Plaque pays tribute to fallen FBI agents FBI Agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger. Photo via FBI.
By Steve Neavling
FBI Agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger, who were killed while serving a search warrant at a home in Florida in February, were honored Thursday at the field office where they worked in Miami.
Law enforcement officials unveiled a plaque honoring the fallen agents.
Alfin and Schwartzenberger specialized in investigating child pornography and crimes against children and worked out of the Miami Field Office.
Alfin, a New York native, was first assigned to the FBI’s Albany Field Office office in 2009. Over the past six years, he investigated crimes against children. He had a wife and child.
Schwartzenberger, 43, joined the bureau’s Albuquerque Field Office in 2005 and was transferred to Miami in 2010. She tracked suspects accused of exploiting children online. She had a husband and two children.
They were shot outside the Sunrise, Fla., apartment of David Lee Huber, a 55-year-old systems engineer who was suspected of possessing child pornography. Three other FBI agents were shot and have since recovered.
The shooting was one of the deadliest in FBI history.
Dallas SAC DeSarno, SAC Piro, and ASAC Fleck unveil a plaque today dedicated to Fallen Agents Dan Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger who were killed in the line of duty on2/2/2021 in Sunrise, Florida. SAC DeSarno presented the plaque on behalf of the employees of FBI Dallas. pic.twitter.com/2oZjhcSQSo
Raul Bujanda has been appointed special agent in charge of the FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office in New Mexico.
Bujanda joined the FBI as a special agent in 2002, when he served in the Portland Field Office in Oregon and investigated violent crime, gang, and Mexican-based drug trafficking organizations.
Bujanda then joined the El Paso Field Office in Texas in 2008 to work on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force strike force, which included members from the DEA, Homeland Security Investigations, and Border Patrol. He also continued to investigate Mexican-based drug trafficking organizations. In 2010, Bujanda was promoted to supervisory special agent of the El Paso strike force.
In 2013, Bujanda became unit chief in the Criminal Justice Information Services Division in West Virginia.
In 2015, Bujanda was tapped to serve as assistant inspector and team leader in the Inspection Division at FBI headquarters. He was promoted in 2016 to assistant special agent in charge of the National Security Branch in the Oklahoma City Field Office before serving as the assistant special agent in charge of Oklahoma City’s Criminal Branch, where he worked criminal violations and administrative matters.
Bujanda was named section chief of the Criminal Investigative Division’s National Covert Operations Section in 2019, managing and overseeing all criminal and national security undercover operations for the FBI.
Before joining the FBI, Bujanda was a special agent in the Immigration and Naturalization Service and a fifth-grade teacher.
President Biden is expected to nominate David Chipman, a prominent gun control advocate, to lead the ATF, The New York Times reports.
Biden’s pick, David Chipman, is a gun owner, former ATF agent and senior policy adviser at Giffords, a gun control advocacy group led by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. Chipman has advocated for gun restrictions, including a ban on assault weapons.
Biden is expected to announce his nomination today.
Biden has faced pressure by gun control groups to pick someone to head the ATF, which has been without a permanent director since 2015 as the nation continues to grapple with mass shootings.
As vice president, Biden recommended in 2013 that President Obama pick a Senate-confirmed ATF director. Obama followed through with the confirmation of B. Todd Jones in 2013, but Jones resigned in 2015, and the agency has been without a permanent director since.
The current acting director, appointed by President Trump, is Regina Lombardo.
Whether Biden can muster the 51 votes required to confirm a permanent leader is an open question. Republicans have blocked ATF candidates who were far friendlier to the pro-gun base.
Louis M. Quesada, special agent in charge of the El Paso Field Office, will leave his post on Friday to become deputy assistant director of the bureau’s Incident Response Group in Quantico.
Quesada was promoted to head of the El Paso office in October 2019.
“Both professionally and personally, it has been a fantastic time, a time of growth,” Quesada told the El Paso Times. “I’m not from this area, but it’s been a wonderful experience. It’s a great community and I think that attributes to why El Paso is El Paso. For a major city to have the third least violent crimes and the fifth overall crime, I think speaks a lot to the people in the community and to the relationships that the law enforcement has with each other, which is something that I’ve never experienced in any other office in the last 25-plus years that I’ve been in the FBI.”
