Last February, snowboarder Loren Richardson carved around a pine-tree-shrouded corner near the Town of Brighton and found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. On the other end was an angry man who shoved him and yelled at him about trespassing — until Richardson unstrapped from his board and walked calmly but quickly to the end of the road.
Richardson didn’t think much in Utah could shock him more than that encounter. Then, he said, he told a representative from the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s office that he believed the plea deal it planned to offer his aggressor, Brighton resident Keith Stebbings, amounted to a slap on the wrist.
“He laughed and said, ‘What, do you want him to go to jail?’” Richardson, 42, wrote in a text to The Salt Lake Tribune. He could not recall the name of the man he talked to.
“I was shocked, and so that was our last conversation.”
Richardson actually did not want Stebbings to go to jail. Instead, he said, he wanted the 67-year-old man to get help, even if it was court ordered. And Richardson wanted help as well, to deal with the lingering trauma of the encounter.
He said he got neither. Instead, Richardson lost something: his faith in Utah’s court system.
“After not getting the help I was asking for from the DA, and being laughed at, I gave up and let your Utah justice system do whatever they do,” Richardson, who resides in Clovis, Calif., wrote. “I’ll be back and more aware of the way things are in Utah.”
The sentence
The afternoon he crossed Stebbings’ path, Richardson was returning to a vacation rental near Brighton Loop Road where he and some buddies had spent most of the week. He said he did not see any “No trespassing” signs at the border of the U.S. Forest Service property he was on or Stebbings’ driveway. Officers from the Unified Police Department also did not find any in that area, according to a police report.
Richardson, who frequently posts snowboarding videos on his Instagram account, captured the entire encounter with a GoPro camera he was carrying. That included footage of Stebbings shoving him, asking if he was an Ikon Pass user and telling Richardson “Do it again and there will be holes in you.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Old Prospect Road, where a man threatened a snowboarder with a shotgun for allegedly entering his property near Brighton Ski Resort, on Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024.
In June, Stebbings entered a plea in abeyance to aggravated assault, a third-degree felony, in 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City. Under the terms of the deal, handed down by Judge Kara Pettit, Stebbings will serve up to 36 months on probation and must surrender his Winchester rifle until Dec. 25, 2025. Additionally, he was ordered to take a gun safety course and write an essay on “The Use of Deadly Force in Utah.” If he abides by the terms of his probation, the charge will be expunged from his record.
A second, misdemeanor charge against Stebbings of threatening violence was dismissed with prejudice.
Sim Gill, the county D.A., said in an email to The Tribune that he proposed Stebbings’ sentence. One factor he considered was that Stebbings had no prior convictions. He also “considered the strength of the case and how provable it was,” he wrote. “Some elements are more provable than others.”
The initial police report appeared to dispute whether Stebbings had pointed the Winchester rifle directly at Richardson. Richardson responded to that by posting on his Instagram account a slow-motion capture of the scene, which appears to show the barrel of the gun pointed at him. The charging documents assert that the rifle was pointed at Richardson.
Gill also said his office takes input from victims when it comes to crafting sentences and the terms of plea deals.
A skier told The Tribune that Stebbings also assaulted him on Feb. 24, bruising his hip with the butt of the rifle as he unknowingly crossed the driveway while returning from a backcountry clinic near Guardsman Pass. The skier asked not to be identified, did not press charges and did not testify in court.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Old Prospect Road, where a man threatened a snowboarder with a shotgun for allegedly entering his property near Brighton Ski Resort, on Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024.
Meanwhile, Richardson said he tried several times to speak to someone in Gill’s office about the charges. Not until the day of the trial did someone return his calls, he said.
“I wasn’t OK with it, with what they were going to do,” he said. “I think that he should have a little bit more probation and … maybe some psychiatric or anger management — more to do with what he actually did.”
While it is an unusual tool for the court to employ, Gill said the essay was meant to impress upon Stebbings where he crossed the line.
“The defendant in this case did not think he had done anything wrong,” Gill wrote, “and we wanted him to go through the exercise of explaining what he had done that was wrong.”
Richardson seemed frustrated by the proposed terms, Gill said, but ultimately he agreed to them and later thanked prosecutors for their efforts. Gill said no one ever laughed at Richardson.
In his one-page essay, dated June 24, Stebbings wrote that he appreciated the Utah Criminal Code using the term “exhibiting” rather than brandished in the section regarding threatening with a dangerous weapon.
He was unaware, he wrote, “that exhibiting an unloaded gun on my personal private property was unlawful when encountering an individual trespassing.”
The fallout
As for securing his own counseling, Richardson said that never happened, either.
He filled out all the paperwork he was sent by a victim’s advocate, he said, and was told therapy might take a few months to set up. A second letter — he could not remember what organization sent it — informed him that he qualified for reimbursement but would have to find a therapist and pay for the sessions up front.
Tallie Viteri is the interim director of the Utah Office for Victims of Crime, which assists with victim reparations and services for crimes within the state. She admitted that getting help to victims can be a drawn out and complicated process for a variety of reasons. But she encouraged those feeling frustrated to reach out to her office.
For Richardson, the delays felt like one more slap in the face. Instead of seeking professional counseling, he said he worked out his issues by talking to his friends.
“As traumatic as it was for me, I can get over it,” Richardson said of the encounter. “But someone who does that needs help.”
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