How a Fatal Encounter Outside a Little Rock Home Led to Questions About Illegally Missing or Destroyed Police Records

The investigation began with three reported attempts on the life of an anti-corruption journalist. It has since produced 73 internal affairs files on one officer, 27 pursuit cases missing from his produced discipline history, a police admission that the required destruction records do not exist, and a public records lawsuit now pending in Pulaski County Circuit Court.

Dead racist LRPD Officer Todd "Creepy Todd" Payne

LITTLE ROCK. On the morning of April 21, 2014, a fired 18-year veteran Little Rock police officer named Joel Todd Payne died in the yard outside Ean Lee Bordeaux's home on South Bragg Street.

Bordeaux, an anti-corruption journalist who had spent years publishing criticism of the police department, says it was the third time Payne had tried to kill him. He was questioned that morning and released without charges.

What Bordeaux wanted afterward was not a prosecution. It was an answer to a narrower question: whether anyone inside law enforcement had known what Payne intended, and whether the records that would show it still existed.

Twelve years later, that question has become a lawsuit about records two agencies cannot find and cannot show were lawfully destroyed.

Along the way it produced 73 internal affairs files on a single officer, Ryan Bewley, son of the man who would rise to interim chief of the department. Of those, 27 were vehicle pursuits, and none of them appears on the discipline history the department produced for him. It produced a recorded admission from an LRPD lieutenant that the paperwork the department requires whenever records are destroyed does not exist. And it produced a criminal complaint that the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office logged as an information item and closed without doing the work its own detective said would be required.

Lighter Creepy Todd used to commit hate crime.

The suit, Bordeaux v. Higgins, No. 60CV-26-10583, was filed August 14 against Sheriff Eric Higgins and Pulaski County. A hearing set for August 20 was continued after the county produced records hours beforehand. The parties confer August 26.

Who Payne was

Bordeaux sold hot dogs in the River Market while writing about racketeering and police misconduct on his blog.

He says he had known Payne since about 2004, when the officer began hanging around his cart. By Bordeaux's account, Payne started passing him internal information about the department while simultaneously feeding information about the hot dog business to a small group of officers working to damage it.

Mask Creepy Todd was wearing committing his hate crime

Payne was fired for good cause from the department in 2010 after serving the LRPD for 18 years. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported at the time that he lost the job after using an illness as a reason to refuse to break up a bar fight.

Bordeaux kept writing about him afterward, and about the officer who had been Payne's rookie school partner and River Market colleague.

The first attempt: January 2014

In January 2014, someone shot up Bordeaux's house on South Bragg Street. In the account he gave VICE that August, five rounds struck roughly six inches above his head, two went through a downstairs neighbor's window, and one killed his dog, Dixie, in her kennel.

A bullet was recovered from Dixie's chest. Bordeaux says it was matched to a Glock .40-caliber handgun, serial number BVU083, later found on the passenger seat of Payne's green Chevrolet truck.

That is the evidentiary link between the January shooting and the man who died in April, and it is the single most important item of forensic work in the case. The ballistics report itself, with the case number, examiner and chain of custody, would anchor it. It has never been published.

Arkansas State Crime Laboratory records for LRPD Incident #2014-041402, filed under ASCL Case #2014-008324, log the Glock and 15 live .40-caliber rounds recovered from Payne's truck, together with five spent .40-caliber casings collected from the northwest yard of the house. Bordeaux says the casings and the ballistics work relate to the January shooting rather than to the April encounter.

Two fires in one morning

The second and third attempts came on the same morning, roughly 30 minutes apart, and the gap between them was the time Bordeaux spent waiting on police.

Two days before, at his girlfriend's insistence, he had installed a home surveillance system.

Early on April 21 he saw flames on the monitor. The hot dog cart was burning. He went down, put the fire out himself and called 911 at 4:22 a.m.

Then he waited. He called again at 4:45 a.m. More than half an hour passed with no officer on the scene.

Payne came back during that wait, to set the cart alight a second time.

Bordeaux says his dogs' alarm barking sent him back to the monitors, and he saw a masked figure crossing toward the cart with a container. He went down the stairs quietly, in a bathrobe, and challenged him. The man ran. Bordeaux caught him and took him to the ground.

The crime lab log records what the morning left behind. From Payne's truck: a two-gallon red gas can and an empty bottle of charcoal lighter fluid. From the yard: a partially burned blue tarp, twisted white paper and a green-handled multipurpose utility lighter.

The burned tarp is the first fire. The lighter fluid is the second.

