Murders of FBI agents raise questions about absence of SWAT in Florida child-porn raid

On the same morning that a Sunrise man fired an assault rifle and killed FBI agents serving a search warrant for child-porn images at his apartment, the Broward Sheriff’s Office was quietly arresting a nearby Coral Springs man suspected of downloading videos of young girls engaged in sex with adult males.

The two suspects’ alleged crimes were similar, but the warrant operations executed early Tuesday were strikingly different: The FBI squad tried to serve the search warrant without the protection of a military-like tactical team, whereas BSO followed a standard policy requiring the presence of SWAT officers highly trained to confront a potentially dangerous suspect with possible firearms.

In Sunrise, two FBI agents were murdered and three others wounded, while a few miles away in Coral Springs the BSO arrest went like clockwork.

In a tragic turn, when the ambushed FBI agents called for backup, it was that same Broward Special Weapons and Tactics team that showed up first at the Sunrise apartment where the suspect, David Lee Huber, had barricaded himself inside during a two-hour standoff before taking his own life.

In the aftermath of one of the deadliest shootings in FBI history, the agency will now be conducting a comprehensive self-examination of what went wrong and what could have been done differently to prevent the deaths of Special Agents Laura Schwartzenberger, 43, and Daniel Alfin, 36. They both worked on a federal task force fighting Internet Crimes Against Children, a phenomenon that has exploded since 2000.

“There will be a huge internal review of this shooting,” said Miami lawyer Marcos Jimenez, who headed the U.S. Attorney’s Office during the first term of George W. Bush. “I just hope at the end of this process that their policy is changed ... with SWAT being involved in the planning and execution of these operations.”

Law enforcement officials who did not want to be identified said the FBI apparently missed or underestimated the danger of serving the search warrant on Huber, noting his possession of firearms, including an assault rifle.

There are also questions emerging about Huber’s mental health.

On Friday, the Sunrise Police Department released records showing two calls in the last year to Huber’s address. One was about a man reported hallucinating, the other about a man screaming at a neighbor and making a throat-slashing gesture. Huber isn’t named in either report but officers were sent to his address and he fits the descriptions.

Moreover, at least two people told the Miami Herald that Huber had weapons at his home, including a former neighbor who said he pulled a gun on an exterminator hired by his apartment complex to spray for pests. A former co-worker at a computer firm also told WTVJ Channel 6 that Huber once told him he was bipolar and that he feared Huber, who he knew owned guns, might shoot up the office after being fired over an angry outburst.

The FBI’s Miami field office, which identified the shooter on Wednesday, declined to comment about any aspect of the investigation, other than to say that Huber, 55, was suspected of possessing child pornography.

But it is a certainty that the FBI will be re-evaluating its current policy of using tactical force on a discretionary case-by-case basis in executing search or arrest warrants of any kind, not just child-porn investigations.

Although the FBI wouldn’t talk about its policy, federal agencies routinely conduct a “threat assessment” of a suspect, examining any criminal history and possession of weapons along with the configuration of a residence on the outside and inside before deciding whether to use a special tactical team. Other factors include security systems, bars on windows and fences, as well as dangerous dogs, such as a guard dog. It’s not known if they review records that might reveal potential non-criminal red flags like police calls to homes.

As part of its internal review, the FBI will likely be looking carefully at a strict BSO policy established after the 2004 fatal shooting of a deputy who was killed while his squad was carrying out an arrest of a child-porn suspect at his Fort Lauderdale home — without the assistance of a SWAT team.

“This [FBI shooting] is the second time this has happened,” said Jimenez, who headed the U.S. Attorney’s Office when the BSO deputy was killed. “This just can’t happen again. I was heartbroken then, and I’m heartbroken now.”

BSO’s policy, known as the Todd Fatta Protocol for a deputy who was murdered during a warrant raid, requires a tactical team to evaluate a suspect’s criminal history, ownership of weapons and disposition for violence, among other issues. Before each operation SWAT must do a drive-by verifying the location, address and layout of a suspect’s residence. After a review, the SWAT team must either lead the operation or be available at a moment’s notice to assist in the execution of a search or arrest warrant. The Fatta protocol also calls for the decision to deploy SWAT to be made at the “lowest appropriate command level.”

