Ambush in Sunrise left 2 agents dead. A year later, FBI still reviewing how it went wrong.
It was one of the bloodiest days in the FBI’s history: A year ago, two veteran special agents were shot to death and three others wounded while trying to serve a search warrant in a child-porn case. Inside a Sunrise apartment, a computer programmer with no criminal history had monitored the approach of the agents with a doorbell camera and ambushed them with an assault rifle before later turning the gun on himself.
“He fired blindly,” recalled George Piro, FBI special agent in charge in Miami. “He didn’t just fire through the front door. He fired through the living room window. He fired indiscriminately with complete disregard for his neighbors and the innocent people in that complex.”
In an exclusive interview with the Miami Herald, Piro was frank about the emotional toll from that day. The murders of special agents Daniel Alfin, 36, and Laura Schwartzenberger, 43, left the FBI and the South Florida community in shock, wondering how the dawn raid on Feb. 2, 2021, went so fatally wrong.
“A loss like this ... ,” Piro said, choking up for a moment. “We still haven’t recovered.”
But he would not discuss any details of an operation that had raised questions with some law enforcement experts — particularly that the FBI had not employed a special tactical force team to execute a search warrant, one of the more potentially dangerous tasks for agencies.
Piro said the bureau had yet to complete an internal review of the team’s actions, but he said nothing about the incident had persuaded the FBI to change its policy and make SWAT backup mandatory. The FBI still evaluates the need for additional force on a case-by-case basis. Agents had done that before the Sunrise shootout and the risk assessment had raised no red flags about a man suspected only of having child porn on his computer.
“It’s really hard to figure out what’s going on in somebody’s head,” Piro said. “This guy had no criminal history.”
Private tribute for two agents
The FBI’s Miami Field Office in Miramar plans to pay tribute to the fallen agents on Wednesday morning. The service will not be open to the public because their families want to keep it private.
Their deaths resurrected the tragic memory of a bloody shootout that happened nearly 36 years ago, when two FBI special agents were killed and five wounded by a pair of rifle-brandishing bank robbers in the South Miami-Dade area. It was a defining moment in the FBI’s history, prompting the bureau to make sure all agents were better armed, replacing .38-caliber revolvers with 9mm semi-automatic handguns.
Like that tragedy, the fatal shootings of Alfin and Schwartzenberger hit hard. They were described by colleagues as being “cut from the same patriotic cloth.”
Schwartzenberger, a native of Pueblo, Colorado, started her FBI career in 2005 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she became the first — and remains the only — female member of the SWAT team. Five years later, she transferred to Miami and found her calling: protecting children from abuse. She investigated internet child-porn cases, which exploded during her tenure. During a memorial service at Hard Rock Stadium the weekend after the tragedy, FBI Director Christopher Wray said she experienced the “very worst parts of humanity.”
Schwartzenberger spoke at schools, in neighborhoods and even to a local softball team about predators lurking online. She was the lead agent in a sex extortion case that put a Hialeah man in prison for 50 years after he posed as a teenage girl to induce about 300 boys to send him sexually explicit images of themselves.
At the memorial service, her close friend Brenda Chavez called Schwartzenberger, who was married and a mother of two children, the “biggest badass I know.”
Her colleague, Alfin, joined the FBI in 2009 in Albany, New York. He was smart and a whiz at computers. Alfin, who was married and had one child, hated the cold and thought he was “living the dream” in South Florida.
He was assigned to the FBI Miami Field Office in 2017 and worked on crimes against children, leading one of the largest international child pornography hacking schemes at the FBI, Operation Pacifier, that targeted users of a dark web platform called Playpen.
“Dan’s expertise helped identify them and stop the victimization of so many innocent children,” Wray, the FBI director, said during a memorial service at Hard Rock Stadium. He said the Playpen case had resulted in rescuing hundreds of sexually abused children and “still stands as the FBI’s most successful operation against deep web investigations.”
Investigations continue
Piro said the local FBI office, in standard procedure, is still investigating the child-porn case against 55-year-old David Lee Huber, even though the divorced computer programmer had killed himself after blasting away at agents.
