Rubicon Sues Derek Brown’s Utah Attorney General’s Office Again, After It Loses Evidence Potentially Material to the $1 Billion Case Against Its Own Former Officials

The new state suit says the misconduct never stopped. After a judge questioned the warrants and the office dropped its own case, it kept pushing for new criminal charges, published the company founder’s Social Security number, lost seized records and drives, even the archived backups, and failed to answer the owners’ formal claim after sixty days of silence

Bountiful, UTAH, Sept. 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The misconduct did not end when the misguided criminal case collapsed. Today, Rubicon Contracting, Rudy Larsen, Jena Larsen and others sued the office now led by Attorney General Derek Brown. The complaint alleges the AGO lost evidence potentially relevant to Rubicon’s pending $1 billion civil-rights case against the office’s former officials: a sealed box of original business records, four USB drives, and, by the office’s own records, even the forensic-image backups. Utah law requires the office to answer for a loss like this. It has said nothing for more than sixty days.

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The suit, filed in Utah’s Second Judicial District Court, relies on a Utah Code provision that makes the office answerable when seized property in its custody is negligently lost. It names a single defendant: the Office of the Utah Attorney General itself — not any individual official.

The promise didn’t hold.

Derek Brown took office in January 2025 promising a "gold standard" office with "the highest standards of transparency and ethics in government," telling reporters on January 31, 2025, "I am accountable to the people of Utah." That same day, legislative auditors found the office’s prosecution policies went unused, that "minimal documentation" existed for key decisions, and that in an earlier case, thousands of "lost" documents had turned up "by accident" in a "junk drawer." The pattern didn’t break. On January 8, 2026, AGO employee Brad Blackham gave written assurance the evidence had been preserved. On January 30, 2026, the office filed Rudy Larsen’s unredacted Social Security number in a public record; within 48 hours, it surfaced on the dark web. A May evidence handoff failed. A Notice of Claim served July 13, 2026 went unanswered.

"Utah’s top law-enforcement office lost the evidence it seized, called it ‘a clerical error,’ and went silent," said Cameron Drommond, VP at Scandia. "Rudy’s Social Security number made it to the dark web in forty-eight hours; our claim hasn’t drawn a response in sixty days. If any business in this state operated the way this office does, the Attorney General would raid it — we know, because our business is held to a higher standard than the AGO, and they raided ours anyway. Maybe our records will turn up where the auditors say the last ‘lost’ documents did: in the junk drawer."

How it started.

On November 20, 2023, agents of the AGO’s SECURE Strike Force — under then-Attorney General Sean Reyes — executed a highly publicized raid on Rubicon, then valued at more than $300 million according to the complaint, with Fox13 News reporters riding along in the agency’s own vehicles. Agents seized original business records and electronic media as part of a purported human-trafficking investigation. The case did not survive scrutiny. On August 1, 2024, a Second District judge found the owners had made a substantial showing that the warrant affidavits contained false statements and misleading omissions, writing that it is “possible, perhaps even probable” that Special Agent Michael Adam Jeter’s affidavits are “replete with false and misleading statements.” On February 24, 2025, the AGO dismissed its own case. On April 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice answered in writing that its investigation — "premised on allegations of visa fraud and forced labor" — was closed, and that both the DOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s Office had "declined prosecution." No plaintiff faces any pending charge or investigation, state or federal.

How the evidence disappeared.

The complaint traces the loss to the AGO’s own evidence room. While charges were still pending, Jeter testified that he checked out all of the seized evidence, kept records in his personal office for more than two months, and cut the seals on the evidence boxes — later agreeing under oath that there was a "hole in the chain of custody," which he called "a clerical error." When federal agents arrived with their own warrant on December 30, 2024, the AGO’s sworn return showed three forensic-image discs were already "not in the evidence vault." On May 21, 2026, when a court ordered the property transferred back, the AGO could not produce the sealed box or the four USB drives at all. Because the records were original, the complaint alleges, what was lost cannot be reprinted, re-imaged, or replaced.

“Twenty years of scandal. Two legislative audits, ten years apart, finding the same broken record-keeping. A brand-new state law just to force this office to answer its own auditors,” said Scott Bennion, Vice President, Scandia Company. “Derek Brown said he’d fix it all, top to bottom. Twenty months later, his office can’t produce one sealed box it was court-ordered to preserve — and won’t answer for it. The Legislature has done its part documenting the problem. We’re asking a court to do the rest.”

Why the loss matters.

The Larsens and the three companies are suing four officials of the Reyes-era AGO in a related federal case: Larsen, et al. v. Reyes, et al., No. 2:25-cv-00963 (D. Utah), filed in October 2025 and seeking no less than $1 billion. The defendants are Sean D. Reyes, attorney general from 2013 to January 2025, whom legislative auditors later found "resisted turning over full information"; Leo Lucey, chief of the AGO’s Criminal Investigations Division, who personally invited Fox13 News to ride along on the raid; Michael Adam Jeter, the SECURE case agent whose sworn affidavits were the subject of the August 2024 ruling; and Kaytlin Virginia Beckett, the Assistant Attorney General who prosecuted the case and, by her own sworn account, reviewed the warrant affidavits. The AGO seized the now-lost property as part of the evidence in its misguided prosecution, the complaint alleges — and that evidence is was lost while in the custody of the very agency being sued.

The suit seeks return of the property if it still exists, damages under Utah’s negligent-loss-of-seized-property statute, Utah Code § 77-11b-204(2), and a court-supervised accounting of what happened to it. Plaintiffs are represented by Keith Woodwell and Jake Taylor of Clyde Snow & Sessions, and David Tufts of Dentons Durham Jones & Pinegar.

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About Rubicon

Rubicon is a Utah-based commercial facility maintenance company providing landscaping, snow and ice management, facility care, and tenant improvement services. Founded in 2011, Rubicon brings multiple property services under one provider, using technology to give customers greater visibility into work and project status. The company has served more than 1,200 clients, including businesses and organizations across a range of industries.

Press Inquiries

Alex Koritz
alex [at] koritzpr.com
https://gorubicon.com/
801 N 500 W #102, Bountiful, UT 84010