CONFIRMEDthe truck rentals are on U-Haul’s own website; the store closures are from a newspaper and the stores’ own listings; the company filings are from state registries and BAM’s own documents
This is the plain-language version of the full update, written to be read out loud. The full page has every number and every source.
This site has tracked three U-Haul trucks in this story so far. All three ran in Oregon, around the store BAM seized in Keizer, and all three were rented by Brandon Best, the man who ended up with that store. Now there are two more receipts. And these two are different.
They ran in California and Kentucky, two thousand miles apart. And they were not rented by a franchisee at all. They were rented by a BAM headquarters officer named Adam Brimhall, the man whose job is handling what happens when a Bricks & Minifigs store shuts down. Each truck showed up at the door of a store that had just closed.
Start with Kentucky, because every piece of it is public and dated. On a Wednesday in late March, the Louisville newspaper reported that the local Bricks & Minifigs had closed. Customers found the windows papered over. Their store credit, their layaways, their booked birthday parties, all went dark.
The very next afternoon, a 15-foot U-Haul went out from a lot three miles down the same road, booked that same day, with furniture pads and a dolly, the gear you rent to move shelving and fixtures, not a household. It came back Saturday. The bill was about a hundred and forty dollars.
Two weeks later, a new company was filed with the state of Kentucky to run a replacement store: a BAM corporate company, with its office at BAM headquarters in Utah. The signature on the filing is Adam Brimhall. The same name as on the truck.
Then BAM told the town what would happen to the money customers had already paid the closed store: their credit would be honored at the new corporate location. Not refunded. Honored. The money people paid the franchisee becomes foot traffic for the company store that replaced it.
The other receipt is stranger. It is for the biggest truck U-Haul builds, a 26-footer, the size they rate for moving a four-bedroom house. It picked up not at a store but at a storage unit near the closed Santa Clarita store, and it drove one way, about a thousand miles north, to another storage unit in Washington State. The bill was about thirty-seven hundred dollars. Nobody pays that to ship an empty truck.
Here is the part worth sitting with. That store closed, and its own listings say permanently closed. But BAM’s official franchise paperwork, published six weeks after the truck left, still lists the Santa Clarita store as up and running. Ask the paperwork, and the store is fine. Ask U-Haul, and it already left for Washington. And unlike Louisville, nothing replaced it. No new company was filed. No reopening was announced. The store just left in a truck.
None of this is a theory about hidden hands, because the hands sign their names. BAM’s own financial statements describe a family of company subsidiaries, one per taken-over store, all named the same way: BAMF Salem, BAMF Canby, BAMF Orem, and so on. A franchisee leaves, a BAMF company takes the store, and then, in the auditor’s own words, the store gets “sold to an outside party.” The “outside party” who bought the seized Keizer store was Brandon Best, the man from the first three trucks.
And on the newest corporate filings, in state after state, the same few names appear again and again as the people who set up the replacement companies. One of them is Adam Brimhall. He signs the company that takes the store, and his name is on the truck that shows up when it closes.
One detail is printed right on the orders: both of the new trucks were booked the same day they drove. So was the truck on the night Keizer was seized. These are not moves planned weeks ahead on a calendar. They happen when they have to.
Honesty about the limit: the rental records fix the truck, the route, the day, the equipment, and the renter. They do not show what was inside. Nothing here proves a single item of store inventory was loaded. What the receipts prove is the pattern around the closures, and who keeps renting the trucks. The receipts themselves are live on U-Haul’s own website, readable by anyone.
This is a plain-language retelling. Every receipt number, every date, and every source is in the full update. Nothing here is a finding of a court, and nothing here claims to know what the trucks carried.
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