Brandon Moore was one of several gun owners contacted by The Trace who didn’t know that a gun stolen from his home had been used in a crime—one that left two families devastated. thetrace.org/features/stole…
In June 2013, Brandon and his family moved into a new home just 30 minutes outside Denver. His wife stashed his loaded .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol in a closet.
When Moore went to look for his pistol later, it was gone. He suspected the movers took it. He filed a report. The case went nowhere.
Two years later, Bobby Brown, a 34-year-old husband and father of four, went to his car and fell into an argument with a drunken neighbor.
His oldest daughter, 13-year-old Shanice, couldn’t sleep because of the noise. When she went to tell her dad to keep it down, gunfire erupted. Her father was struck, and she watched him crumple to the pavement. Bobby was pronounced dead later that night.
Across a courtyard, Aysia Quinn, a 17-year-old high school basketball player, saw the bullets sparking off the concrete. She turned to run but her legs gave out. She had been shot. One bullet hit underneath her arm; the other in her lower spine.
Aysia was rushed into surgery. The next day, when she went to stand up, she realized she was paralyzed from the waist down. “I didn’t deserve this,” she said in an interview. “It ruined what I wanted to do.” 
The gunman, Jesse Oliver, had used the Smith & Wesson that had been stolen from Brandon Moore two years earlier.
When reporter @BrianFreskos told Brandon his gun was used to shoot two people, Brandon said: “Are you serious? That’s exactly why I reported it stolen, because I was afraid something like that was going to happen.”
Then he asked how he could get the gun back.