Lt. Sidney Allen gave Arkansas Online the department's version: "The suspect fled on foot and was caught by Bordeaux within a short distance." Allen continued: "Details are limited, but while Bordeaux was engaged with the suspect, the suspect sustained injuries that later led to his death at a local hospital."

Associate Medical Examiner Dr. Daniel Dye told Detective Kevin Simpson that Payne had no skull fractures, that his injuries were consistent with being tackled and striking pavement, and that there was no evidence he had been kicked or stomped. Dye gave the cause of death as hypertensive heart disease with contributing blunt-force injury and ethanol intoxication. The manner of death was classified a homicide, a medical classification rather than a legal finding about culpability.

How long it took officers to reach a reported arson in progress, and what the dispatch record shows about the calls at 4:22 and 4:45, are questions the computer-aided dispatch log answers. It has never been produced.

'It's been times we haven't done the proper investigations'

Eric Higgins and Heath Helton

The man who now holds the records Bordeaux is suing for has already conceded part of the point.

In a recorded telephone call, Eric Higgins, who was an LRPD assistant chief during the relevant period and is now the Pulaski County sheriff and the named defendant in this case, told Bordeaux:

"You've had negative contact with law enforcement, and it's been times we haven't done the proper investigations. I mean, having former police trying to harm you and your family, killing your dogs and stuff. So it's..."

What the excerpt shows on its face is a senior law enforcement official acknowledging that proper investigations were not done, in a sentence whose own example is "former"— fired, actually police trying to harm Bordeaux's family and killing his dogs.

That is the April 2014 matter, described by the man now declining to release the file on how a later complaint about it was handled.

The murder of family dog Dixie and bedroom window shot-out.

'His day is coming'

Nine weeks before he died in Bordeaux's yard, Payne was writing about him to a man named John W. Batton.

The exchange runs from February 2 to February 13, 2014, on Facebook Messenger. Payne told Batton he had left the department and had "been doing security but looking to do something different." Then he raised Bordeaux unprompted.

Payne: "Nigger Harris (Bordeaux) was the victim of a drive-by shooting recently."

Batton: "Awesome!!! Where did it happen? To bad he lived."

Payne: "His dog was killed. 1510 Bragg St., LR"

Batton: "Go bad was he injured? Did the perp get away?"

Payne: "He refused to cooperate with the PD."

Payne had the address. He had the fact that the dog was killed. He had Bordeaux's posture toward the investigating officers. None of that was public.

The conversation continued.

Batton: "I've laid in bed and dreamed about shooting that POS."

Payne: "Me too."

Batton: "It's a shame try didn't get a head shot."

Payne: "I'm getting a copy of the PD report. Good jack off material."

Batton: "Send me a copy of it"

Payne: "OK"

Payne: "I shut down his illegal hot dog biz."

Batton: "What's he doing now?"

Payne: "Getting shot at. Getting rid of dead dogs. Hiding."

Six days later, Payne had it.

Feb. 8, 7:44 p.m., Payne: "Give me your email. I have that Nigger Harris shooting report."

Feb. 8, 11:06 p.m., Batton: "Jwbatton@yahoo.com"

Feb. 13, 8:12 p.m., Payne: "Did you get the nigger report?"

Feb. 13, 10:03 p.m., Batton: "Yep I got the report. I thought he got shot. Too bad."

Payne: "His day is coming."

Payne died in Bordeaux's yard on April 21, sixty-seven days later.

The report that left the building

Strip out the venom and a records question remains, and it is the one that runs through everything that follows.

On February 2, Payne said he was getting a copy of the police report on a shooting at a private citizen's home. By February 8 he had it. By February 13 he had emailed it to a third party who had just written that he wished the victim had been shot in the head.

Payne had been off the Little Rock police force since 2010. He had no case, no assignment and no lawful entitlement to an incident report in which the man he was discussing was the victim. He obtained one anyway, and he told Batton flatly why he had it: someone in the department sent it to him.

Payne said as much to Bordeaux directly. On March 1, 2014, he messaged him: "I'm reading your shooting report. Was the dog outside or inside when it was shot?" And: "Why were you untruthful with the police dept? They are laughing their asses off at you. That's why the report was sent to me."

No record has ever been produced identifying who pulled that report, who released it, or under what authority. Whether the department documented the release at all is the same question this case has been asking about pursuit files, VCAT worksheets and destruction logs for twelve years.

How the messages surfaced

Batton is not a neutral witness. He is the man who wrote "Awesome!!!" when told of the shooting and who said it was a shame the shooter missed a head shot.