SWAT must knock on the door and announce itself and give a reasonable amount of time before entry. If, however, the occupant is aware of the warrant and is deemed too dangerous, the tactical team doesn’t have to announce its presence.

After Fatta’s death, BSO not only beefed up its tactical force policy for search and arrest warrants, but the agency agreed to pay a $2 million settlement to the late deputy’s family after admitting its terrible mistake.

The SWAT team should have been used to execute the arrest warrant for Kenneth Wilk, the child-porn suspect who was known to be armed and to hate police, top BSO officials later admitted. Wilk shot Fatta, 33, once in the chest with a Winchester rifle and wounded another deputy during the raid at his Fort Lauderdale home on Aug. 19, 2004.

A team consisting entirely of SWAT members had been used at the same home a month earlier to search for child pornography. At that time, Wilk’s partner, Kelly Ray Jones, was arrested. In addition, the Broward Sheriff’s Office plans for both raids warned of guns in the home. Wilk had a gun on him during a previous search and a history of run-ins with law enforcement.

Wilk was convicted by a federal jury of first-degree murder and sentenced to life.

Former Broward Sheriff Scott Israel, who ran the agency after Fatta’s killing, said that threat assessments are absolutely critical in sizing up the danger of serving a search or arrest warrant with SWAT in the lead. “It can be a dangerous, dangerous situation,” he said.

“The most important thing for people to understand is you never know the mindset [of the suspect],” Israel said. “You don’t know if they made a commitment to themselves to never go to jail.”

Israel said the public might underestimate the danger of child-porn suspects because their profile is not that of a hardened criminal, such as a drug trafficker, but he said it seems that as a subculture they’re known to be heavily armed.

Another law enforcement officer agreed. “You’d think they’d be skinny and weird, but they’re armed to the teeth.”

A retired U.S. Marshal deputy said federal agencies must not only conduct thorough threat assessments with tactical teams and deploy them in dangerous situations, but agents themselves must undergo regular training for executing search and arrest warrants. They must also wear both bulletproof vests and use ballistic shields during raids if a SWAT team is not present.

Barry Golden, who served nearly 30 years with the U.S. Marshals Service, said the 2004 Fatta killing was a “wake-up call” for all law enforcement and that he was surprised by the shooting of the FBI agents all these years later because they didn’t have a tactical team in front of them. He said the shooter apparently opened fire on the group of agents as they approached the unopened front door of his apartment after he spotted them on his doorbell ring camera.

“They appeared to be standing in front of the door,” Golden said, noting that area is known as the “fatal funnel.”

“You don’t want to be standing in front of that door,” he said. “You want to be standing to the side of the door.”

But at some point, Golden said, officers, agents and SWAT teams have to go through that funnel into the “unknown” — the inside of a suspect’s house. That’s why it’s critical to do a thorough risk assessment of the property and suspect with ample surveillance and backup.

And even that might not be enough. Golden pointed out that on Thursday a U.S. Marshal deputy was shot by a man wanted for attempted murder who was hiding in the closet of his Baltimore, Maryland, home.

“I would expect some type of major police change will come from this [FBI shooting],” said Golden, a Miami private investigator. “Anytime a law enforcement officer dies, you have to look at what happened and how to make it safer.”

Tuesday’s fatal shootings of the two FBI agents rivaled the deadliest in the bureau’s history — a bloody confrontation between a group of agents and a pair of bank robbers in South Miami-Dade nearly 35 years ago.

Killed in that confrontation were special agents Ben Grogan and Jerry Dove. Grogan, 53, a two-decade veteran nicknamed The Doctor, was one year shy of retirement when he died. The “Miami Shootout” — which left five other agents wounded and the two suspects dead the morning of April 11, 1986 — was a defining moment in the FBI’s history. It prompted the bureau to make sure all agents were better armed, replacing .38-caliber revolvers with 9mm semiautomatic handguns.