He also said that an independent FBI review team from Washington, D.C., is investigating the Sunrise shooting, including what procedures agents had followed and protections they had used. He said both probes are still ongoing, and that a redacted version of the shooting review eventually would be released by the FBI and Justice Department to the public.
“We are a learning organization whose goal is not only to protect the community but also its employees,” Piro said, noting that the review team’s findings and recommendations would be shared with the entire FBI and other law enforcement agencies. “We’re always looking for ways to improve our tactics and protocols and also adapt to technology.”
But Piro said the FBI had not significantly changed its policy to mandate using tactical force on a regular basis while carrying out search and arrest warrants. He said the FBI’s Miami office and others around the country continue to make that decision on a case-by-case basis.
“We haven’t overhauled anything that we don’t normally do,” he said. “It’s unrealistic to use SWAT in every arrest and search.”
“We are making sure that we are thoroughly prepared, that we have a thorough, structured plan,” Piro said, while declining to disclose any details about agency protocols. “At the end of the day, unfortunately, our line of work is very dangerous no matter how much we prepare.”
Piro also pushed back against some critics who said the FBI did not take enough precautions by using a special tactical force team on the day of the shootings. He also said that using too much force, like a military operation, in carrying out search and arrest warrants can be a double-edged sword.
“What we don’t want to do is overreact and use more force than necessary,” Piro told the Herald. “It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback, but the public expects us to be much more professional in our use of force.”
Although the FBI wouldn’t talk about its policy, federal agencies routinely conduct a “threat assessment” of a suspect, examining criminal history, weapons possession and the layout of a residence before deciding whether to use a special tactical force team. Other factors considered include security systems, bars on windows, fences and guard dogs. It’s not known if agents review records that might reveal potential non-criminal red flags like police calls to homes. There had been two at Huber’s apartment.
Ironically, on the same morning that the FBI’s child-porn squad was executing the search warrant at the Sunrise 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.
While the cases were similar, the warrant operations were strikingly different: The FBI squad served the search warrant without a tactical team, whereas BSO followed its standard policy, which requires the presence of SWAT officers highly trained to confront a potentially dangerous suspect with possible firearms.
When the ambushed FBI agents called for backup, it was that same Broward SWAT team that first responded to the scene as Huber barricaded himself inside during a two-hour standoff before taking his own life.
Deputy death changed Broward policy
BSO’s policy is known as the Todd Fatta Protocol for a deputy who was murdered by a child-porn suspect in Fort Lauderdale during a warrant raid in 2004. After Fatta’s death, the sheriff’s office started requiring a special tactical team to evaluate the dangers posed by suspects.
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. The Fatta protocol also calls for the decision to deploy SWAT to be made at the “lowest appropriate command level.”
SWAT officers must announce themselves and give a reasonable amount of time before entry. But they also can charge in without warning if the occupant is aware of the warrant and deemed too dangerous.
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 were also questions about the child-porn suspect’s mental health. The Sunrise Police Department released records showing two calls in 2020 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 wasn’t named in either report but officers were sent to his address and he fit the descriptions.
Moreover, at least two people told the Herald after the two FBI agents’ deaths 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. The co-worker said he feared Huber, who he knew owned guns and might shoot up the office after being fired over an angry outburst.
The FBI’s Piro declined to comment about whether the bureau’s agents missed any signs of Huber’s potentially violent tendencies, from his ownership of firearms to his mental instability. He said he also did not want to comment on how the FBI team of agents had protected themselves as they approached the suspect’s front door, which had a funnel-like narrow entrance, and was rigged with a doorbell camera.
Piro would only say that “it’s extremely difficult to know what someone is going to do” when the suspect has not left a concrete trail of criminal or other suspicious activities. “It’s really hard to figure out what’s going on in somebody’s head, especially when they [like Huber] are determined not to be taken alive,” he said.
Instead, FBI’s special agent in charge kept focused on the “terrible loss” of Alfin and Schwartzenberger during the ambush.
“What I would ask of our community is to take a moment to recognize the sacrifice that Laura and Dan made that day in protecting our community’s most vulnerable,” Piro said. “Dan and Laura represented the best of the FBI.”
This story was originally published January 31, 2022 at 10:48 AM with the headline "Ambush in Sunrise left 2 agents dead. A year later, FBI still reviewing how it went wrong.."
