The very first Bricks & Minifigs store in Oregon is in a small town called Canby. In 2017, a family bought it. Three people, one family: David Thornton, who ran the store; Leah Brown, who was his wife then; and Christina Cooper, Leah’s mother, David’s mother-in-law. Cooper was 65, she was not in good health, and according to the lawsuit she later filed, she put more than $120,000 of her life savings, basically everything she had, into buying and financing that store. This is the story of what the company did with that family. Both halves of it. Because it used the mother for her money, and, if you believe him, it used the son-in-law for something stranger: his name.
Here is what the court records say happened.
Start with a piece of paperwork almost nobody has heard of. Every company has to tell the state the name of one person, at one address, who receives its legal mail. If you want to sue a company, that person, the registered agent, is the door you knock on. It is the company’s official front door for lawsuits. For years, BAM’s front door in Oregon was where you would expect: its lawyer’s office in Salem.
Then, in 2018, the company changed hands, and in May 2019 the new owners filed their first annual report with the State of Oregon. That one form did two things. It put the new owners’ names at the top of the company, Ammon McNeff as president and Matthew McNeff as secretary. And it changed the company’s front door. The new registered agent was not a lawyer. The form says, in capital letters, DAVID THORNTON, at the address of the Canby store. The franchisee. The son-in-law, behind the counter of the family’s shop. The state form has one sentence built into it for this exact situation, a promise that says the new agent has consented to the appointment. Matthew McNeff signed the filing electronically, right above the form’s own warning that making false statements is against the law. David’s signature is not on it. David’s signature is not on any of the filings that kept him listed as the company’s agent for the next four years. Those were signed by Matthew McNeff, twice more, and once by a company office manager.
David says nobody ever asked him. He says he found out this summer, seven years later, when a researcher showed him the 2019 form. His reaction, in messages this site has reviewed: “I assure you I have no idea how or why my name is on it.” And: “I NEVER consented to that appointment and NEVER acted as their agent!” His own best guess at what happened is almost worse than the accusation. He thinks somebody asked him casually, hey David, if any mail shows up for corporate, can you forward it to us, the same small favor he used to do for the old owner, and that when he said yes, they wrote him down with the state as their agent. Think about what that means if it is true. Saying yes to forwarding somebody’s stray mail is not saying yes to being the legal front door of a corporation for four years. The state’s files contain the company’s promise that he consented. They contain nothing with his name signed to it. Whether a real consent form exists is a question only BAM’s own file cabinets can answer.
Now watch what the company did with that arrangement when the family stopped being useful.
By 2022 the family was fighting among themselves, and the franchise contract was up for renewal. Cooper’s lawsuit says the company used that moment: that it falsely accused the store of breaking the rules, that it went around them and talked to their landlord in a way aimed at killing their lease, and that it pressured her to hand over her ownership for nothing. Those are her allegations. The company denies wrongdoing, and no judge ever ruled on who was right. Keep that in mind the whole way through, because it matters, and you will see in a moment why no judge ever will. And through that entire fight, on the state’s books, the company’s official address for receiving lawsuits was still the counter of the store it was fighting with.
On September 1, 2023, a law firm working for BAM sent the store a letter. This site has that letter. It ended the franchise effective immediately. It said BAM had the right to buy the store’s assets, and it laid out the math it would use: old assets counted at ten cents on the dollar, and anything with the Bricks & Minifigs logo on it counted at zero. Zero. Understand how upside down that is. The whole idea of this business is that old LEGO gets more valuable if somebody keeps it safe. The company’s exit math says the opposite: everything rots on a schedule, and the branded stuff, the very thing the sign over the door advertises, is worth nothing. It gave the family until six o’clock the next evening to hand over a complete inventory list. And it said that if BAM bought the assets, the deal would include a promise never to sue BAM for anything. You only demand that promise from somebody who has something to sue you about. One more detail: on the day that letter went out, BAM’s own Oregon corporation was actually in dissolved status with the state, because it had missed its own paperwork that summer.
Five days later, on September 6, BAM fixed its paperwork problem. The same filing that fixed it did one more thing: it removed David Thornton as the company’s registered agent and hired a professional agent service instead. Why does that matter? Because of what happened six days after that. On September 12, BAM sued the family. All three of them, personally. The grandmother, the daughter, and the son-in-law. And a company cannot sue a man who is still listed as the company’s own front door for lawsuits; it had to remove him first. So whatever the company did or did not tell David in 2019, look at the calendar in September 2023: it terminated his family’s franchise on the 1st, erased him as its agent on the 6th, and sued him on the 12th. When it needed him for an address, it knew where he was. When it needed him as a defendant, it knew who he was. He says the only part nobody ever told him was the four years in between. Within a month, his lawyer quit the case, and David was standing in a courtroom representing himself against the company whose official front door he had unknowingly been. On the front of its lawsuit, BAM wrote that its claims were not subject to arbitration, meaning it wanted to be in a real courtroom.
