Having grown up with Trey in Roanoke, serving as a groomsman at his wedding and speaking at his funeral, Dandridge told Lynne Kinder the day after her husband’s death that he “owed it to Trey” to look after the Kinder family, according to the suit.

Based on the understanding that Dandridge was a financial professional, Kinder entrusted the family’s assets to him, including proceeds from a life insurance policy, stocks and stock options worth $6.53 million, with another $400,000 in a retirement account added later.

At the time that Dandridge took over Kinder’s assets, he and his wife were allegedly losing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on the businesses they owned, listed in the lawsuit as Timberlake Lighting, Vitruvian Educational Resources and its affiliated entity VER2 LLC. In order to keep those businesses afloat and “simply to line his own pockets and those of his family,” the suit alleges that Dandridge “stole and squandered millions of dollars in Kinder monies.”

After taking control of her assets, Kinder alleges that Dandridge deviated from the investments he had proposed to her, transferring $1.4 million into Runnymeade Capital Management. While Dandridge allegedly characterized the transfer as an “investment partnership,” it was actually just an account he used to pay off personal debts, the suit states.