After Payne died, Batton contacted Bordeaux and turned the exchange over. He wrote that the communications reflected sustained malice and led him to believe Payne had planned to kill him, and he offered to provide the complete messages to Bordeaux's attorney, swear an affidavit, deliver the material to the prosecuting attorney and testify.

No produced record shows that Batton was interviewed, that the complete communications were obtained rather than screenshots, that the affidavit was taken or that any of it reached prosecutors.

A records request, three months before

Weeks before the January shooting, or possibly days after it, the Little Rock Fraternal Order of Police asked the city for essentially everything it had on Bordeaux.

The request, dated January 21, 2014, and signed by Lodge #17 President Jarred McCauley, went to Stacey Witherell in LRPD human resources. It sought his business licenses and permits; any law enforcement, code enforcement or zoning action in which he was complainant, defendant or subject; all email between him and any city employee, full or part time; and documentation of every complaint made by or about him.

Which came first, the request or the shooting, is a question the incident report date settles, and it matters. What the city produced in response, who received it, and whether any of it reached Payne are questions the records could answer. No custodian has answered them.

Why the father mattered

Bordeaux says officers interfered with the hot dog business because of the blog, and that his complaints about it went nowhere.

Pulaski County Sheriff's Office interview notes describe his account of a conversation in which Eric Higgins, then an LRPD assistant chief and now the sheriff and the defendant in this lawsuit, asked Assistant Chief Wayne Bewley why officers kept giving Bordeaux problems. Bewley, in that account, answered that Bordeaux "has that blog."

Higgins has not testified to it. The same notes name possible witnesses to encounters between Bordeaux and Wayne Bewley, including state Rep. Denise Ennett, FBI Special agent Maria Hoskins and LRPD Lt. Tanya Washington.

The question was never whether Wayne Bewley had anything to do with Payne. It was whether a command official tolerated harassment of a journalist, interfered with complaints, or controlled the records that would show what the department knew.

That is what sent Bordeaux looking for records on the son.

2020: 'No releasable discipline records'

On November 16, 2020, Bordeaux asked LRPD whether Officers Ryan Bewley and C.J. Bewley were serving in the same division "in violation of nepotism policies," and requested personnel and discipline records for both.

Three days later, Sgt. Domikia Davis answered in writing: "Officer Ryan Bewley does not have any releasable discipline records. Officer CJ Bewley does not have any releasable discipline records."

Later agency productions identified 73 internal affairs files on Ryan Bewley.

Through December 2020, Bordeaux sent three notices to Mayor Frank Scott Jr. as custodian of records. The third demanded "the COMPLETE records regarding his involvement in the destruction of city vehicles." The mayor's FOIA coordinator, Markett Humphries, replied on December 16 that human resources had no responsive records.

Twenty-seven pursuits, and a history with none of them

The documentary core of the case is a comparison between two LRPD record sets.

Agency productions identify 73 internal affairs files involving Ryan Bewley between 2015 and 2022. Twenty-seven are classified as vehicle pursuits and two as vehicle accidents.

The cleanest comparison covers 2015 and 2016, so that every file predates the document it is measured against. In those two years the listing shows 21 matters: seven pursuits, six use-of-force, two accidents, four divisional investigations and two others.

LRPD printed the officer's "Part II" discipline history on May 4, 2017, at 9:23 a.m. It contained six entries: the two accidents and the four divisional investigations. Neither the seven pursuits nor the six use-of-force matters appeared. The description beneath every entry is redacted, with no exemption cited.

Across the full 2015 to 2022 listing, not one of the 27 pursuit files appears.

The next day, Sgt. Rebecca Junkins of the FOI unit wrote that Professional Standards had "recheck[ed] each entry" and that the history showed "only the two accidents." The department's own printout from the day before listed six. Junkins declined to release the two accident files because the officer "did not receive a suspension, demotion or termination."

Bordeaux replied within four minutes that he was not asking for disciplinary files. He wanted the accident reports, the mobile video and the material attached to the accident investigations. Those are operational records, created because city-owned vehicles were in reportable crashes.

He did not get them.

An internal affairs file can close with a finding that an officer followed policy, that an allegation was unfounded or that the evidence was insufficient. The records do not show that all 27 pursuits violated policy, and they do not establish that every pursuit file belongs on a discipline history.

They show that 27 pursuit files existed in one official LRPD record set and appear in none of the discipline history produced for the same officer. The underlying files, the dispositions and the department's rule on what goes into a discipline history would explain why. None has been produced.

'We don't have any record of that'

Wayne and Ryan Bewley

The trail ran next through VCAT, the department's disbanded Violent Crime Apprehension Team, and into the city's vehicle fleet.

