Akron City Council candidate accused of child neglect; her husband — a former candidate — accused of child sex abuse

Acacia Reynolds is a consistent presence inside Akron City Council chambers, often speaking at the podium for her allotted three minutes of public comment at the beginning of meetings. Her impassioned speeches focus on injustices to the community at large and perceived injustices she has experienced herself. 

“I am a mother who has undergone the worst tragedy a mother can possibly go through,” she told council members and the public late last year in an indignant speech. Her five children, she said, were taken away by Summit County Children Services (SCCS) despite them being “loved, happy, healthy, beautiful children.” 

The child welfare agency “doesn’t deserve a dime” from a tax levy “until evil is rooted out of the company,” she concluded as the public comment clock ran out. She rejoined her husband and father of her five children — Akron-area activist William Reynolds — sitting front and center among other spectators.

Now, Acacia Reynolds will be on the November ballot as an independent candidate for City Council’s Ward 1 seat. She is facing off against Fran Wilson, who won the Democratic primary against incumbent Samuel DeShazior in May. Acacia Reynolds also previously applied to fill the council seat vacated by Nancy Holland last year — DeShazior was selected instead. 

Since she lost custody of her children, experiencing “the powers that be abusing their powers” inspired her to run for Akron City Council, Acacia Reynolds told Signal Akron In August. The Summit County Board of Elections had recently approved her petition to appear on the ballot. 

“If they can do this to me, what can they do to someone who’s in the minority, less privileged? Somebody who’s privileged needs to speak up,” she said.

But court records detail that judges in multiple courts have found that the City Council candidate’s children were in danger. They further show that she was unable — or unwilling — to protect them. 

Records detail child neglect and sexual abuse claims

Documents obtained by Signal Akron detail that William and Acacia Reynolds lost custody of their children after investigations into child neglect and sexual abuse that date back to 2021. 

Multiple courts declared:

• Acacia and William Reynolds neglected their children in an “unsafe and uninhabitable” house and did “nothing to remedy the filthy and hazardous physical conditions in the home” after their children were taken away in order to have their children returned.
• William Reynolds sexually abused at least one child. The child’s disclosures were detailed and credible, according to juvenile court and appeals court judges. The child was traumatized by the experience, a child psychologist said. A psychologist who conducted a sex offender evaluation said William shouldn’t be around children.
• Acacia Reynolds’ “unrelenting support” for her husband in the wake of sexual abuse findings and her “outlandish explanations” for the disclosures from the child indicate she can’t protect children from her husband, a juvenile court judge wrote. 

A report from the Akron Police Department shows that a detective began investigating William Reynolds in August 2021 for allegations that he raped a child under the age of 13. While he has been arrested on other charges in recent years — criminal damaging, obstructing official business, theft — William Reynolds has not been arrested or criminally charged in connection to the child sexual abuse allegation. Police remain interested in collecting evidence regarding the sexual assault allegations, APD spokesperson Michael Murphy said in an interview. Criminal courts have stricter evidence admissibility and standard of proof thresholds than do civil proceedings, like custody hearings.

The couple, in an interview with Signal Akron, denied that their home was ever unsafe and that William Reynolds had sexually abused a child. 

At the same time he was under investigation for child rape, William Reynolds pursued public office. He ran for Akron City Council in 2023 and said he plans to run again in the future. He recently applied for a position on Akron’s Citizens’ Police Oversight Board. William Reynolds also said he was previously the policy chair of the Head Start program where his children were enrolled. 

Additionally, William Reynolds is a member of Freedom BLOC and signed up last year to be a member of Signal Akron’s Documenters program, attending an orientation and three other workshops. 

William Reynolds is portrayed in court records as a domineering husband who exerts control over his wife, often attending her counseling sessions and answering questions for her. It was described in court documents as one of many concerns SCCS had if Acacia Reynolds were to have her children returned while the court considered sexual abuse claims against her husband.

William and Acacia Reynolds deny sex abuse

According to police and court records, child sexual abuse allegations against William Reynolds were deemed credible by SCCS and psychologists. Judges in both the juvenile court and the court of appeals agreed with their assessments.

Courts heard testimony from a psychologist that a child with trauma symptoms disclosed:

• The specific sexually abusive acts they were subjected to
• The multiple locations where the acts occurred
• That it was William Reynolds who subjected them to it
• That William Reynolds provided the child with Kool-Aid to mask specific tastes related to the sexual abuse

The psychologist said the child expressed knowledge about sex acts that a child of that age should not have. The psychologist found the disclosures to be compelling, uncoached, and “consistent with child sexual abuse.” 

A second child, younger than the first, also disclosed sexual abuse by William Reynolds but the psychologist and courts deemed the statements to be inconsistent.

