Jonathan Beard, son of a disgraced sheriff’s captain, will likely follow his father on the path to prison after he was kicked out of a court-supervised treatment program for drug offenders.

Nine separate criminal cases against Beard are working their way through Deschutes County Circuit Court. The 25-year-old faces 25 criminal counts, including delivery of heroin and methamphetamine, first-degree burglary and identity theft.

Beard is the son of Scott Beard, a former Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office captain convicted in 2017 of embezzling more than $200,000 from the agency.

The younger Beard had no arrests prior to this year.

Because the charges he faces are all property crimes or drug possession, Beard was let into Deschutes County Family Drug Court, a court-supervised treatment program that keeps people charged with crimes out of prison if they’re successful.

“We believe his crimes were motivated by drug use, and that’s why he was allowed into family drug court for the limited time he was there,” said Deputy District Attorney Steve Gunnels.

Beard violated multiple drug court rules while he was in the program, Gunnels said.

The final violation came in September, when he was named as a suspect in the burglary of a roommate’s mother.

He and two others are accused of stealing $40,000, five rifles and other items from a Redmond woman’s house.

On September 25, one of Beard’s roommates, Mark Elijah Peck, told police Beard and Sierra Shannon Campbell brought home rifles, a safe and a large of amount of cash. He told Deschutes County Sheriff’s Sgt. Deke Demars he knew the property belonged to Campbell’s mother.

At about 8 p.m. on Sept. 26, Beard was pulled over by a Bend Police officer. He told the officer he’d recently paid $1,500 cash for the vehicle, a dark 1980 Volkswagen, as well as $1,000 in new stereo equipment. Additionally, he was found to have $2,000 in cash inside the vehicle.

Beard told police he lived on a fixed income from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the money had come from the recent sale of another car he owned — a Volkswagen Jetta.

Beard reportedly gave police permission to search his residence in Redmond. When Deschutes County Sheriff’s Det. James McLaughlin arrived, he saw the Jetta that Beard said he’d sold.

Beard said a man had paid cash for the car but had only picked up the keys and paperwork, not the vehicle itself. He couldn’t remember the buyer’s name.

“I told Beard that I did not believe he was paid $6,000 for a vehicle from an unknown man who neglected to pick the vehicle up,” McLaughlin wrote in a search warrant affidavit.

Beard, Peck and Campbell are each facing five criminal charges for the alleged burglary, including first-degree burglary and first-degree theft.

Beard is currently in Deschutes County jail on a no-bail hold.

He faces penalties in the nine cases in which he’s named as a defendant. Some of the drug charges could be dropped in deals with prosecutors, but the cases with separate victims will all likely have separate resolutions, Gunnels said.

Scott Beard, 48, is currently being housed in a privately run federal prison in Taft, California.

He’s scheduled to be released in January 2021.

— Reporter: 541-383-0325, gandrews@bendbulletin.com