It's been just over a year since an incident in a Little Rock neighborhood left an agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives injured and a prominent city employee dead.
Bryan Malinowski was director of Little Rock’s Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport when he was killed in a shootout while ATF agents executed a search warrant on his home.
A lawsuit has been filed by Malinowski’s widow against the ATF for their actions in the incident, which happened in March of 2024. Back then, the ATF released a lengthy affidavit explaining why they were at Malinowski's house to conduct a search warrant. He was a gun collector, which is legal and not disputed, but he was alleged to have sold guns without a license, including to people who later used them to commit crimes.
The ATF conducted an investigation where agents followed his car and posed as criminals to buy guns from him. They said in an affidavit that they decided to search his house to look for possible “information networks.”
The warrant said they could raid his house between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Agents went right at 6 am. Little Rock Public Radio obtained the investigation files through the Freedom of Information Act, and learned the whole incident played out in under a few minutes.
Both sides agree on this: Malinowski shot at an ATF agent, and agents responded by shooting Malinowski, who later died at a hospital. The questions come down to the handling of the case generally.
Upon cross-referencing the files and recordings from the incident itself to events described in the lawsuit against the ATF, there are two big areas of disagreement.
One: Did the ATF agents need to be at Malinowski’s house at 6 a.m. at all? ATF agents decided not to execute the warrant the week before, when Malinowski was out of town. What they were doing was legal, and a judge signed off on it. But critics say the whole raid was unnecessarily militant, and that Malinowski didn't have a violent criminal history.
The second question: did agents give Malinowski enough time to come to the door? There is no way to know if Malinowski knew the people in his house were police. He may have thought it was intruders. He may have been confused since he had woken up seconds before.
Dashcam video reveals bright blue police lights came on in the cul-de-sac of Malinowski's neighborhood seconds before the raid. We can hear an agent announce their presence, commanding whoever's inside to open the door. It's almost impossible in the video to see when the first entry happened, or much else.
In their recordings, ATF agents refer to the agents executing the warrant as “the stack.” There are differing accounts of how many people were in the stack and what order they were in, but we know the leader was Agent Matthew Sprinkles. The second person in line was an agent named Tyler Cowart, who had a lockpick with him.
Sprinkles was tasked with knocking on the door. He also put a piece of tape on the camera the Malinowski family had on their front porch before he knocked.
“I can't tell you how many times I knocked," Sprinkles said. “But I knocked and announced multiple times, three, four five times. My hand still hurts from knocking on the window.”
The lawsuit disputes how much time was given to allow Malinowski to come to the door, estimating he had 28 seconds before agents forced entry. The suit reached this number by matching the time between Sprinkles putting the tape on the camera and when gunshots are first heard. In any event, the whole incident would have happened in about a minute. Malinowski would have had seconds to register the noise, wake up and answer the door, and the dash camera footage confirms that timeline.
In their internal investigation, agents in “the stack” all say some version of “we gave him enough time.”
Agent Shannon Hicks wasn't in “the stack" during the raid; she was behind Malinowski's house. After the investigation into the incident, she said had a memory of a light being on in the back of the house.
“The light was on,” she said. “I didn't see the light turn on, but to me it was indicative that someone was up in the house.”
Agent Hicks only remembered this two days after the incident. She says she left it out of her first interview the day after the incident, and wanted it on the record.
She also says later in the day of the raid, it looked like the blinds had been moved as if someone had looked out the back window. It seems like she is trying to argue that Malinowski or his wife knew police were at their house.
The number two in “the stack,” Cowart, was the one who was shot. Sprinkles fell and yelled “oh s–t.” He realized someone was shooting at him.
“I was scared out of my mind,” he said. “I've never been put in this type of situation. We thought this would be an easy search warrant.”
Cowart was shot in the foot, but was not critically injured. He said he had never killed someone in about twenty similar raids in his career.
The incident raises questions about gun rights and police procedures, and became a cause célèbre for some. Several Arkansas legislators, all Republicans, held a press conference a month after the raid to express their frustration.
“I get fearful when I see this type of pre-dawn raid simply to execute a search warrant to a valued member of our community, not some former gangster with a rap sheet that needs to have a no knock warrant issued,” said Sen. Mark Johnson, R-Little Rock.
At that press conference, someone in the audience mumbled “Ruby Ridge” in reference to a standoff in Idaho in 1992. A man named Randy Weaver didn't show up for court over a gun charge. The federal government killed him trying to exercise a warrant. It's a case often cited by Second Amendment advocates who worry about government overreach around guns. Critics' description of the Malinowski incident is similar.
A Congressional hearing was held on the Malinowski case where Rep. Jim Jordan, R-OH, tied it to larger criticism he has against the ATF. He believes they were discriminating against gun owners under the Biden administration by pulling too many gun licenses.
“A year after the zero tolerance policy went into effect, the ATF revoked over 90 licenses,” he said. “Last year that number jumped to 157.”
A big point of contention at the hearing is that the agents were not wearing body cameras, which would have violated an executive order at the time. The head of the ATF would later tell Congress they were phasing the policy in.
Representing the Malinowski family in the lawsuit is Bud Cummins. He was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas during the George W. Bush administration. Speaking to Little Rock Public Radio last year, he didn't blame Cowart for returning fire once he was in the house, but he said a different procedure could have prevented the death altogether.
The suit says they gave Malinowski 28 seconds to come to the door. It says “The Constitution Requires Officers to Knock and Announce and Wait a Reasonable Time Before Forcing Entry Where No Exigency Exists.” The suit takes pains to emphasize that Malinowski was not dangerous and the ATF did not indicate in their investigation that he was dangerous.
The suit alleges unlawful use of force, wrongful death and violations of the Fourth Amendment. Cummins is asking for compensatory and punitive damages on behalf of Malinowski's widow, Maer Malinowski.
An ATF spokesperson told Little Rock Public Radio the agency does not comment on pending litigation.