On November 18, 2022, two days after Bordeaux requested VCAT accident and maintenance records, Sgt. Davis wrote: "your FOI request has been processed. There are no records that meets this request."

After he clarified that he wanted completed records rather than blank forms, the department located shift-assignment worksheets that "had to be pulled from archives" and produced part of them.

Then, on December 14, 2022, Davis wrote: "I was double checking to see if we had records from 2015-2017 for VCAT worksheets. There were no more records other than the ones that were provided to you on Nov 23, 2022. Also there were no records for the destruction of those records."

Lt. James Sloan of the public records unit said the same thing on a recorded call, at greater length.

"On this particular case regarding VCAT, unfortunately, we haven't been really good at keeping our records specifically regarding VCAT," Sloan said, noting the unit "had a number of names over the years." It began as VCAT, became mobile, and is now street crimes.

He confirmed the destruction policy: "Yes, we are required by policy to anytime you destroy documents ... to make a copy of it, of the contents of it. You put a copy in that particular box, and then a copy goes to the division who's over that particular unit."

Then: "Now that's the issue we have is not just with VCAT records, but I think with a lot of records. We don't have any record of that."

And: "Back during this time, unfortunately, they didn't do a real good job keeping these records."

Sloan said payroll staff had searched the archives and that what had been sent was all that existed. By his own account, the problem was not confined to VCAT.

A felony complaint, filed as an information item

On July 17, 2023, Bordeaux filed a four-page criminal complaint with the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office alleging that LRPD had withheld, concealed, destroyed or failed to preserve public records, a violation of Ark. Code Ann. § 5-54-121, tampering with a public record, a Class D felony.

Detective Aaron Singleton interviewed him that afternoon in CID Interview Room 1 and took a thumb drive of more than 130 files, including the Sloan recording.

Singleton's interview narrative records that Sloan "essentially admitted" the records at issue "were 'not kept well,'" and notes that a recording of the conversation was on the drive.

His evidence narrative, timed at approximately 9:30 the next morning, records that he had finished reviewing the material. It never mentions the recording. It does not say he listened to it. It names Sloan only as someone copied on emails. It reaches no finding about it.

The same narrative describes what a determination would take. Deciding whether the law had been broken "would take someone with specialized experience in record keeping requirements," Singleton wrote, and "Only a FOIA/Record Keeping specialist would be able to answer that." Proving deliberate destruction "would also be a very difficult thing to prove without extensive investigation, to include large-scale search warrant requests for LRPD records."

No specialist was consulted. No warrant was sought. Sloan was never interviewed.

Singleton also wrote that Bordeaux's email chains "appear to have been selectively edited to not include various replies from LRPD personnel." Two sentences earlier, the same narrative says the missing replies made LRPD personnel's motives hard to determine. The sheriff's office never asked LRPD for the complete chains.

The case report, printed April 27, 2026, carries Report Type Patrol, Incident Code INFO: INFORMATION and Disposition Unknown. Its primary narrative was written August 29, 2023, six weeks after the complaint was filed. That same day a captain recommended routing the matter to the circuit clerk and called Bordeaux to say the sheriff's office would not investigate.

The agency's later summary says that "Pursuant to Arkansas Code § 25-19-104, it was determined that the proper venue for such complaints would be through the Circuit Court Clerk's Office."

Section 25-19-104 does not address venue. It is the penalty provision of the state Freedom of Information Act. Bordeaux's complaint was filed under Title 5, the criminal code.

The same summary calls the complaint one "alleging violations of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act." Section 5-54-121, cited three times in Singleton's own reports and identified there as a felony, appears nowhere in it.

The file then sat with a deputy prosecuting attorney roughly 32 months. When the prosecutor's office answered on April 27, 2026, it said the documentation "did not illustrate evidence to a felony offense violation to the FOIA laws." No produced record shows anyone analyzed § 5-54-121.

The sheriff's office investigates itself

In 2024 the sheriff's office opened a Professional Standards investigation into how it had handled the complaint.

Lt. Cardarious Walker wrote on November 6, 2024, that an investigation had begun. On February 6, 2025, he wrote that it was ongoing and that he would brief Chief Deputy Earnest Whitten. On February 21 he said he would follow up. On June 22, 2025, he said he expected a meeting with administration.

The case report for that investigation, printed April 27, 2026, records the disposition as "EC-Exceptionally Cleared" as of February 29, 2024, before every one of those assurances.

Walker told Bordeaux during the investigation that he had requested the same records from LRPD himself, that LRPD did not produce them, and that required records were missing or destroyed with no record of destruction, Bordeaux says. Walker then stopped discussing the case.

