FBI Director Christopher Wray visits with slain agents’ families in South Florida

One day after a gunman fatally shot two FBI agents, the bureau’s director, Christopher Wray, met Wednesday with members of their families along with fellow agents who worked on their child-porn task force during the deadly execution of a search warrant.

Wray also visited the crime scene where a suspect opened fire on the squad of agents Tuesday morning as they approached the front door of his Sunrise apartment to serve the search warrant for alleged possession of child pornography, law enforcement sources told the Miami Herald.

The FBI director also met with U.S. Attorney Ariana Fajardo Orshan, and her first assistant, prosecutor Tony Gonzalez, at the bureau’s South Florida field office in Miramar.

An FBI spokesman in South Florida declined to comment on Wray’s visit. Special Agent Mike Leverock said an “inspection team” from Washington, D.C., “is reviewing the incident” and gathering forensic evidence at the Sunrise apartment where the suspect killed the two agents and wounded three others.

The gunman, identified as 55-year-old David Lee Huber by the FBI Wednesday afternoon, barricaded himself inside the apartment before killing himself.

On Tuesday, following one of the deadliest shootings in FBI history, Wray issued a statement, recognizing the two slain special agents, Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger, as law enforcement heroes.

“Every day, FBI special agents put themselves in harm’s way to keep the American people safe. Special Agent Alfin and Special Agent Schwartzenberger exemplified heroism today in defense of their country. The FBI will always honor their ultimate sacrifice and will be forever grateful for their bravery,” Wray wrote in the statement.

Alfin, 36, was born in New York and began his career with the FBI in Albany in 2009, FBI Miami Special Agent in Charge George Piro said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon. Alfin joined the Miami field office in 2017 and worked crimes against children cases for six years, Piro said. He is survived by his wife and one child.

Schwartzenberger, 43, was born in Pueblo, Colorado, and became an FBI special agent in 2005 in Albuquerque, N.M. She moved to Miami in 2010 and spent seven years investigating crimes against children, Piro said. She had a husband and two children.

The FBI did not provide details of the case against the gunman, other than to say he was suspected of possessing illegal graphic images of children. The case was being investigated by the FBI’s Internet Crimes against Children task force, and supervised by prosecutors based in Fort Lauderdale.

On Wednesday, Sunrise police public information officer Otishia Browning said there were between four and six Sunrise police officers in the apartment complex helping the task force that served the warrant on the child-porn suspect living at 10100 West Reflections Blvd.

She said they were in at least one unmarked vehicle and that they were far enough back that they didn’t sustain any injuries during the shooting. Browning didn’t say if police or the FBI returned fire.

The officers did, she said, respond after the gunman fired and helped to extract the dead and injured federal agents. She said the task force doesn’t have a name, and it’s typical for local agencies to team up with feds in that situation.

“They were part of the group. They were further back,” Browning said. “They went in to help extract the FBI.”

Browning said her agency has been informed by the FBI that it could be several days before it is done going through forensics and evaluating the scene.

The murders of agents Alfin and Schwartzenberger left the FBI reeling, as investigators began piecing together what went wrong in the type of raid that usually unfolds with little attention but is also fraught with danger for law enforcement. Such raids are commonly conducted in conjunction with heavily armed tactical officers, although Tuesday’s operation was not.

Piro, in a statement read Tuesday evening at the FBI’s Miramar field office, did not address why the FBI’s tactical unit was not initially called in to assist before the raid.