Then, at the end of October 2023, while its own lawsuit was still sitting in front of a judge, BAM took possession of everything in the store. Cooper’s complaint says the company refused to give her an inventory of what it took, refused to say what it was worth, refused to say where it went, and refused to pay for it. When a judge finally ruled on whether BAM should get the court order it had asked for, the answer was no. By then it did not matter. The store was gone.
What happened to it? BAM’s own audited financial statements answer that. On February 2, 2024, the company sold the Canby store for $150,000 and recorded a profit of $56,171 on the sale. Five days after that sale, Cooper filed her lawsuit, still asking, among other things, where her inventory was. It had already been sold.
Her lawsuit asked for $1.45 million, and it included something this site has not reported against BAM before or since: a claim under Oregon’s elder-abuse law. That is the law Oregon wrote to protect older and vulnerable people from having their money and property taken. It is serious enough that the law triples the damages, and serious enough that every complaint like it must be sent to the state Attorney General. Hers was. Twice. She asked for a jury, and on the front page of her complaint, in capital letters, her lawyers wrote NOT SUBJECT TO ARBITRATION.
BAM’s answer to that lawsuit was not an answer. Its first move, after she warned the court BAM was late responding, was a motion to send the whole case into private arbitration. And this part you do not have to take anyone’s word for, because this site got the court’s own audio of the hearing, all 29 minutes, and published it with this update. You can hear it yourself. You can hear BAM’s lawyer, ten minutes in, admit he cannot remember whether Cooper even signed a personal guaranty, and say he doubts it will matter. You can hear the judge ask the question everything hangs on: how do you force arbitration on a woman who never signed the franchise agreement? And you can hear BAM’s lawyer find the answer: the guaranty she signed in May 2017, the standard form every store owner has to sign, sitting at page 84 of the contract he filed. The document he could not remember at minute ten was his whole case by minute twenty-seven. Her lawyer’s last words for her were that she has the right to stand up in court and ask for her rights to be protected. The judge’s answer, word for word: “she’ll be heard. She’ll just be heard in arbitration, right?” Then he granted the motion. The same signature that put her life savings on the line is the signature that took away her jury. So the company that told the court its own claims against the family belonged in open court sent her claims against it into a private room. And that is where the story ends, because arbitration is secret. No award, no ruling, no outcome has ever appeared on the public record. Whatever happened to the only elder-abuse claim ever pleaded against this company, it happened behind a closed door.
Step back and look at the whole thing at once. One family gave this company both of the things it ran on in Oregon. The mother supplied the money, and the company held her signature on a guaranty. The son-in-law supplied, without knowing it if you believe him, the company’s own legal identity, his name and his address standing in for BAM itself on the state’s books for four years. Every signature the family gave got used against them. The mother’s signature took away her jury. And the one signature the state’s file is missing, the one the company’s own form promises exists, David’s consent to any of it, is the one nobody has ever had to produce.
One more thing, and it cuts the other way, which is exactly why this site is telling you. The family that bought the Canby store in 2024 appears to be a genuinely unrelated local family. This site checked the paperwork the same way it checked Keizer and Eugene, where the buyers turned out to be the company’s own people, and at Canby none of those fingerprints are there. The new owners are connected to nothing in this story. BAM even disclosed the Canby sale properly in its audited books, with the price and the profit. Remember that, because it proves the company knows how to do this the right way. It documented the honest sale. The sales this site keeps writing about are the ones it did not.
Christina Cooper’s $1.45 million lawsuit never appeared in the litigation section of the disclosure paperwork BAM is required to hand to people thinking about buying a franchise. Not in 2024, not in 2025, not in 2026. Each edition says there is nothing to disclose. She was the litigation.
Here is that hearing, all of it, from the court’s own recording system. The quotes above start around minute 10, minute 13, and minute 24; the ruling is at 28:59.
To be fair to BAM: it had its own list of complaints about the store, including unpaid bills and a lost lease, no judge ever found it did anything wrong, asking for arbitration is legal, and the arbitration may even have gone its way, or hers. Nobody outside that room knows. That is the point of the room. And on the registered agent: naming your local franchisee as your agent is legal and, by itself, ordinary; Oregon’s online filing system does not collect the new agent’s signature, so no filing of this kind would show one; a consent document might sit in the company’s own files; no lawsuit is known to have been lost in the mail on David’s watch; and David’s account is one man’s memory of something seven years old, told by a man with his own grudges in this story. The paperwork is real either way. What it means rests on a consent nobody has produced.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam