On eve of sentencing, beliefs of Twin Cities man who discussed killing cops are under microscope

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.

Doty is scheduled to sentence Smith on Thursday in Minneapolis. On Wednesday, he took testimony from witnesses that included a senior FBI behavioral profiler during an evidentiary hearing requested by the government.

Smith, who’s been held at the Sherburne County jail since his arrest, appeared in an orange sweatsuit. Seated in the back of the courtroom behind him was a row of family and supporters who waved and blew kisses.

Winter cited recorded jail calls between August 2023 and October 2023 as evidence that Smith still poses a danger. During one call, he told his mother that if he had to serve 10 years in prison, “they have my word that I won’t leave this country. It’ll be settled right here.”

A month later, speaking to his grandmother: “give me seven years and I promise you, you’ll find out why I did what I did to go to the range that much and why I took that so seriously. Cause it’s the one skill that helps deal with little [expletives] like that.”

FBI Special Agent Erinn Tobin, the lead case agent investigating Smith, further testified Wednesday that she reviewed 300 of some 4,900 calls made from jail since his Dec. 2022 arrest. During one call back home to family, Tobin testified, Smith “said he just wanted sentencing to be over so he could ‘focus on the warpath.’”