A man with an extensive criminal record primarily related to DUIs and petty offenses killed himself in the Cochise County jail last fall after being sentenced to 2.5-years in prison during a hearing about 16 hours earlier, according to public records obtained by Arizona Daily Independent.
Bobby Joe Reynolds was pronounced deceased at Copper Queen Hospital around 3 a.m. on Oct. 20, 2020, just an hour after detention officers found him hanging from his bed in his cell. The discovery was made during a “routine welfare check,” according to a statement released by the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office following Reynolds’ death.
The autopsy and toxicology report released by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner on Thursday confirmed Reynolds died as the result of suicide due to asphyxia via hanging. The report shows no indication of any underlying medical issues.
Reynolds, 47, spent a few months in custody of the Arizona Department of Corrections in 2015-2016 for two aggravated DUIs out of Cochise and Graham counties. However, most of his other cases resulted in jail time, fines, or probation,
as in the case of a 2014 Cochise County DUI case.
In June 2016, Reynolds was released from prison and began a 10-year term of supervised probation for the 2014 DUI. But in April 2020 a petition to revoke probation was filed in Cochise County Superior Court alleging Reynolds recently violated probation by committing a DUI offense in Graham County.
Around 9:30 a.m. on Oct. 19, 2020, Reynolds stood before Judge Timothy Dickerson of the Cochise County Superior Court for sentencing on the old DUI case. The judge imposed a 2.5-year sentence, of which Reynolds only had to serve 85 percent before being eligible for release.
Reynolds was also given credit for 204 days of time served, meaning he would likely have been released from prison in April 2022 with no further probation time. Instead, Reynolds took his own life less than 24 hours later.
Court records, however, show that while the April 2020 probation revocation filing was the first notice to Dickerson that Reynolds’ was having problems, it was not Reynolds’ first criminal offense while on probation.
According to public records, Reynolds pleaded guilty in 2019 in Tombstone Municipal Court to misdemeanor disorderly conduct fighting. He also pleaded guilty that year to the same charge in Graham County. And in January 2020, Reynolds entered a no contest plea to a disorderly conduct charge in Safford Municipal.
Then in May 2020, a warrant was issued for Reynolds’ arrest when he failed to appear in Tombstone for a hearing about unpaid fines in his 2019 case. However, Dickerson had already issued a nationwide, no-bail warrant for the alleged probation violation in the 2014 DUI case.
Reynolds was taken into custody on the Cochise County warrant on July 13, 2020 in Navajo County. By then he had been charged with two new crimes -an Extreme DUI and Aggravated DUI- for separate incidents in Graham County.
A judge in Graham County saw Reynolds in court on Aug. 27 but the next day the inmate was transported to the Cochise County jail to await resolution of the probation revocation petition. He remained there until his Oct. 20 death.
The Tombstone case and all of the Graham County cases were dismissed after Reynolds’ death, so there is no way of knowing whether prosecutors intended to pursue additional jail or prison time on top of the 2.5 years imposed by Dickerson.
In an Oct. 20 statement announcing Reynolds’ death, Sheriff Mark Dannels said there was “no indication” that the inmate was suicidal.
“Detention facilities are their own communities and regardless of the location, face their own challenges,” Dannels said. “The Sheriff’s Office Detention Division has highly respected men and women working to keep our inmates safe by utilizing proven methods to identify any potential factors in an inmate considering self-harm.”