MIAMI – The sun had not yet risen on Tuesday when a group of FBI agents investigating criminals who prey on children on the internet approached the Water Terrace apartments in Sunrise, Florida, to carry out a search warrant, a routine part of the job that is always full of risks.
What exactly happened in the ensuing minutes is unknown, but a shootout broke out in which neighbors in the quiet residential community stormed out of bed. Law enforcers called emergency responders. They fired several shots. Send air rescue.
Two FBI agents have died and three more have been injured in one of the deadliest shooting incidents in the bureau’s history. No agent has been shot and killed on duty since 2008. A similar bloody shooting took place 35 years ago in a suburb of Miami, killing two FBI agents and injuring five others.
The man under investigation in the case, who according to the authorities involved violent crimes against children, barricaded himself inside the complex and was found dead. According to a law enforcement official, the man appeared to have killed himself before agents could arrest him. His identity was not disclosed until his family could be notified of his death.
Video footage from local police stations showed a grim scene in the outdoor apartment complex. A SWAT truck landed in a stair railing that lay shattered on the ground. There were blood stains on the floor outside the apartments. Police rushed to the complex, closed the roads and kept people outside most of the day.
Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, identified the two agents killed as special agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger.
“Every day, FBI special agents do their damage to keep the American people safe,” Wray said in a statement. ‘Special Agent Alfin and Special Agent Schwartzenberger were heroic defending their country today. The FBI will always honor their ultimate sacrifice and be forever grateful for their bravery. ”
Schwartzenberger, 43, was a mother of two from Colorado and has been with the FBI since 2005. She was part of the violent crimes against child players in the Miami office, it appears from the court. She was assigned to the Innocent Images National Initiative, part of the FBI’s cybercrime program set up to combat the spread of images of child sexual abuse online.
Mr. Alfin, 36, was a father of one from New York and has been a special agent since 2009. He was named to the Miami Child Exploitation Task Force. He discussed his role in an online FBI article about the 2015 arrest of a man in Naples, Fla., Who ran what the agency described as the largest child pornography website in the world. The site, called Playpen, had more than 150,000 users around the world.
“They put their lives on the line, and that’s a hell of a price to pay,” President Biden said of the agents in comments from the Oval Office. “My heart aches for the families.”
Dawn Garrick, a resident of the apartment complex where the shooting took place, said she was awakened from her sleep shortly after 6am by police sirens and a cross light shining in her bedroom window on the ground floor. From her room, me. Garrick, 53, watched worried neighbors walk out to see what was going on, only to be sent back inside by police. About an hour later, she said, she saw paramedics loading someone onto a stretcher into an ambulance.
The community is usually safe and quiet, she said.
“There are a lot of workers,” she said. “Everyone is friendly.”
According to the FBI, two of the wounded agents, who were each shot several times, were transported to a hospital. The third did not require hospitalization.
The FBI groups investigating crimes against children are considered the most difficult assignments because of the disturbing and graphic nature of the cases they handle. Agents usually review gruesome depictions of children being sexually exploited, images that are then shared online with others.
Investigations into child sexual abuse often begin with a tip from online social media companies like Facebook, which reported that in 2019, they found only 60 million images and videos. According to the company, about half of the content was not necessarily illegal and it was reported that it would help law enforcement with investigations.
Yet, companies can usually only detect a small percentage of what is distributed, as they rely on automated systems that can only tag material previously tagged by users. From a point of view of just one or two images or videos, investigators regularly find trumps of thousands or more on a suspect’s hard drive.
Sharing these images can also indicate abuse in the real world. It is not uncommon to find offenders sharing images of child sexual abuse, who have also abused children in real life.
Mr. Alfin was involved in an investigation into a dark web forum that started in 2014, where members would upload and trade graphic images of child sexual abuse. The investigation has led to the arrest of at least 350 people in the United States and hundreds of others around the world. According to an FBI news release, more than 300 children are rescued
Over the past decade, criminals have been using increasingly advanced technologies such as the dark web – where users’ Internet protocol addresses are obscured – to stay ahead of the police. In one case, a man from Ohio helped run a dark website with nearly 30,000 members from 2012 to 2014. The website, which is now closed, required users to share images of abuse in order to maintain good status. retained, according to court documents.
The online forum had a private section that was only available to members who share the image of children who have abused themselves.
Several police investigations in the past year have broken up other huge dark web forums, including one known as Child’s Play which reportedly had more than a million user accounts.
No investigation has emerged into the Florida investigation that led to Tuesday’s shooting. Hours after the gunfire, there was still a heavy police presence around the apartment complex.
George L. Piro, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Miami, said agents “plan carefully” and carry out search warrants almost daily.
“The vast majority of these warrants take place without incident,” he said. “The operations this morning in Sunrise ended tragically, with the subject burning loose on the members of the investigation team.”
Throughout the day, police maintained a perimeter of about a mile north, which restricted access to the complex and surrounding areas. Officers cordoned off much of Nob Hill Road and erected a scene at a nearby rehabilitation hospital.
The agents killed Tuesday were the first to be fatally shot since November 2008, when the special agent, Samuel S. Hicks, 33, was killed, according to the FBI, while serving a warrant.
Mr. Hicks was part of a team of agents who executed an arrest warrant in a home near Pittsburgh related to a drug deal, the bureau said.
The shooting on Tuesday was one of the worst in FBI history.
In 1986, two agents were killed in Miami and five others wounded in the pursuit of two violent bank robbers who were also killed in the extermination. The gun battle at the Suniland Shopping Plaza in what is now the town of Pinecrest was the most expensive in FBI history.
In November 1994, two agents were killed, a third agent was wounded and a 15-year-old boy was shot in the leg when a man arrived in the room of the police headquarters in Washington and opened fire with an assault rifle. according to the FBI
A police detective was also killed during the shooting. The gunman, a suspect in a triple murder a month earlier, had left notes in which he said he intended to kill members of the local police killing unit, the FBI said.
On Tuesday, police officers stood in a gloomy line and saluted as a gurney with one of the bodies draped in an American flag was placed in a fire truck at Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale. A procession of dark law enforcers and motorcycles with sirens and lights then escorted the ambulance to the medical examiner’s office.
Patricia Mazzei and Johnny Diaz reported from Miami, Adam Goldman of Washington, and Christina Morales of Coral Springs, Fla., Weston, Fla., and Miramar, Fla. Katie Benner and Seamus Hughes contributed reporting from Washington, Maria Cramer of Maplewood, NJ, Gabriel JX Dans, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Michael H. Keller of New York, and Michael Majchrowicz of Sunrise, Fla., and Pembroke Pines, Fla. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.