Quesada joined the FBI as a special agent in 1995 and began working in the Miami Field Office, where he investigated violent crimes with a focus on bank robberies, extortion, and kidnappings. In 1998, Quesada voluntarily transferred to the San Juan Field Office in Puerto Rico before returning to Miami in 2001 to investigates drugs. In both offices, Quesada served on the SWAT teams.
Quesada was promoted in 2003 to supervisory special agent and began working in the Counterterrorism Division of the Terrorist Screening Center, which manages and operates the nation’s terrorist watch list.
In 2005, he transferred to the FBI Academy in Quantico as a defensive tactics instructor. Quesada returned to Miami two years later as the supervisor of the violent gang and high-intensity drug trafficking area task force. He later became the acting assistant special agent in charge of Miami’s Criminal Branch.
In 2010, Quesada became the assistant legal attaché in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he promoted FBI interests in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
In 2012, Quesada was promoted to a unit chief position in the Criminal Investigative Division at FBI Headquarters in Washington, focusing on counter-narcotics efforts in Latin America and the U.S. Southwest border.
In 2014, Quesada became legal attaché of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, focusing on counterterrorism threats throughout the Balkans and the U.S.
A year later, Quesada became the assistant special agent in charge of the Criminal Branch in the Jackson Field Office in Mississippi. In 2017, he was appointed to assistant section chief in the Training Division, and a year later was promoted to section chief of the division’s Training Services Section.
Quesada earned a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies from Florida International University
A Border Patrol agent and off-duty firefighter are credited with saving the life of a woman who intended to jump off a bridge along an interstate in California on Tuesday morning, CBP said.
The Border Patrol agent, who works in the San Diego Sector, was driving eastbound on I-8 in Pine Valley at 7 a.m. when he spotted a woman standing on the rails of the Pine Valle Bridge near the westbound traffic lanes. He turned around and was met with an off-duty firefighter. Together, they removed the woman from the edge of the bridge before she was able to jump.
The woman was transferred to the California Highway Patrol for care and assistance.
“A tragedy was avoided today thanks to the efforts of these heroes,” Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke said in a statement. “Even though border security is our primary mission, our agents respond to a multitude of significant events in the areas they patrol and consistently rise to the challenge.”
A police car stolen by notorious gangster John Dillinger after his daring escape from an Indiana jail in 1934 has returned to Indiana.
Dillinger escaped jail using a fake gun and stole the 1933 Ford V8 police car from Lake County Sheriff Lillian Holley and drove it to Chicago before abandoning it.
FBI agents killed Dillinger in a shootout on July 22, 1934, about four months after the escape.
The car was impounded and then auctioned off.
“A gentleman from Milwaukee acquired the car,” Lake County Realtor Roger Pace, who helped track the car down, told WBOI. “He didn’t know what the car was. He relocated to Maine, decades later, he died.”
Now officials are searching for a permanent home to display the infamous car.
A 37-year-old Arizona man wanted in connection with the 2016 murder of his girlfriend has been added to the U.S. Marshals 15 Most Wanted List, the agency announced Monday.
Raymond “RJ” McLeod is the first fugitive to debut on the list with a $15,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
McLeod is wanted by the San Diego Police Department for the murder of 30-year-old Krystal Mitchell.
Authorities believe he fled the country and may be hiding out in Mexico or Central America. He was last spotted in Belize in 2018 and Guatemala in 2017.
“McLeod poses a significant threat to the public and must be brought to justice,” U.S. Marshal Service Director Donald Washington said in a statement.
The San Diego District Attorney’s Office charged McLeod with murder after Mitchell was found dead in June 2016 at an apartment in San Diego, where the couple was visiting friends. McLeod was the last known person to see Mitchell alive, authorities said.
“The passage of time will never deter the Marshals’ fugitive investigation for McLeod,” U.S. Marshal Steve Stafford of the Southern District of California said. “If anything, it fuels our determination. We will leave no stone unturned until he is brought to justice.”
McLeod is 5 feet 11 inches tall and has brown hair and hazel eyes. At the time he fled, McLeod weighed 245 pounds and had “a tattooed muscular physique.”