That request and LRPD's answer are the most consequential documents nobody has seen. The sheriff's office has not produced them and has not said they do not exist.

The agency classified the complaint UNFOUNDED. It released the conclusion while withholding Walker's notes, activity reports, interviews, findings, recommendation, his request to LRPD, LRPD's response and the records of command review.

The findings letter is dated May 29, 2026. It was delivered August 18, 81 days later and four days after the lawsuit was filed. The county attributed the delay to administrative oversight.

Where Wayne Bewley works now

Charles Wayne Bewley rose to interim chief of the Little Rock Police Department. On December 1, 2022, the day after he announced his retirement, Attorney General-elect Tim Griffin named him chief of investigations for the office's Special Investigations Division. By March 2023 he was also directing the division's Election Integrity Unit.

The division's published units include public integrity.

Bordeaux's complaint alleges records tampering by a police department during a period when Bewley served in its command. The Pulaski County prosecuting attorney has already received the documentation and taken a position. The attorney general's office is among the remaining state offices to which such a matter could be referred.

Bordeaux has filed a criminal complaint and a request for appointment of a special prosecutor with the Arkansas Prosecutor Coordinator's Office, citing the conflict.

The lawsuit, and what arrived after it

Bordeaux filed suit on August 14, 2026, seeking the records behind both sheriff's office investigations and challenging the county's handling of 11 FOIA requests. The case is before Circuit Judge Shawn Johnson.

Three days later, a consolidated records request pending about two months was closed, citing the litigation. No statutory exemption was identified. The Arkansas FOIA does not contain one for pending litigation.

On August 20, hours before the hearing, the county attorney's office produced audit histories, retention policies, the delayed findings letter, an apology, Attorney General Opinion 2025-130, a Garrity advisement form and a case summary the county said had been "created for the benefit of the County Attorney in preparation for the case before the court."

That summary is not a contemporaneous investigative record. It was written after the case reached court.

The production carried new admissions. Professional Standards files behind suspensions in 2010 and 2013 were destroyed in 2015 and 2018 under a five-year retention rule. The file behind a 2017 suspension "no longer exist[s]" and "may have been lost when Sheriffs Office switched from Administrative Investigation Management system (AIM) to the Blue Team management system." The same response says the policy was revised in 2020 to require that all such files be kept indefinitely.

Asked for the central complaint index its general orders require, the county said: "There is no Central Index system." Asked for any written response to the 2023 complaint, it said none exists.

The hearing was continued rather than dismissed. Bordeaux told the court the same afternoon that in camera review appears necessary.

The federal standard this record speaks to

Federal law makes it unlawful for a state or local law enforcement agency to permit a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of rights secured by the Constitution or federal law. The provision was enacted as 42 U.S.C. § 14141 and was transferred in 2017 to 34 U.S.C. § 12601. The Justice Department's own guidance still refers to it by the old number.

It authorizes the Justice Department to seek civil remedies against an agency, not against individual officers. Among the conditions the department identifies as triggers for a pattern or practice inquiry are inadequate supervision or monitoring of officers, failures of justification and reporting on use of force, inadequate or improper training, and citizen complaint processes that treat complainants as adversaries.

Nothing in this record establishes that any federal inquiry is open, and none is known to be. But the last of those four descriptions is the one the documents here return to repeatedly: a complaint answered by monitoring the complainant, a felony referral logged as an information item, an internal review that quotes the complainant's tone back at him while never asking the accused agency for the emails that would test the accusation, and a findings letter that arrived after a lawsuit.

Still unanswered

What were the dispositions of the 27 pursuit files, and does LRPD policy keep pursuit reviews off discipline histories, or was this officer handled differently?

Where did the VCAT, fleet and maintenance records go, and why can no destruction trail be produced?

What did Lt. Walker ask LRPD for, and what did LRPD tell him?

When was the May 29 findings letter created and signed?

Who inside LRPD pulled and released the January 2014 shooting report to Payne, and is that release documented anywhere?

Who received the 2014 FOP request, and did any of it reach Payne?

Where is the ballistics report matching the round taken from Dixie to the handgun found in Payne's truck?

What does the dispatch log show about the response to the 4:22 a.m. and 4:45 a.m. calls on April 21, 2014?

When was the recorded call with Sheriff Higgins made, and what does the audio show before and after the excerpt quoted here?

Each points to a record, a system, a custodian or a witness that exists.

How a Fatal Encounter Outside a Little Rock Home Led to Questions About Illegally Missing or Destroyed Police Records