A former employee of a well-known Bartow criminal lawyer firm has been charged with multiple felonies after investigators said client payments were diverted, records were falsified and missing funds were concealed over several years.
Natalie Escamilla, 39, was charged with grand theft between $20,000 and $100,000, scheme to defraud greater than $20,000, grand theft between $750 and $5,000, 15 counts of forgery and 15 counts of uttering a forged instrument, court records show. She has a court-appointed attorney and has been issued bond.
The case grew out of a problem attorney Gil Colon said he discovered when his firm’s trust account was overdrawn. Colon found thousands of dollars in payments that had been documented as received by the office but, investigators alleged, never made it into the trust account. A review later turned up dozens of additional transactions that appeared in office records but could not be matched to deposits into the firm’s accounts.
Investigators with the State Attorney’s Office alleged Escamilla handled a significant portion of client payments for the Bartow criminal defense firm and collected cash and electronic payments intended for the office. They said some of those funds were not deposited into the firm’s trust account and that some payments were routed into Escamilla’s personal accounts.
The affidavit says the conduct began in 2022 and continued through 2025. Investigators also said Escamilla received more than $16,000 in Zelle payments from clients. Court records show they reviewed bank records, Zelle records, Cash App records, office accounting documents, client statements, text messages, emails and information recovered from an office-issued cellphone. They also conducted a controlled phone call during the investigation.
The friction point in the case is the gap between the office paperwork and the money itself: payments were logged as received, yet investigators alleged many of those funds never reached the trust account. That is the issue prosecutors will now have to prove in court, along with how much money was ultimately missing in total, which the records released so far do not say.
For the firm’s clients, the allegations point to a breakdown in one of the most sensitive parts of a law office’s finances: money held in trust on a client’s behalf. For Escamilla, the next step is the criminal case itself, with the charges now filed and bond set while the court-appointed defense takes shape.
