Sister of Bryan Malinowski: 'Ten cars of cops go to his house, and not one of them was wearing a camera? I find that hard to believe.'
Copyright 2024 Maumelle Monitor[ed]
By Jay C. Grelen, Editor, Maumelle Monitor[ed]
Lee Ann Maciujec suspected that the ATF agents who raided her older brother’s home and shot him in the head weren’t wearing body cameras as Department of Justice policy requires.
She didn’t know one way or the other because the ATF hadn’t offered a single detail about the deadly assault on Bryan Malinowski’s house. The ATF left Mr. Malinowski’s parents, siblings, and friends in total darkness.
On Friday, however, a month to the day after the ATF shot Mr. Malinowski, Arkansas’s U.S. Senators Tom Cotton and John Boozman announced that the Department of Justice had contacted them the previous night. The information the ATF shared confirmed Mrs. Maciujec’s suspicions: None of the agents who raided the house, the ATF said, was wearing a body camera.
Now that the ATF has confirmed the news, however, Mrs. Maciujec doesn’t believe it could be true. She is incredulous that not one of the 10 agents on the ATF mission followed policy.
“Ten cars of cops go to his house, and not one of them was wearing a camera? I find that hard to believe,” Mrs. Maciujec said by telephone Friday evening.
“That was in defiance of the president of the United States,” she said, referring to President Biden’s mandate in 2022 that all federal agents must wear a body camera when executing a search warrant. “Ten cars of agents, and no one had a body camera? They couldn’t all be that dumb.”
The ATF’s revelation about the body-worn cameras raises more questions for Mrs. Maciujec:
Is the ATF lying in stating that the agents weren’t wearing cameras in violation of DOJ policy?
Did agents wear cameras and destroy them after they shot Mr. Malinowski in order to destroy evidence of what happened. Are they attempting to destroy evidence of wrongdoing?
Did they choose not to wear the cameras, thinking that the consequence for violating the policy would be far less severe than the consequence for executing an illegal raid and killing of Mr. Malinowski?
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When agents raided Mr. Malinowski’s house before dawn on March 19, he had been director of the Bill and Hillary National Air Port in Little Rock since 2019.
In an affidavit for a search warrant of Mr. Malinowski’s home, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives drew a portrait of a man who, the agency suggested, should have obtained a Federal Firearms License because of the number of guns he had bought and sold over the past several years. But no one alerted Mr. Malinowski, who by all accounts knew gun law and was meticulous about following rules.
“I knew the way Bryan was,” said Mrs. Maciujec, who is four years younger than her brother. “He knew what the laws were. I firmly do not believe that he thought he was doing anything wrong. He had so much to lose.”
Mr. Malinowski was a gun enthusiast who hunted with his father and other family members from a young age in Pennsylvania. At a YMCA summer camp where their mother was the nurse, Mr. Malinowski and his three siblings learned the fine points of marksmanship shooting a .22 caliber rifle at empty soda cans. They also learned the fine points of gun safety.
No one from the ATF has said how Mr. Malinowski came to the agency’s attention, but the ATF opened an investigation that included a tracking device on his car. Undercover agents bought three guns from Mr. Malinowski at gun shows. The sales were legal.
Neither Mr. Malinowski nor any of his family or friends knew the ATF was investigating him until 6 a.m. March 19, when agents in 10 unmarked cars drove to his house, where he and his wife were sleeping. In less than sixty-seconds, the agents had stormed his front porch, taped over the lens of his Ring doorbell camera, broken into his house, where they encountered him in the dark hallway.
Mr. Malinowski, who had no way to know the figures he saw were law enforcement agents, could reasonably have thought he was the victim of a home invasion. He fired his gun toward the feet of the figures in the hall. Agents returned fire, shooting him in the head. He died two days later.
“Bryan Malinowski was asleep but rose to the sound of the door crashing and located a firearm,” said Bud Cummins, the attorney who represents the family. “His wife believed the noise must have been intruders and believes her husband thought the same. He loaded a magazine into a pistol and emerged from the master bedroom into a hallway … He reached a corner in the hall and looked around it to see several unidentifiable figures already several steps inside his home.”
Neither Mr. Cummins nor members of Mr. Malinowski’s family have heard confirmation or seen evidence that agents knocked, sufficiently identified themselves as ATF agents, or waited a reasonable amount of time for someone to answer their knock.
The information the Malinowski family does have shows the ATF was reckless and incompetent, and that the raid was completely unnecessary, Mr. Cummins said.
Mrs. Maciujec learned late Friday that the Department of Justice had admitted that agents weren’t wearing body cameras. Officials with the DOJ shared that information with Arkansas’s U.S. senators Tom Cotton and John Boozman on Thursday night. They released the news on TwitterX and on Senator Cotton’s website about 3 p.m. Friday,
But no one informed Mr. Malinowski’s family in Pennsylvania. Mrs. Maciujec, Mr. Malinowski’s younger sister, learned the news when I contacted her at 5:10 p.m. Friday. She informed her mother, brother, and sister.
“I had to get past the utter shock of it all,” she said. “Everyone was upset. Anger, shock. My mom was crying. You go through all your emotions again.”
The ATF’s refusal to communicate raises even more questions about what happened and what the agency may be hiding. “The ATF’s quietness is so loud,” she said, “it’s deafening.”
The Malinowskis supported first responders in the family’s hometown of Easton, Pennsylvania. “I grew up with my mom, both brothers and my sister working with the local EMS,” Mrs. Maciujec said.
She trusted law enforcement officers to protect those in danger, and as required by the DOJ’s Affirmative Duty to Intervene policy, “to prevent or stop, as appropriate, any officer from engaging in excessive force or any other use of force that violates the Constitution, other federal laws, or Department policies on the reasonable use of force.”
Mrs. Maciujec believes that the policy implies the obligation that agents ensure that fellow agents are following DOJ policy for raids, such as wearing a body camera.
“I’ve always been pro-police,” she said. “They need the funds for more training. This whole (ATF) branch needs a lot of training.”
Although the agents reportedly didn’t have body cameras, they were outfitted in SWAT uniforms and well-equipped with weapons, ammunition, and other gear, Mrs. Maciujec said.
“They sure had the tape to cover up that Ring camera,” she said.
The medical examiner hasn’t released Mr. Malinowski’s body to the family. “His body is supposed to be cremated,” Mrs. Maciujec said. “Right now, he’s not laid to rest.”
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