Federal prosecutors are urging a judge this week to elevate the sentence of a young Twin Cities man caught buying illegal machine gun conversion devices from an FBI informant, arguing that his extremist ideologies and interest in deadly armed conflicts with police warrant a decade in prison.
River William Smith, arrested in December 2022, pleaded guilty last year to buying the gun parts from an undercover FBI informant, bringing to a close an investigation that followed reports of concerning behavior at a shooting range. Smith last year made a straight plea to one charge of illegally possessing a machine gun. Now, his attorney is calling for an 18-month prison sentence, instead describing his client as a nonviolent video game enthusiast who took an FBI informant’s bait.
Smith was arrested peacefully after purchasing two machine gun conversion devices, or switches, and three inert hand grenades from one of two undercover informants helping to investigate him in 2022. He was wearing soft armor and possessed a loaded Glock handgun and agents recovered from his vehicle an assault-style rifle and nearly 1,000 rounds of ammunition.
Prosecutors and federal agents have raised alarms about statements from Smith, 21, of Savage, supporting Nazi paramilitary groups and mass killings of law enforcement, the LGBTQ community and Muslims. He often spoke of waging a deadly gun battle with law enforcement and dubbed as a “hero” the perpetrator of a deadly attack on a Colorado LGBTQ night club, according to court records.
“Ultimately, the defendant is a heavily armed, angry, socially isolated, and bullied marksman who harbors a grievance against law enforcement, racial and religious minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, and virtually anyone who does not fit in with his vision of society,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Winter wrote last week in a memo supporting his case for a 10-year elevated sentence. “The defendant presents a unique danger to the community and the sentence imposed in this case should reflect this reality.”
Smith first landed on law enforcement’s radar at age 17 in 2019, when he discharged an AK-47 in the home he shared with his grandparents in the south metro suburbs. His grandmother was injured when she cut her hand on a doorknob that had been rendered shrapnel by the shooting, according to court records and testimony. Police found several handguns, a rifle, shotgun, magazines, tactical equipment and ammunition during a search of the home. And law enforcement found searches on his electronic devices relating to Hitler and Nazis, bomb-making and videos of gay people being killed.
Smith’s attorney, Jordan Kushner, is calling Winter’s request for a 10-year sentence “outrageous.” Smith had never committed an act of violence or harmed anyone, Kushner said, and instead was more interested in recreating “action that he viewed on video games.” In court on Wednesday, Kushner said Smith never followed through on violent statements, and noted that it was not illegal to research any of the topics that appeared in his web search history.
“The government’s dislike for Mr. Smith’s ideologies (some of which he has renounced), his interests and fantasies, and the fact that he does not like the government, are inappropriate considerations for sentencing,” Kushner wrote in his own memo to Senior U.S. District Judge David Doty.