When the psychologist who received the disclosures from the children attempted to explain them to William Reynolds, SCCS filings said that he frequently “interrupted the conversation with irrelevant statements” and attempted to place blame elsewhere. 

A child advocate wrote in court filings that Acacia Reynolds “continued to suggest other, completely absurd, explanations” for the sexual abuse disclosures. Courts found that the couple’s denials were not credible. 

In an interview with Signal Akron, the couple repeated the same explanations that were not deemed credible by the courts. 

“This isn’t something we hide from — we’re more than willing to speak about it,” said William Reynolds, who said he told fellow activists in Akron about the allegations made against him and that he is innocent of them. “… Everyone I’ve spoken to, even the secretary to the director of SCCS, when I told them my story, I could hear a nerve in their voice that they were appalled” by how he was treated. 

Police investigation stalls

The Akron Police Department never questioned the couple about the child sexual abuse allegations. 

William Reynolds told Signal Akron that because he “went to school for criminal justice for a time” and knows “some things about when they do investigations,” the lack of police questioning indicated to him that police knew the allegations against him weren’t true. 

“They never reached out to us for any comments whatsoever,” Acacia Reynolds said, backing up her husband. “They didn’t even reach out to me.”

Signal Akron told the couple that they weren’t questioned because a lawyer representing them contacted police first and prohibited it. 

The APD’s spokesperson said the criminal investigation stalled at that point. They couldn’t gather enough evidence for the case to be presented to a grand jury.

“Well, I did get a lawyer because I know how serious of an allegation it is,” William Reynolds said. He said his wife’s father paid for a defense attorney to represent him during the investigation because he “didn’t want me railroaded” by police. 

“So yeah, dang right, I got a lawyer,” he said. 

Juvenile court records indicate that William Reynolds agreed during a 2021 custody hearing with SCCS to go through a sex offender evaluation “to determine whether he was a sex offender and his likelihood of reoffending.”

Two years later, an SCCS court filing stated William Reynolds hadn’t “followed through” with that plan. 

Eventually, an evaluation conducted by Summit Psychological Associates was framed differently in court by his attorney and by a court-appointed child advocate in 2024. 

William Reynolds was “forthcoming and not deceitful” in the sex offender evaluation, his attorney wrote. The evaluation doesn’t show evidence of sexual abuse because the psychologist “admitted that he could not decide” if Reynolds “had committed any sexual abuse, nor whether [he] was at risk of re-offending (or offending, for that matter).”

A week prior, a child advocate wrote in court that the psychologist who evaluated William Reynolds “was of the opinion that he should have no contact with his children.” 

‘Deplorable’ home conditions instigated investigations

The sexual abuse claims against William Reynolds emerged after SCCS investigated a report in the summer of 2021 that four children were living in “deplorable” conditions with William and Acacia Reynolds, who was pregnant with a fifth child at the time of the report.

According to appeals court judge Jennifer Hensal, the SCCS declared:

• “The filth in the parents’ home included pet urine and feces, high piles of trash and debris, and gnats throughout the residence.”
• “The siblings’ clothes and bodies were dirty. The youngest children in diapers had feces and pet hair in the folds of their bodies.”
• “Safety hazards in the home included electrical cords hanging from the ceiling and so much clutter that there were no paths for a child to maneuver. The items cluttering the home were piled so high that they could easily fall and harm a child below.” 
• “Mother and Father demonstrated the inability to provide proper care for their children who went without meals.”

Courts ruled over the next three years that regardless of the findings that William Reynolds sexually abused a child, William and Acacia Reynolds made so little progress on fixing the “filthy and hazardous physical conditions in the home” that it would have been unsafe for the children to return. The two kids old enough to vocalize opinions said they were afraid of their father and did not want to return to live with their biological parents, reports show. Both were diagnosed with mental health issues related to trauma.

William and Acacia Reynolds reject those conclusions with a litany of reasons. 

Couple says kids were not at risk from clutter, unclean conditions

If their house was deemed by the authorities to be cluttered, it’s because they aren’t wasteful, the Reynolds told Signal Akron.

“During COVID, everyone was sending home food for the kids and stuff like that, and we hate wasting food,” William Reynolds said. “So stuff we weren’t using, we put it in a pile.”

Acacia Reynolds chuckled and explained the food that piled up in their house was junk food, an example of good parenting because her children were eating healthier food instead. And, they said, if the pile was at risk of falling on their children, they never let the kids into the dining room unsupervised.

If other parts of the house were cluttered, it was because SCCS showed up shortly after William Reynolds directed his kids to clean their rooms.

