A LEGO set has no serial number. We wrote a whole piece about that: the only way to tell one boxed set from another identical one is a mark somebody puts on it. Bryan Mansell’s family put marks on theirs. Every consigned set had a removable yellow sticker; every little minifigure had a white tag on a string. Those marks were the whole proof of whose property it was. And two of the store’s own former workers told a police detective, on the record, that after Bricks & Minifigs took the store over, the marks started coming off.
This is not the YouTuber’s claim, and it is not ours. It is in the police file, in the words of people who worked behind that counter, each interviewed on their own by the detective who reopened the case.
The first worker said that after Brandon Best took over the store, some of the yellow stickers were removed from the sets, and that it happened right after he took over, though she could not say exactly which sets lost their stickers. She counted about sixty stickered Star Wars boxes and about twenty tagged minifigures still in the store when the old owner left.
The second worker, interviewed separately, said the marked items were pulled off the sales floor, and that she was told they were part of a consignment deal and needed to be removed. About a hundred tagged minifigures, she said, ended up in the safe. Under the new owner she and another worker went unpaid for months.
Now say the plain thing, because the careful wording hides it. Stickers do not fall off boxes by themselves. Tagged inventory does not walk off a shelf and lock itself in a safe. Somebody took those marks off, and one of the two workers says she was told the items had to be removed. That is an order. Orders in a store come from whoever is running the store. And every account in the file puts it at the same moment: after Brandon Best took over. The only thing the file does not spell out is which worker’s hands touched which box. It is not in doubt that the marks came off, that someone ordered it, and that it happened once the new owners were in charge.
And here is the part that turns it from housekeeping into something else. The man in charge, Brandon Best, told the same detective he never saw any markings, stickers, or tags in the store at all. His own business partner, Joshua Johnson, says the opposite: the sets had dots on them and the minifigures had strings, and those were Mansell’s, and they set them aside. Johnson even put it in a text: anything with a sticker on it, they put in the back. So the owner says there were no identifying marks. His partner and both workers describe the marks, describe setting them aside, and describe the stickers coming off. One of those four accounts does not fit with the other three.
Why does a sticker matter this much? Because when the marks came off, there was already a police theft report open on this exact property. Bryan Mansell had reported the collection missing back in December 2024. The sticker was the only thing linking a box on the shelf to the family that owned it. Take the sticker off, and a five-hundred-dollar set that provably belonged to the Mansells becomes just one more anonymous box in a store full of Star Wars LEGO. Which is exactly what Johnson later told Bryan: a list does not prove where a set came from, and yours were not the only Star Wars sets in the store. The marks were the answer to that. The marks came off.
A lawyer who read the file, the commentator who goes by the BBQ Counselor and says he has practiced law for fifteen years, put it bluntly: if the workers’ account is true, then Brandon Best was responsible for concealing and destroying the evidence of Bryan Mansell’s ownership. He said “if that’s true,” and so do we. There is a legal word for getting rid of evidence you are supposed to keep, spoliation, and it can let a court tell a jury to assume the missing evidence would have hurt the side that got rid of it. Whether this file meets that legal test is for a court to decide, and no court has been asked. What the file itself shows is simpler: the marks came off, on an order, after the takeover, while the police case was open.
To be fair, and it matters: there is an innocent version too. A new owner reorganizing a store he just took over moves things around; putting valuables in a safe is smart, not sinister; and peeling a yard-sale sticker off a box you plan to sell is ordinary retail on its own. No worker named the exact person who removed a specific sticker. A prosecutor looked at the whole file twice and called it a civil matter, and Brandon Best is entitled to have his account believed unless a court finds otherwise. Nobody has been charged with destroying anything. What the record does show, in the company’s own people’s words, is this: the family’s property was marked, the marks were the only thing identifying it, the marks were removed on an order after Bricks & Minifigs took the store, and the man who took it says he never saw the marks his own partner and staff describe. You can decide what that adds up to. A court, with the power to ask who told whom, could decide more.
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