Murders of FBI agents reveal dangers of serving a warrant. Did agency miss something?
It may seem routine, but law enforcement officers and agents say serving warrants can also be among their most dangerous tasks — with the risk heightened by the uncertainty of who might lurk behind a closed door.
At dawn Tuesday in Sunrise, law enforcement sources say a man armed with an assault rifle blasted a group of FBI agents from a child-pornography task force after he spotted them through a doorbell ring camera. Special Agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger, there to serve a search warrant aimed at seizing the still-unidentified man’s computers, were killed. Three others were wounded in one of the deadliest days for the FBI in decades.
There is a long history in South Florida alone of similar, seemingly everyday encounters turning violent — including the 2004 fatal shooting of a Broward Sheriff’s deputy, Todd Fatta, by a Fort Lauderdale man who opened fire on him and other deputies who also were serving a search warrant in a child-porn raid.
“You always face the uncertainty, the unknown.,” said retired BSO deputy Al Pollock. “A minor traffic warrant can turn dangerous because you don’t know the mindset. We learned our lessons for that from Fatta.”
Local police and federal agents, who are accustomed to serving court-approved warrants to gather evidence for a case, go through risk assessments before serving warrants — but they still sometimes find themselves blindly entering the lairs of suspected criminals who they have little information about. On Tuesday, the FBI child-porn task force did not bring along a SWAT team for extra protection — although that still may not have prevented the tragedy since sources told the Miami Herald that the suspect shot right through his unopened front door at the agents. After a standoff, he killed himself.
FBI Special Agent in Charge George 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. But even though there won’t be a criminal prosecution of the shooter, the FBI will exhaustively examine every detail of the deadly operation to figure out what went wrong — and what can be learned from it. Was there something they missed about the suspect? Did they know he had an assault rifle or perhaps a concealed weapons permit? Did the layout of the apartment complex expose agents? There will be a long list of questions.
“That’s why threat assessments are so important,” former Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said, speaking generally about serving warrants and not about Tuesday’s shootout. “Do they have pit bulls? Are they prepared for a violent encounter with police?
“There are times when a SWAT team has to do a dynamic entry,” he said. “But I’ve always said entering a home should be an absolute last resort. Can you set up surveillance and get the person to leave the home? Any time you can take a person down outside a home, do it.”
Former Miami-Dade Police Director Juan Perez said police by their very nature are reactionary, almost always waiting for an action to occur before responding. “Facing that unknown puts us behind the eight ball,” Perez said.
Case in point: A decade ago, Miami-Dade police officers Roger Castillo and Amanda Haworth were part of a specially trained squad that had been criss-crossing Liberty City searching for Johnny Simms, wanted on a Miami murder warrant. Squad members, protected by body armor, had already visited several homes before they knocked on the door at Simms’ mother’s duplex. She let them inside, but Simms — armed with a pistol — popped out of an inside room, fatally shooting Haworth and Castillo before police shot him.
Suspects in their own homes always pose a danger for police.
Last October, Miami-Dade Police Detective Christopher Fernandez was shot in the ear as he entered a South Miami-Dade apartment during a narcotics investigation. In the gunfire, suspected shooter Julio Juan Garcia was wounded, and later surrendered after a standoff with the Special Response Team.
Even when tactical SWAT officers are involved, there’s danger. Last August, a fugitive shot a Miami-Dade SRT member in the vest after a standoff in South Miami-Dade. The officer was not wounded. The shooter, James Justin Munro, was shot dead.
Retired U.S. Marshal Deputy Barry Golden said that he arrested “hundreds and hundreds of guys” over his career, but he and his colleagues always trained to follow one rule of safety: Avoid going inside a home and instead try to set up surveillance and wait for the suspect to come out.
“My preference was always to arrest them outside,” Golden said. “Sometimes you have to go into a residence, but then you are going into the unknown. You never know if the suspect is going to be carrying a weapon.”
Several law enforcement sources said that the public may not understand how risky it is for police and agents to serve search warrants, even on child-porn suspects who may not seem as threatening because of the lack of information about their criminal history. They are typically not like drug traffickers, for example, who often have prior arrests involving weapons that show a predisposition for violence.
“The FBI always puts a great deal of thought and planning into these operations,” said Ben Greenberg, a former U.S. attorney in South Florida and partner with the Miami law firm Greenberg Traurig. “The public doesn’t realize how dangerous it is to execute search warrants and arrest warrants, sometimes with the absolutely horrifying consequences we saw [Tuesday].”
Miami Herald staff writer David Ovalle contributed to this story.
