The FBI’s child pornography case against suspect David Lee Huber remains largely under wraps on Thursday – two days after he allegedly peeked through the doorbell camera and fired an assault gun through the closed door of his southern apartment. Florida, killing two FBI agents who came to fulfill a federal warrant and wound three others.
Huber, who investigators believe then pointed the gun at himself and died of suicide after the standoff, was the subject of a “common” child pornography case, an unnamed police officer told the Miami Herald. This meant that he was suspected of exchanging images of underage children having sex, and not the most serious crime of making and distributing illegal graphic images.
The full extent of Huber’s online activities remains under investigation, and the FBI is evaluating a hard drive on Huber’s computer and other evidence recovered after the deadly attack on Tuesday, the source told the Herald. The federal warrant granting agents permission to search the address remains sealed, and the FBI has publicly released few details about the case against Huber and what happened during the operation.
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Florida court records show Huber with only minor traffic violations. The 55-year-old man had no sex offender record and no Florida arrest record. Records show that he owned computer consulting firms from 2008 until last year. He was licensed as a commercial pilot in 1994.
Broward County records show that he divorced in 2016. Fox News’s efforts to contact his ex-wife and two children have been unsuccessful.
An FBI forensic team was coming from Washington, DC, and the property and gated community in Sunrise, Florida, where the operation took place, remained isolated on Wednesday.
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Miami FBI special agent Mike Leverock told the Herald that “an inspection team” from Washington, DC, “is reviewing the incident” and gathering forensic evidence at Huber’s apartment.
FBI Director Christopher Wray also flew to South Florida on Wednesday to take a tour of the shooting scene. He then went to the Miramar office’s field office to meet with the families of the dead agents and members of the child pornography task force, as well as the United States attorney, Ariana Fajardo Orshan, and his first assistant, the prosecutor Tony Gonzalez, reported the Herald.
The FBI identified the two agents killed on Tuesday as Laura Schwartzenberger and Daniel Alfin.
On Wednesday, the agency said two wounded FBI agents had been released from the Broward Medical Health Center. A third wounded agent was treated at the scene and did not require hospitalization.
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Schwartzenberger, 43, and an agent for 15 years was part of Rockway Middle School’s magnetic law studies program, teaching children about the dangers of the internet, including sexual exploitation and cyberbullying. She was married and had two children.
Alfin, 36, and an agent for almost 13 years, was married and had a son and made headlines seven years ago when he led a team that took down Naples, Florida, the chief administrator of Playpen, the world’s largest famous child pornography site.
Steven Chase created the site on Tor, an open network on the Internet where users can communicate anonymously through “hidden services” sites. Playpen had more than 150,000 users worldwide. Members uploaded and viewed tens of thousands of graphic images of young victims, categorized by age, sex and type of sexual activity involved. The FBI launched an investigation in 2014 after Playpen’s IP address was accidentally revealed.
After Chase’s arrest in 2015, the FBI kept the site operating for two weeks to identify other users, hiding malware in the images to discover their IP addresses, the Associated Press reported. From that effort, investigators sent more than 1,000 leads to FBI field offices across the country and thousands more to law enforcement agencies abroad.
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According to the FBI, 350 arrests were made in the United States and 548 internationally, including 25 producers of child pornography and 51 abusers. The operation identified or rescued 55 American children who were sexually abused and 296 internationally. Chase was 30 years old.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.