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SUNRISE, Fla. — Still reeling from the fatal shooting of two F.B.I. agents in South Florida, the nation’s tight-knit law enforcement community was examining evidence at the scene on Wednesday to understand how the execution of a search warrant in an online child exploitation case turned into a deadly gunfight.
Officials identified the suspect as David Lee Huber, 55, who was under investigation in a case involving violent crimes against children. He died, apparently by suicide, after barricading himself in the apartment.
The shooting broke out before dawn on Tuesday when a group of F.B.I. agents was serving a search warrant at Mr. Huber’s apartment in Sunrise, Fla., northwest of Fort Lauderdale. The shooting killed Special Agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger and injured three other agents, one of whom was still in a hospital on Wednesday.
The Water Terrace apartments, the sprawling Sunrise complex where the shooting took place, was still teeming with law enforcement officers on Wednesday. On hand were members of the F.B.I.; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies; and Sunrise police officers. A mobile police command unit was parked at the main entrance. A phalanx of reporters across the street awaited news.
“In the five years we are in this place, nothing has ever happened,” Jorge Castillo, 76, said of the time he had lived in the complex. “To have somebody here the way this person was makes it very difficult, because you don’t know who your neighbor is.”
The shooting, which rivaled the worst in F.B.I. history, returned the spotlight to the global scourge of online sex abuse — and to the dangers that law enforcement officers face when doing their frequent work of showing up at the doors of people under investigation to conduct searches or arrest them.
Debbie Garner, the commander of the child exploitation and computer crimes unit in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said her unit executed more in-person search warrants last year — about two a week — than any other unit in the bureau, a reflection of how pervasive online child exploitation cases have become.
“That’s honestly a massive amount,” she said of the warrants. In about a third of the cases, she estimated, agents find that the suspect has a weapon, “a sobering reminder that it could have been used.”
When she started working with the unit seven years ago, it received about 180 “cybertips” a month about possible online child predators. The agents thought they were swamped. Now, they get about 1,000 tips a month, meaning their work has roughly quintupled, while funding for the unit has remained relatively flat or seen only minor bumps.
“My agents will say that the worst thing is they have information that may help a child, and they know they may never get to it,” she said. “It’s the overwhelming caseload that is the worst thing to them, and that they feel as though they will never reach all the children that need help.”
Benjamin G. Greenberg, a former United States attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said online child exploitation cases were more common than people realized. His former office had a section of prosecutors who specialized in those cases, even though the Miami area is known mostly for other federal crimes, such as Medicare fraud.
“I don’t think it’s like health care fraud, where — for better or worse — we are the capital,” he said. With child pornography cases, he noted, online perpetrators could be anywhere: “Start to finish, you can engage in the criminal conduct without ever leaving your bedroom or your house.”
That is why physical evidence, such as computers obtained with the help of a search warrant, is so important to making cases, and perhaps why agents descended on Mr. Huber’s first-floor apartment on Tuesday.
Mr. Huber had worked as recently as April 2020 as a temporary technology contractor for Florida Blue, an affiliate insurance company of Blue Cross and Blue Shield. He had previously worked as a temporary systems engineer with Modis, an employment agency, according to a financial statement he submitted in court after his wife filed for divorce in March 2016, in which he said he made about $93,000 annually before taxes.
He indicated at the time that he was living at the Water Terrace apartments, the sprawling Sunrise complex where the shooting took place. Mr. Huber’s ex-wife said in the court filings that the couple had married in 2000 and separated in 2009, and that their two children had lived in nearby Pembroke Pines since they were born.
April Evans, who lived in the Water Terrace complex until 2019, said she remembered the odd, grumbling man who lived in Apartment 102, Mr. Huber’s listed address. The unit was one flight down from her apartment, and while she did not know Mr. Huber’s name, she recalled a frightening incident two or three years ago in which she learned that the man in that unit had a gun.
An exterminator entered Ms. Evans’s apartment one day in 2018 or 2019 and said a man in the apartment downstairs had pointed a gun at him when he entered the unit, Ms. Evans said. The exterminator appeared upset and told her that the man appeared not to have seen the notices plastered around the building alerting residents that an exterminator would be coming, Ms. Evans said.
“I remember him saying, ‘When I walked in, he had a gun in my face,’” she said. “He just looked shaken.”
She said she had mostly avoided contact with her downstairs neighbor. The only interactions she had with him were when the two would pass by each other, she said, and he would only grumble in response to greetings from her and other neighbors.
She had noticed through his sliding glass door on one occasion that he seemed to have barely any furniture in his bedroom.
He lived alone but occasionally had two younger boys with him, she said. Mr. Huber and his ex-wife had two boys together, according to court records in the divorce, and they agreed that the children would spend most of their time with their mother, visiting Mr. Huber on some Fridays and Saturdays.
In 2004, when the couple was still together, they registered a company called Computer Troubleshooters 0512 with the state. Mr. Huber received a commercial pilot’s license in 1994 and was also authorized to be a flight instructor for single-engine airplanes, according to records from the Federal Aviation Administration.
A judge approved the couple’s divorce in April 2016, finding that “irreconcilable differences exist and have caused the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage.” The couple agreed to split many of their children’s expenses.
Mr. Huber’s ex-wife lives in a gated community of two-story houses with Spanish-tiled roofs and palm-tree-lined streets in Pembroke Pines. She could not be reached for comment on Tuesday or Wednesday. A police cruiser was parked near one of the community’s entrances.
Johnny Diaz reported from Sunrise, Patricia Mazzei from Miami, and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York. Michael H. Keller contributed reporting from New York. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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