witness in case against Lewis had been shot.
All eyes turned to Lewis. His trial was briefly postponed and what had otherwise been a relatively unknown criminal case suddenly became of great interest to many.
At the trial, a jury was not told that McReynolds had been killed. Instead, the jurors were told McReynolds was unavailable.
The jurors did hear sworn testimony that McReynolds previously provided of Lewis’ threat the day of the robbery. The woman who came to the check-cashing store at the time of the holdup, identified Lewis in court by his neck tattoo.
Lewis had no previous criminal record and he faced a minimum 10-year sentence for the attempted robbery, kidnapping and aggravated assault charges.
After 2½ hours of deliberation, a jury found him guilty of all charges. The judge ordered him to spend the rest of his life in prison. Lewis’ family vowed to appeal.
Lewis’ attorney, Randall Haas, said the sentence made it abundantly clear that the judge could not look past the death of the star witness.
“It was eerie, that’s for sure,” Haas told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in a recent interview. “Your first reaction is going to be, ‘Oh my God, the day the person is supposed to testify in court and the victim is dead.’
“My internal reaction would have been the same as anyone else in the circumstances, but the more I learned, the more I was convinced in my mind that it couldn’t have been Mr. Lewis, who was in court by 9 a.m.”
At the time, Hollywood police acknowledged they were looking at whether there was a link between the killing and the trial.
“There are a lot of ifs, but if it turns out [the robbery defendant] had something to do with it, it could send a ripple effect,” a Hollywood police spokesman was quoted saying in a Sun Sentinel news article from 2007. “Your average citizen might have second thoughts about co-operating or assisting law enforcement.”
In a recent interview, Haas said Hollywood Police never came to him asking questions about his client’s location. They also never approached Lewis as far as he knew.
Hollywood Police recently declined to comment about the case.
“To me, there didn’t appear to be any evidence to suggest that he was responsible for the victim’s death,” Haas said. “From all appearances at the time of her [shooting], he would have been in court or close enough to the courthouse to make it improbable for him to be at the location where the victim was shot.”
In 2010, Lewis successfully fought to have the kidnapping verdict thrown out.
That scuttled the life sentence, but he still was required to serve time for the attempted armed robbery and assault convictions.
Until recently, Baskins had no idea about Lewis’ successful appeal.
Baskins was just 20 when her mother was killed. She said she tried to reinvent herself and fall off the radar. She started going by her first name, Jessica. Before then, everyone had called her by her middle name, Renee.
Like her mom, she said she also ran from her fears. Multiple times Baskins has left South Florida hoping to start over, but each time she returned hoping to be nearby when police can tell her they have solved her mother’s case.
Each time she got a new phone number, she’d call Hollywood Police to let them them know how they could reach her, she said.
She said she hasn’t heard from police since 2012.
Over the years she has logged on to the Florida Department of Corrections website to track Lewis, and said she became terrified to learn recently about Lewis’ August 2020 release from prison.
Baskins said her relationship with police in Hollywood has been awful. She admits to calling incessantly — five to six times a week — years ago. She said the last time she spoke with police an officer threatened to have her arrested for harassment.
After learning of Lewis’ August release, she has been calling police again and leaving messages asking them the status of the case and wanting to know if they intend to question Lewis. Police have not returned her calls, she said.
In addition to declining to comment about the case, the police also declined to comment about Baskins’ assertion that her calls are being ignored.
She said Gene McReynolds, a man the 32-year-old has known since she was a girl, is not in good health. Baskins said she she’d like to be able to give him answers about her mother’s death while he is alive.
“I just want him to know that I have literally done everything possible to get answers,” Baskins cried. “I feel defeated. I feel helpless. I feel like I won’t get answers or justice for my mom.”