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MANTI — Collecting the antlers shed by deer and elk in the winter is becoming a big business. One man was arrested for allegedly stealing $20,000 worth of antler sheds from a small family business in Sanpete County.
Brennon Golding was arrested Tuesday, in part due to a Snapchat photo he allegedly posted earlier that day.
For the past 10 years, Dave Jorgensen has been collecting deer and elk antlers.
“It pays bills,” he said. “It keeps my wife home, so she can be a stay-at-home mom, and it is a job for her and myself, so we depend on the income from this.”
And this is a busy time of year for Jorgensen, as he buys deer and elk antler sheds people find in the mountains.
“A lot of guys will spend weeks watching the bulls, waiting for them to drop,” he said. “It is a short window to find the antlers, and a lot of guys are in the hills doing it.”
Jorgensen then sells the antlers in bulk to exporters, where there’s a big market for it as a medicine in Asia.
“Most of it probably goes to the port in Hong Kong and it is distributed from there,” he said.
But as Jorgensen began to fill an order Tuesday morning, he found that the majority of the inventory in his backyard shop — more than 1,500 pounds — was gone. He estimated the loss at $20,000.
“I was shocked, and I was scared, wondering what we were going to do,” said Jorgensen's wife, Kristen.
“He took mainly the high-grade antler,” Dave Jorgensen said. “He knew what he was stealing.”
The Jorgensens decided to get the word out about the theft on Facebook.
“As soon as it hit social media, it was overwhelming the support we had, and the texts and phone calls from random people trying to help us,” Dave Jorgensen said.
And within a few hours, the alleged thief was arrested by police.
“He put a post on Snapchat that morning with a quote that said, ‘Going to pay for my college this fall’ today with a picture of our antlers in the back of his truck," Dave Jorgensen said.
Police started getting tips and pulled Golding over Tuesday as he was driving north of Mt. Pleasant, using markings on the antlers to connect them to Jorgensen’s shop.
“It kind of confirmed my lack of trust in humanity, but then the phone calls started coming in. … It was humbling to see the support we had from people we didn’t even know,” Dave Jorgensen said.
