Couple who stole disabled NC Chick-fil-A worker’s phone sentenced after his death
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A South Carolina couple will spend time in prison for blackmailing a mentally disabled Charlotte Chick-fil-A worker in a scheme that his family and prosecutors say prompted his suicide.
Trysten Cullon, 27, was sentenced to about three and a half years in prison. That was eight months more than the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Cullon’s federal public defender had jointly recommended to the court.
Jade Stone, 27, was sentenced to two years and three months, which was nine months more than her attorney asked for.
Both must pay more than $26,000 in restitution.
Cullon and Stone both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit cyberstalking last year. Both originally faced a maximum of 45 years in prison for charges of wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to commit extortion and conspiracy to commit cyberstalking.
According to court documents, Cullon went into a Charlotte Chick-fil-A in September 2024. There, he met the victim, a greeter at the fast-food chain identified for the first time Thursday as Christopher Tsoulos.
Cullon asked to use his phone, then stole it. Later, he and Stone sent messages to Tsoulos’s mother and brother demanding money.
“How dare he work at a Christian establishment while he is going to brothels and asking hundreds of women online to have sex,” they texted. “Unless you want me to ruin him and embarrass you I suggest you provide some compensation. He will lose everything. The things I saw were disgusting and disturbing.”
Tsoulos was a 37-year-old man with mental disabilities that kept him at a fourth-grade reading level and second-grade math level, Assistant U.S. Attorney Caryn Finley said in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina on Thursday.
“He couldn’t understand that he’d not done anything wrong,” John Tsoulos, his father, said in a statement Finley read aloud in court.
After three days, the couple’s threats became overwhelming, and Tsoulos became convinced he would go to jail and lose his job.
Christopher Tsoulos — who had never touched a gun before, not even while on hunting trips with his brother — committed suicide on his front porch step.
His father, who he lived with near Charlotte, found him when he stepped outside in the morning. That was two weeks before a trip to see more family in Greece.
Both Cullon and Stone were high on crack cocaine and wanted money for more drugs when they stole the phone and sent the messages, defense attorneys Kelly Sullivan and Mekka Jeffers-Nelson said in court.
Judge Max O. Cogburn Jr. found them equally culpable in the crime and said they “shouldn’t get a lessened sentence” because they are addicts. Stone received a lesser sentence than Cullon because of her otherwise clean criminal background. Cullon had previously been convicted in an armed robbery as a teen.
Both defendants apologized in court, reading handwritten statements as a photo of Tsoulos sat across from them and more than 60 of his friends and family watched from the gallery. More waited outside.
Patricia Buckingham, Christopher Tsoulos’ mother, told Cogburn that her son had been looking forward to the trip for months and kept saying he was working out to “lose his Chick-fil-A weight.”
His job greeting customers was everything to him, she said. The only thing he loved more, other than his family, was baseball. Buckingham, who lives in Fort Myers, Florida, told Cogburn about her son’s routine trips down south to watch spring training.
“He’d run down to get autographs from the players, and he’d tower over the other little kids,” she said. “But mentally, he was a little kid.
“Just like them.”
This story was originally published March 12, 2026 at 5:43 PM.
