Series of thefts leaves Kingston fly shop owners reeling

KINGSTON, Idaho – When Dustin Stetson opened the River Fly Shop on the North Fork Coeur d’Alene River in 2015, the 34-year-old guide realized a childhood dream.

A mile north of the Kingston exit off Interstate 90, Stetson, along with his girlfriend and business partner Katie Hoyt, got busy selling flies, rods and miscellaneous gear to local anglers.

Those first few months were a labor of love, though.

“I was as broke as I’d ever been,” Stetson recalled of the shop’s first season. “I quit my job and put everything I had into the shop.”

And just when business was picking up steam this past summer, the couple said, the shop faced a major setback.

In the late evening of July 16, according to Hoyt, someone shot out the shop’s back window with a BB gun, opened the door and pried open the register, taking $1,000.

Hoyt and Stetson say they know who committed the crime and have evidence to prove it. They say it wasn’t the first time the individual – who they identified as an 18-year-old neighbor – has stolen from their shop.

However, the Shoshone County Prosecutor’s Office said it doesn’t have enough evidence in the case, and informed the owners in late October that it wouldn’t pursue charges.

Supporting their claim, the couple say they are in possession of a recorded telephone conversation between the neighbor and his landlord, Brandon Speckman. In the conversation – which was shared with The Spokesman-Review – the neighbor appears to admit to stealing from the shop, saying he “made a really, really big mistake.”

“I was high and wasn’t thinking at all,” says an individual, identified by Hoyt and Stetson as the neighbor, on the recording. “It’s no excuse.”

“You go over to the shop and peel ’em?” Speckman presses. “And the worst part is that you blamed it on one of my friends.”

“I didn’t blame it on one of your friends at all,” the neighbor replies.

Speckman gave the recording to Stetson and Hoyt, who turned it over to authorities. Prosecutors declined to pursue charges, to the couple’s disappointment.

The shop owners say the theft was not an isolated incident. Several weeks prior, according to Hoyt, the 18-year-old neighbor stole a hat and sunglasses from the shop in the middle of the day.

The neighbor wore the hat out of the store, Hoyt said, and when she confronted him, he allegedly told her “Oh, I hoped you weren’t going to notice.”

Hoyt said she also saw him trying on a pair of high-end glasses that ended up missing. When he came back three days later wearing the missing sunglasses, she said, he initially said he bought them in Spokane before admitting he’d stolen them.

Stetson had taken the young man on previous fishing trips because, he said, he wanted to be a positive influence, so he was initially reluctant to call the authorities.

“Dustin didn’t want to call the police on him; he wanted to give him a chance to work off what he took,” Hoyt said. The neighbor originally said he would do the work, Hoyt said, then excused himself, saying he had found another job. That turned out to be a lie as well, she said.

“That’s when we called the police the first time,” she said. After that incident, the neighbor was trespassed, but again, no charges were filed.

When the neighbor realized the police had been called, Hoyt said, he began acting out toward the couple, flipping them off when passing by.

Then came the break-in and burglary, on the evening of July 16, after one of the busiest days since the shop opened.

“A thousand dollars doesn’t seem like that much, but for a little shop that sells $4 flies, it is,” Hoyt said. “When we called to report the burglary, they sent a (Sheriff’s deputy) who hadn’t even been trained by the academy yet. The whole thing was just very unprofessional.”

Reached by social media Saturday, the neighbor denied the allegations. He declined to comment further.

When asked if the voice recording was enough to establish probable cause, Caryn McInerney, a prosecutor with the Shoshone County Prosecutor’s Office, said it wouldn’t go into the details of the investigation and that “theft happens all the time in the Silver Valley.”

“There was a lack of sufficient evidence to proceed,” the prosecutor’s office said. “There was no burden of proof without a reasonable doubt, so we declined to file charges.”

Stetson and Hoyt said there was a time they considered closing the shop down because they were so upset by the theft, the lack of action by authorities and still having to live by the alleged culprit.

But in the end, they decided that they weren’t going to let the burglary take away their dream, they said. They’ll be back for business in the late spring.

“We’re not going to let some person like that bring us down,” Stetson said. “But, as a small business owner, something needs to be done about what happened.”