2 days Ago By Maxine Bernstein
A man who used a sledgehammer to bust through the wall of a Southeast Portland pawn shop and helped steal 47 guns was sentenced Tuesday to nearly five years in prison. Kory Dean Boyd, 39, was one of five people involved in the gun heist at Pawn Central off Southeast Stark Street but the only one identified and prosecuted. Assistant U.
S. Attorney Lewis S. Burkhart told a judge that the January 2022 pawn shop break-in was “straight out of Hollywood.
” “This isn’t the run-of-the-mill burglary,” Burkhart said. “The burglary involved a level of sophistication and brazenness that is rarely seen.” Burkhart asked the judge to impose a five year and three month prison term, while Boyd’s defense lawyer urged a lesser term of two years and six months.
Boyd and his accomplices waited until the middle of the night between Jan. 29 and early Jan. 30, 2022, and then carefully knocked out a hole in the back wall of the shop, stole several guns and then concealed the hole with several large trash containers, which completely hid the break-in.
The owners had received notice of several alarm activations and one responded to them but when she checked the doors and windows, she found nothing amiss. Everything appeared to be secure and so she left, without discovering the hole, according to court records. But Boyd and the other burglars “brazenly returned” to load up dozens of firearms, including pistols, revolvers, rifles and shotguns, from metal and wooden racks in the exposed room of the shop.
It wasn’t until the morning of Jan. 31, 2022, that shop owners discovered two large holes in the concrete block west wall of the building and dozens of their customers’ guns missing. Only seven of the 47 guns have been recovered.
Assistant Federal Public Defender Kari Sagi argued that her client is the only one who has been held accountable for the burglary that involved a handful of people. “While he’s culpable,” she said, “this is bigger than just him.” U.
S. District Judge Michael H. Simon sentenced Boyd to four years and nine months in prison.
“I’m more concerned about the harm to the rest of the community with all those guns,” unaccounted for, the judge said. Surveillance footage showed two vehicles - a dark gray Ford Explorer and blue Jeep Liberty SUV - and five people near the holes in the building during the late evening and early morning hours. The video surveillance also revealed two people carrying a suspected sledgehammer and several others hauling rifle cases out to waiting vehicles, according to a federal affidavit.
Boyd was already under investigation by the FBI and Clackamas County Interagency Task Force, which had previously set up a camera on Boyd’s residence on Southeast 187th Avenue in an unrelated case, according to the court documents. Investigators linked Boyd to the pawn shop burglary and theft of firearms through the FBI’s video surveillance images at his home from the separate investigaton, according to Burkhart. The images captured men outside the home carrying gun cases from a dark gray Ford Explorer the night of the pawn shop break-in.
Federal agents obtained a warrant to search Boyd’s home and found seven stolen guns from the pawn shop - three pistols and four rifles - and one other gun in his home, as well as a large handheld sledgehammer, according to court records. Boyd told investigators he learned of the so-called “lick,” - street slang for theft - from a man he knew as “Cracker Jack,” according to Burkhart. The plan was to sell the stolen guns, Boyd said.
Asked why only seven of the stolen firearms were found in his home, Boyd said “Cracker Jack” had already sold the rest, according to the prosecutor. Boyd pleaded guilty to theft of a firearm in May. As the gun burglary case was pending, Boyd was found to have violated his pretrial release “an astonishing” nine times with 25 urinalysis tests that tested positive for drugs, Burkhart said.
Boyd has struggled with sobriety but completed about six months in residential treatment before relapsing, his lawyer said. He has faced numerous challenges in his life that have triggered his substance abuse - from unemployment to eviction and homelessness, she said. Boyd was previously convicted in 2016 of attacking a Black man at a bar in downtown Vancouver and was sentenced then to two years and 10 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
An admitted white supremacist at the time, Boyd started attacking the man when he refused to leave the bar. He threw a pint glass that narrowly missed the victim’s head while he repeatedly yelled “white power” and called the man by a racist slur. The victim suffered minor physical injuries, according to prosecutors.
Boyd has since disavowed white supremacist views, according to Burkhart. Boyd told the judge that when he completes his prison term, he wants to work as a millwright somewhere “far away from Portland.” Noticeably absent from the sentencing hearing were the owners of Pawn Central.
The prosecutor said the owners were not supportive of the plea agreement with Boyd. Pawn Central’s co-owners Sarah and Tawnya Pearson told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the break-in almost crippled their business, which opened during the pandemic in March 2020 “This really hit us hard,” said Tawnya Pearson. It was clearly premeditated, they said, because several of the suspects were in the business a day earlier scoping it out and were caught on surveillance.
They said the guns were secured on metal shelves in a back room. In the days before the break-in, the owners had installed motion sensors in the room. Tawnya Pearson raced to the business after alarms were activated in the middle of the night, checked all the doors and found nothing out of the ordinary.
She thought maybe the sensors were faulty or that a mouse had set them off. As she drove away, she spotted the outside garbage and recycling bins had been moved about five feet from their normal spot, and thought, “that’s weird,” but headed home. The Pearson sisters said they were disappointed Boyd’s accomplices were never caught and aren’t satisfied with the prison time Boyd received.
Sarah Pearson also said she was discouraged that it took more than two years before Boyd, who was arrested in 2022, to be sentenced. “Five years is not long enough,” Tawnya Pearson said, noting Boyd didn’t appear to help investigators locate the other guns to get them off the street or identify his accomplices. -- Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice.
Reach her at 503-221-8212, [email protected], follow her on X @maxoregonian , or on LinkedIn . Our journalism needs your support.
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