- Stephen Daniel Cord was cleared of all criminal charges against him after a lengthy legal battle.
- Cord faced accusations of stealing and selling guns from his employer.
- Cord's attorney says inadequate bookkeeping by Cord's employer led to the false allegations.
TREMONTON — Stephen Daniel Cord left his home in Tremonton to drive to work on July 18, 2023, just as he had been doing for years.
But just a mile down the road he was pulled over. He was placed in handcuffs and driven back to his house, where there were now law enforcers from the Utah Attorney General's Office, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Box Elder County Sheriff's Office and several other agencies swarming in and around the home.
"I'm thinking there has to be some kind of misunderstanding. I have no idea what this could be about," Cord said.
He soon found out he was being accused of stealing guns from his employer, Doug's Shoot'n Sports, 4926 S. Redwood Road, and illegally selling them. Cord was charged in 3rd District Court with engaging in a pattern of unlawful activity and five counts of retail theft, all second-degree felonies.
Matthew Robert Provard, of South Jordan, who also worked at Doug's Shoot'n Sports, was also charged with engaging in a pattern of unlawful activity and retail theft. Less than a month later, Provard pleaded guilty to retail theft, which was reduced to a class A misdemeanor, and the other felony charge was dropped.
Cord was also offered a plea deal several times. But he refused to take it.
"I will not plead out to something I didn't do in the first place," he said adamantly. "If that's a hill I need to die on, then so be it."
Just a week before he was scheduled to go to trial, the Utah Attorney General's Office recommended that all charges be dismissed, and on Aug. 7 the judge agreed.
Now, six months later, Cord, 43, is eligible to seek expungement of his case from the Utah State Courts database. He is also ready to publicly speak for the first time about what he and his family have been through over the past 2 1/2 years. For Cord, he feels like he was treated as "guilty until proven innocent."
Gun hobby
For the vast majority of Cord's adult life, he has enjoyed collecting and shooting guns.
"For me, it was just a hobby. I really liked shooting. It was fun. It was something we did as a family," he said. "Some (guns) are just fun to collect because of historical value."
Cord served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007. When he returned to Utah, he took a concealed firearms class to become certified. But according to Cord, "The class was terrible. There was no clear understanding of the law (or) self-defense."
Because of that, Cord decided to put his military experience and love of teaching to use and spent "countless hours" and "tens of thousands of dollars" both as a student and a firearms instructor.
"I felt if I could make the community safer through more education (and help others see) the fun side of shooting and how it's something you can do with the family …it just became a hobby. I've been a lifelong guitar player and guitars and guns are kind of my thing. I don't snowboard or ski in Utah. It's easy to dump just as much money in that, I think," said Cord, who also sings and plays guitar for a couple of nationally touring bands.
Cord says he became a respected firearms instructor and has worked with more than 500 students. He also got a job at Doug's Shoot'n Sports, where he says he became one of their top salesmen.
"I believed in that store. That's why I went to work there," he said.
All of that changed, however, on the morning of July 18, 2023.
"Blindsided is an understatement," Cord recalled.
'There has to be a misunderstanding'
After Cord was handcuffed and taken back to his home, he arrived to find his wife being pressed by police officers as their two young children looked on. The officers were asking questions such as what groups her husband belonged to, what groups he was selling guns to, and whether he was a sovereign citizen.
"The entire time this was occurring, I thought there has to be a huge misunderstanding with the store," Cord said. "This doesn't add up. This doesn't make any sense. I've never stolen anything. I said, 'Every firearm I have from that store has a 4473,' which is the background form."
Nevertheless, Cord says agents tore his house apart looking for tens of thousands of dollars worth of guns, ammunition and gun parts such as scopes and silencers. The items listed in their search warrant included everything Cord had purchased from his store for the past three years. The return to the search warrant lists 68 items that were seized from Cord's home.
Every gun in his home that he has owned since he was 18 was seized, Cord said, in addition to his wife's guns and ammunition and gun accessories. Cord was booked into the Box Elder County Jail and transferred the next day to the Salt Lake County Jail, where he remained for about two weeks before a judge agreed to release him.
'I'm going all the way with this'
Cord was soon put in touch with defense attorney Brent Huff. He told Huff early on that he would not accept any plea deals.
"Because I didn't steal anything," Cord said. "I'm going all the way with this. I'm taking this to a trial. I've never stolen anything. I'm not going to plead to something I didn't do in the first place. So that's just absolutely not going to happen."
Huff says it's rare for a client to take their fight all the way to trial. The stress of not knowing whether a jury will agree with your side while also knowing that a plea deal is on the table can weigh heavily on a defendant.
"It is terrifying to see 'State of Utah vs. Stephen Daniel Cord.' I don't have words for what that feels like," Cord admitted. "I can't even express the feeling that it feels to be under the thumb of a system that big."
But as the case began to unfold and the state shared its evidence with Cord, it soon became apparent that the real problem was an inadequate system of bookkeeping at the store, Huff said.
"There was really a lack of documentation. The problem was that once there was suspicion that theft may have occurred, then the store went back and looked at its records, which were woefully inadequate. They had three different systems, none of which even talked to each other," he said. "The more you looked at (the documents), the more you could see there were just a lot of errors and false assumptions."
The store was using an analog cash register, a computer system and even a bulletin board of index cards pinned to it that were hand-written and showed the store credit each employee had earned, Huff said. The result was a system being used to track inventory and sales that was way off, he said.
Huff believes that within just a couple of days of Cord being charged, the attorney general's office realized any allegation of his client being involved in a conspiracy "just wasn't true," and by December 2023, the charge of engaging in a pattern of unlawful activity was dropped.
But the felony charges of retail theft remained. Huff said the charges were the equivalent of shoplifting from Walmart. But because of the value of some of the items believed to have been stolen, they were felony crimes.
As the case progressed, however, more holes were found. For example, Cord and Huff say one of the gun parts Cord was accused of stealing was actually found still in the store.
While both men said they are thankful to the attorney general's office for doing the right thing and dismissing the case, "I do think any proper investigation would have shown that Dan was wrongfully accused," Huff said.
In August, during a brief court hearing, the charges against Cord were formally dismissed. But Cord says it was all anticlimactic.
"It felt like we had been running a marathon that everyone just forfeited and folded up at the finish line and we won by default," he said.
In a matter of minutes, the case against Cord was over. But over the past two years, Cord says he lost tens of thousands of dollars of income from not being able to be a firearms instructor and from venues cancelling his band's shows because of the allegations. He even tried getting a job as a substitute teacher and a food delivery driver to earn some money, but was fired after just a day or two because of the charges hanging over him.
Cord is grateful that all the items seized from his home were returned. Some of those items, he said, have sentimental value, such as the matching guns he bought with his brother when they returned from their tour in Iraq.
"To some people, that's just a gun. To me, he and I buying matching pistols, it means a lot more to me than just a piece of metal," he said.
Cord gives huge credit to Huff for helping him navigate the legal process for 2 1/2 years and fighting for him. He hopes now that his story is out, he won't continue to be "blackballed" by some businesses and firearms instructors. The people who know him personally knew all along the allegations weren't true, he said.
To them, the most shocking revelation to come out of it all, said Cord, who goes by his middle name Dan, was that his first name is Stephen.
