A Hart County man was sentenced Wednesday to 82 months in prison in a federal criminal case in which he admitted stealing hundreds of firearms from the pawn shop he managed and selling them off the books.
Brandon Wayne Parker, 41, of Horse Cave, received the sentence in U.S. District Court. He pleaded guilty earlier to four counts of theft of firearms from a federal firearms licensee, two counts of possession of stolen firearms, two counts of entering false information on ATF forms and two counts of aggravated identity theft.
Court records indicate Parker stole about 335 firearms from Master Pawn in Horse Cave from November 2016 to Aug. 22, 2018.
After taking the various handguns and rifles from his employer, Parker sold them to at least 11 people who did not undergo the requisite background checks, conducting cash transactions and selling the guns at significant discounts before taking steps to conceal the true purchasers.
That involved providing false information on an ATF Form 4473, which is required to be filled to buy a firearm from a federally licensed firearms dealer.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Kentucky said Parker entered the identifications of legitimate purchasers on the ATF Form 4473 without their knowledge in order to fraudulently obtain the firearms.
“This was definitely a significant amount of firearms to be illegally taken and potentially put out into the streets,” said Senior Special Agent Dean Clark of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “Many of these (stolen firearms) were recovered at crime scenes across the country.”
Law enforcement became involved after Master Pawn owner Brian Meadows conducted a store inventory in 2018 and learned some firearms were missing, Clark said.
Parker reported in a separate inventory that all the firearms had been accounted for except three, but the inventory undertaken by Meadows revealed the scope of the losses.
Meadows also believed Parker was responsible for jewelry going missing from a safe at the business, and Parker was eventually prosecuted in Hart County on theft charges dealing with missing jewelry and ammunition.
Parker was placed on probation in the state case, but a federal grand jury returned a 32-count indictment last year against Parker charging him with stealing numerous firearms.
“I was robbed for approximately $480,000 in guns, ammunition, jewelry and cash,” Meadows said in court Wednesday at Parker’s sentencing hearing.
A portion of the stolen firearms were recovered over the course of the investigation by law enforcement.
Some of those were discovered at crime scenes, including a stolen rifle recovered in 2019 during an investigation by the Nashville Metro Police Gang Unit, a stolen firearm recovered in Metcalfe County by police investigating a drug complaint and handguns recovered by police who made arrests in Kansas and North Carolina in 2019.
“The sheer volume of the theft is staggering in this instance,” U.S. District Court Senior Judge Greg Stivers said at the hearing before imposing the 82-month sentence. “Unregistered guns frequently become currency in the drug world.”
In addition to the imprisonment, Parker was ordered to pay $99,588.40 in restitution.
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