Jury convicts Armonk man, son of 'gun nut,' in case that was part of ghost gun crackdown

An Armonk man arrested with his parents when investigators seized a cache of guns and ammunition in their home was convicted Wednesday after the jury rejected the claim that all the weapons were exclusively his father's.

Brandon Brois, who turned 27 during the trial, was found guilty of second- , third- and fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon and faces between 7 and 15 years in prison when he is sentenced in December.

Jurors found Brois guilty in connection to a pair of handguns in two of the bedrooms, a rifle in the family room and assault rifles, shotguns and other weapons in a basement safe. They acquitted him on charges related to guns found in other locked cabinets around the house.

Brois, his father Theodore and mother Helene were arrested in January 2022 after their sprawling Tallwoods Road home was raided by North Castle and Westchester County police, the FBI and the Westchester District Attorney's Office as part of 'Operation Casper,' a multi-jurisdictional effort to track down ghost guns in the Lower Hudson Valley. Dozens of assault rifles, shotguns and handguns were seized, along with thousands of rounds of ammunition and other gun paraphernalia.

The raid resulted from records obtained by federal authorities from the gun-parts supplier Brownells, which showed Theodore Brois had purchased numerous parts from the company between May 2019 and August 2021, according to court documents.

Brandon Brois had gone away to college but was living in the Armonk home for nine months before the raid.

Brandon Brois' father testified guns were exclusively his

Theodore Brois, who pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing, testified on his son’s behalf for several days. He detailed how the extensive gun and ammunition collection that he had amassed over decades was exclusively his. He particularly tried to explain away two handguns, one a Walther PPK .380 caliber semi-automatic pistol found in a nightstand in the master bedroom that contained his son's DNA on the trigger and another that was found on a shelf in Brandon's bedroom.

He said he himself had put the gun on the shelf in his son’s room when he found the room flooded one day. The elder Brois, who said he always walked around the home armed, claimed he had the handgun in the pocket of his robe and when the robe got wet from the flooding he took the gun out and put it on the shelf.

Brois and his wife had separated and while she mostly stayed in New Jersey and Florida, he had moved into an upstairs room in the Armonk home. He testified that he sometimes missed her and would lie in her bed. In one such instance he brought a handgun with him and put it in the nightstand. As with the gun he left on his son’s shelf, he said he simply forgot it when he left the room.

Defense lawyer Stanley Cohen insisted in closing arguments Monday that there was simply no evidence showing Brandon Brois had purchased, used or had control of any of the weapons.

He argued there was no proof of when the son’s DNA got on the handgun, that it could have been when he was a child and his father was demonstrating to him how to shoot it, or even could have gotten there based on secondary or tertiary transfer.

Assistant District Attorney James Bavero called the DNA the “nail in the coffin” proving Brandon Brois’ possession of the weapons and attacked the father’s explanation for how the handguns got into the nightstand and his son’s shelf. He said the presence of ammunition in Brandon Brois’ room that exactly matched rifles and shotguns locked in other areas of the house showed the son had access to multiple guns there.

Brois now held while awaiting sentencing

Brandon Brois, who had a previous weapon conviction, had been free on bail since last year. But state Supreme Court Justice Larry Schwartz granted Bavero's request that Brois be held at the county jail to await sentencing because he was a flight risk now that he faces mandatory prison time.

Cohen expressed disappointment with the verdict and said it would be appealed.

"I took the position from the outset that the guns were all Theodore Brois' and under his exclusive dominion and control," Cohen said. "This is a young kid who's living in a house where his father is a gun nut and he gets hit with all these gun charges."

Helene Brois pleaded guilty earlier this year to fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon and was sentenced to three years of probation.

Theodore Brois is expected to be sentenced next week to 7 ½ years in prison. He pleaded guilty in May to first- and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Jury convicts Armonk man, son of 'gun nut,' in case that was part of ghost gun crackdown