“By the end of the weekend, their mess was in the hallway,” William Reynolds said. “And I told this to Children’s Services and they acted like that’s not possible.”

If their youngest children had feces on them, they said, it’s because the infants frequently defecated and not because they were ignored.

“[Acacia] could change the diapers at home and drive the kids over to Head Start five minutes later and they’d mess in their diapers again,” William Reynolds said. 

If their children were wearing dirty clothing, they said, it was because the couple couldn’t smell that the clothes were dirty.

“Right around election time 2020, we both got COVID real bad — I immediately lost my sense of taste, sense of smell, and [Acacia] didn’t realize the certain smells she wasn’t smelling,” William Reynolds said. “We had a laundry machine that the exhaust liked to clog, so the clothes weren’t getting clean, and they’d smell bad.”

If social workers felt their kids weren’t being fed enough, they said, it’s because the kids sometimes slept in. 

“When they talked to the kids, they asked the kids, ‘Do you eat breakfast?’ And my oldest says, ‘Not all the time, sometimes I don’t,’” William Reynolds explained. “At that age, our oldest daughter didn’t understand that if you decide to sleep until 11 a.m., your first meal’s going to be lunch.” 

Months after SCCS first entered the Reynolds’ home in 2021, they observed little progress in cleaning it up.

“While the feces were gone and the odor of urine had dissipated,” the agency wrote in a brief to the appeals court in 2023, “the paths and hoarding conditions remained.” 

At the time of an adjudication hearing, the brief stated, it had been months since the Reynolds had allowed any agency officials into their house to see if the “conditions had improved, remained the same, or worsened.”

‘Forum shopping’ for the birth of their fifth child

In the middle of the police investigation and child custody proceedings in the summer of 2021, the couple left home and drove east to Acacia Reynolds’ parents’ house in Pennsylvania. She was pregnant with the couple’s fifth child; the other four had already been removed from their home.

William Reynolds said the couple chose to spend “one last holiday with family” due to “the nature of the accusations against him.”

They had intended to come back to Akron shortly after Christmas, Acacia Reynolds said, but she experienced a “false labor” around New Year’s Day. The hospital told them “you’re not going anywhere,” she said.

So they stayed in Pennsylvania. Their child was born there weeks later. 

In an appeals court brief, SCCS interpreted the Pennsylvania trip differently: The couple was “forum shopping,” the agency stated, and deliberately gave birth in another state “in order to avoid scrutiny from the local authorities in Summit County.” 

William and Acacia Reynolds “reportedly executed and had notarized a document” that would grant her parents in Pennsylvania custody upon the child’s birth, according to the court. The SCCS told judges that the document was invalid because it was never presented to a juvenile court. Even if it had been, “it would not have had any legal effect.”

SCCS was “tipped off” about the birth and contacted its counterparts in Berks County, Pennsylvania, the agency wrote in court. The Reynoldses were tracked down at a hospital, where officials took custody of the baby. They initially placed the child with Acacia’s sister before moving him to an Ohio foster family. 

Reynolds for Akron

In May 2023, ten days before the SCCS again lambasted the couple in court — highlighting the dangerous home that hadn’t been fixed, the credible sexual abuse allegation against William Reynolds that Acacia Reynolds rejected, and the couple’s attempt to avoid scrutiny with an out-of-state birth — they created the “Reynolds for Akron” committee. William Reynolds was running as an independent candidate for the Ward 3 Akron City Council seat. Acacia Reynolds was the campaign’s treasurer. 

Margo Sommerville, the incumbent city council president, won that race.

Two years later and all out of court challenges after the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear their appeals, the couple created the “Acacia Reynolds for Akron” committee for her run in Akron City Council’s Ward 1, where the couple lives now. William Reynolds is the treasurer.

“I want to leave behind a good legacy and that is why she is running for office,” William Reynolds told Signal Akron in August.

“The number of abuses of power that I have experienced myself is one of the reasons why I have become so vocal, become so active,” Acacia Reynolds said.

How we reported this: The key allegations in this story derive from court records filed by Summit County Juvenile Court Judge Linda Teodosio, Ohio Ninth District Court of Appeals Judge Jennifer Hensal, the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office on behalf of Summit County Children Services, attorneys for court-appointed child advocates and attorneys representing both Acacia Reynolds and William Reynolds. The documents were filed in the Summit County Juvenile Court, the Ninth District Court of Appeals and the Ohio Supreme Court. Other information was obtained through public statements made at Akron City Council meetings, public records obtained from the Akron Police Department, on-the-record interviews with an APD spokesperson, filings from both the Akron Municipal Court and courts in Pennsylvania and an interview with Acacia and WIlliam Reynolds.