Bryan Malinowski
Chapter One: ATF Bullets Before Sunrise
From The Arkansas Monitor: The stories in the series that starts today are based on an interview with Bryan Malinowski’s wife, Maer, the first time her story has been published. The Arkansas Monitor also interviewed Mr. Malinowski’s sister, friends, and co-workers, as well as attorneys, and law-enforcement officers.
Copyright 2024, The Arkansas Monitor
By Jay C. Grelen, The Arkansas Monitor
There is a cruel symmetry to Bryan and Maer Malinowski’s life, a poignant similarity between the first moment each was aware of the other and the last, the details of their final moments running a tight parallel to their first meeting.
Bryan didn’t pick the moment he arrived in Maer’s orbit, although he would have if he could have. In 1997, through no action of his own, Bryan showed up at an emergency room in El Paso, Texas, bloody and beat up, victim of the drunken, uninsured driver of a Ford F-150 pickup who blindsided him, T-boning his white Nissan 240SX, which had arrived by transit from Pennsylvania only hours before.
Maer (pronounced Mare, short for Mary), a pediatric nurse, was covering a shift in the hospital’s understaffed emergency room. Bryan’s injuries appeared to be so severe that an ER nurse telephoned his mother in Pennsylvania with an update that the impact of the crash may have crushed his spine.
Maer sponged him off and gurneyed him down the hall for X-rays, which showed the preliminary prognosis had been wrong. His spine was fine. So the nurses patched him up. The gangly six-foot-two 26-year-old, his sports car smashed beyond repair, walked out of the hospital with only scratches, bruises, and a dusting of powdered windshield glass in his hair.
Their brief encounter seemed to be only an insignificant intersection of two lives. Their first encounter, as life turned out, wouldn’t be their last.
Maer holds a clear memory of the night nearly 30 years ago they officially met in the west Texas town of El Paso. The nightclub Maer, her sister, and friends chose happened to be the club Bryan and his best friend, Jay, had landed. Maer became aware of Bryan because Jay was flirting with her sister.
“So,” she says, “Bryan and I talked.”
Nothing about Bryan reminded Maer that he was the fellow from the emergency room. As far as she and he knew, they were strangers meeting for the first time.
“At the end of the night, he gave me his business card, and I said:
“ ‘Oh, you work at the airport?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘As what? A luggage boy?’
“And he laughed. He goes, ‘No, no. I’m not a luggage boy. But I do work at the airport.’ ”
Before they parted, Bryan made a dinner date with Maer for the next night. “Later on, after we were dating,” Maer says, “we started talking about a car accident that he had. And I'm like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait. Was that like a year ago?’ That's when we started connecting the dots. We figured out that a year ago, I was the one who cleaned him up. He fell in love with me. I found it was destiny.”
Nearly 30 years later, before sunrise on March 19, as they slept in their west Little Rock home, 10 cars filled with ATF agents and other law enforcement officers, sped through the darkness into their neighborhood. They were swarming to search the home of the executive director of the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, whom they suspected should have purchased a $200 Federal Firearms License to sell the guns he had sold.
They piled out of their vehicles, dressed for a riot, and stormed up the front sidewalk. The Malinowski’s Ring camera was recording their rapid approach. The lead agent reached back, and the agent behind him put something in the lead’s hand in a move that appeared choreographed, practiced.
The lead agent moved his right hand toward the doorbell and covered the lens. The screen went black, the audio stopped. That’s the last anyone outside the ATF knows about what transpired in the Malinowski’s home just after 6 a.m. None of the agents, not a single one, wore a body camera, in defiance of the DOJ and ATF policy that President Biden rolled out in 2022.
The Malinowskis awakened to the crash of ATF agents kicking in their front door. Bryan shook off the slumber, found his pistol, slammed in a clip, and stepped softly onto the carpet in the dark hall. He moved toward the foyer. Maer was close on his heels, ignoring Bryan’s quiet entreaty to stay back.
The DOJ body camera policy is crystal clear: Every agent must wear one when executing a warrant. This violation has raised question with even the most staunch supporters of law enforcement.
Attorney Tom Mars, who was director of Arkansas State Police under Governor Mike Huckabee, is one of those. Mr. Mars told Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist John Brummett that his opinion turned 180 degrees after the ATF confirmed that agents didn’t use body-worn cameras.
With the Ring camera disabled, and ATF’s failure to record the raid, no one outside ATF knows whether agents knocked, announced themselves, or waited a reasonable interim for the Malinowskis to respond before kicking in the door.
The lack of video/audio evidence is only one of several questions the killing of Mr. Malinowski has raised.
The gun-sale rule the ATF believed Mr. Malinowski might have violated is anything but clear. The penalty for breaking the rule, if somehow someone can twist out an interpretation that proves to be a violation and win a conviction, is possible forfeiture of weapons, a fine, and up to six months in prison. Mr. Malinowski had not been charged or arrested for any crime. He died at the hands of ATF agents.
The ATF had secured a search warrant for Mr. Malinowski’s home, car, and electronics. Not an arrest warrant. Why did agents execute the warrant at the Malinowski’s home at 6 a.m., waking the couple from a dead sleep, instead of waiting until he was at his desk at Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport?
Six-and-a-half weeks after ATF agents mortally wounded Mr. Malinowski in a dark hall in his own home, the agency isn’t saying why agents did what they did. The Arkansas State Police investigated the shooting element of the case and has submitted its report to the Pulaski County prosecuting attorney. ASP has made clear that it isn’t investigating process or policies related to the raid.
But some facts are known: ATF believed that Mr. Malinowski likely was selling guns illegally. The ATF did not in any way alert Mr. Malinowski of its concerns or that the agency was investigating him. He was oblivious that agents had stuck an electronic tracker on his car and that they were following him around Central Arkansas.
And this is known: At 6 a.m. on March 19, Bryan and Maer Malinowski were asleep in the comfort and what they believed was the constitutionally protected security of their home. In his final seconds of consciousness, in the time it took gun-toting ATF agents to kick open his front door and squeeze off several rounds, Mr. Malinowski understood clearly and finally he was fatally mistaken.
Next Chapter: Eyeglasses and Airplanes
The Arkansas Monitor comforts the afflicted and afflicts the afflicters. If you’re an afflicter, buckle up and batten down. We’re here. If you’re afflicted, breathe easy. We’re here. We also write stories that have nothing to do with affliction.
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Excellent journalism.