Bella Vista Teen On Sex Offender Registry Charged After Police Trace Gun Trades To Pea Ridge Boy’s Death

BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Elijah Rain Jurgens, a 16-year-old Bella Vista boy who registered as a sex offender after pleading guilty this summer, has been charged as an adult with furnishing a deadly weapon to a minor after police say he traded a stolen handgun to a Pea Ridge boy who later died.

His father, Richard Jurgens, 62, has also been charged, accused of throwing one of the teen’s guns into Lake Loch Lomond to keep his son out of further trouble.

Prosecutors filed the charges Wednesday in Benton County Circuit Court: furnishing a deadly weapon to a minor, failure to comply with sex offender registration requirements and theft by receiving a firearm.

The case began Sept. 15, when Elijah Jurgens went to the Bella Vista Police Department for his sex offender registration and told the department’s registration coordinator he had deleted all of his social media accounts, according to a probable cause affidavit by Bella Vista Detective Michael Hubbard. He had a search waiver on file, so the coordinator checked his phone and found Discord and the dating app Hinge, both of which registered offenders must report, the affidavit said.

The phone also held photos and videos of the teen with handguns, AR-style rifles and a shotgun, taken between May 5 and Aug. 31, the day he pleaded guilty to two felony counts, the affidavit said.

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The gun in the Pea Ridge case

Two videos showed a Glock 17 with an extended tan magazine and a light with purple and green lasers, the affidavit said. Investigators believed it matched a Glock 17 reported stolen in Fayetteville on April 26 that Pea Ridge police now hold as evidence in the recent death of a juvenile in Pea Ridge, which the affidavit describes as accidental.

According to Pea Ridge Police Detective Todd Cornwell, the boy traded the Bella Vista teen a Glock 43 plus $200 for the Glock 17, the affidavit said. Investigators lined up the trade with the boy’s Snapchat posts: the Glock 43 appears in the boy’s Snapchat media on Aug. 1 and Aug. 4, then disappears as the Glock 17 shows up, while the Glock 17 stops appearing on the Bella Vista teen’s phone after Aug. 4. The boy’s parents told Cornwell they did not know he had guns and did not condone it, the affidavit said.

A conversation recovered from the teen’s phone after it had been deleted shows a girl confronting him on Aug. 27. She wrote that she had been “bawling all fucking week” since learning the boy died “because of someone I know giving him a fucking gun n him not knowing it was loaded,” and added, “you still going around n trading guns after someone died,” the affidavit said. He answered, “ok lmao.”

Interviewed at Bentonville West High School on Oct. 8, the girl told investigators she had heard through social media that the boy took his own life and had gotten the gun from the Bella Vista teen, who told her the two had traded guns, the affidavit said. The affidavit does not reconcile that account with its own description of the death as accidental.

Other guns, a lake search and threats

When questioned in his father’s presence, the teen said many of the guns belonged to friends and that he had taken photos with them “to impress women,” the affidavit said. He said the Glock 43 was his, that he got it from a child of about 13 through Snapchat, and that his father threw it into Lake Loch Lomond while he was in jail. His father confirmed throwing it in the lake after finding it while cleaning, the affidavit said. The Benton County Dive Team searched the lake Sept. 17 and Sept. 22 without finding it.

A forensic search of the phone also turned up a video of a SIG Sauer P320, dated July 24, the day after it was reported stolen in Rogers, and messages offering to trade guns, an iPhone or THC vape pens, including an Aug. 12 conversation about buying an AR-style rifle with a forced-reset trigger for $2,000, the affidavit said.

The girl and a second teenage girl told investigators he had pointed a handgun at the first girl’s face while drunk, telling her it was unloaded, and later said in a car that he would have shot her if the revolver he was holding had bullets in it, according to the affidavit. The first girl said he threatened to come to her home and shoot her after they broke up in May.

Father charged with tampering

Richard Lee Jurgens, 62, was arrested Tuesday on a warrant charging him with tampering with physical evidence, according to a separate affidavit by Hubbard and Benton County jail records.

According to that affidavit, the teen told Hubbard the small Glock 43 was his, that he had gotten it from a “little kid about 13” he met through Snapchat and that “technically” he had taken it from the boy rather than buying it. The teen said his father found the gun while cleaning his room while he was in jail and threw it into the lake along with a bong and marijuana.

When Hubbard then spoke with Richard Jurgens, “the story changed,” the detective wrote. The father said he had found the gun in a container on a shelf in the garage, not in his son’s bedroom. He admitted getting rid of it and said it was “a stupid thing to do,” the affidavit said, and showed the detective on Google Maps that he had thrown it off the dam near a bench.

On Sept. 17, a Bella Vista police sergeant drove the father to the top of the dam to show the dive team where he had stood. Handed a rock about the size of a fist and asked to throw it where he thought the gun went in, the father tossed it a couple of feet from the shoreline, the affidavit said. On a second walk along the dam he went a few feet farther, pointed to a steel pipe sticking out of the water and said he was positive he had thrown the gun by the time he passed it. The dive team never found the pistol.

Messages recovered from the teen’s phone show the father discussing the value of a gun and the sights installed on it during an Aug. 30 conversation about trading a scooter, and earlier warning his son that his public social media posts could draw the attention of police and prosecutors, the affidavit said. Hubbard wrote that nothing in the messages showed the father supplying guns, but that they showed he knew his son was acquiring and distributing firearms as a juvenile.

Because the teen had no lawful reason to have a handgun and was facing a felony plea agreement at the time, the father “knowingly disposed of the Glock 43 to keep [his son] from getting further criminal charges,” Hubbard wrote.

Richard Jurgens was released from the Benton County jail Thursday morning on his written promise to appear. A jail court information sheet notes no prior criminal history. He is due in Benton County Circuit Court on Nov. 30. Tampering with physical evidence is punishable by up to six years in prison.

His earlier case

The teen was 14 when police investigated him in April 2025. He was charged as an adult and pleaded guilty Aug. 31 to two counts of second-degree sexual assault involving two juvenile girls, court records show. Circuit Judge Robin Green accepted a plea agreement for 10 years of supervised probation and 120 days in the county jail, with credit for 236 days already served, and ordered him to register as a sex offender and take sex offender treatment classes.

Furnishing a deadly weapon to a minor carries up to 20 years in prison. Elijah Jurgens was arrested Tuesday on a warrant issued Monday, court records show. A probable cause order in the court file releases him on his own recognizance and orders him to appear Nov. 30 in the same Benton County Circuit Court division as his father. Online records did not list a lawyer for him in the new case as of Thursday night.