An FBI report released to The Express-Times shows miscommunication brought two FBI teams together with heavily armed bank robbers under unexpected circumstances
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A recently released report details the 2007 shooting death of FBI Special Agent Barry Lee Bush, of Forks Township.
Two FBI teams spent the morning of April 5, 2007, tailing a white car and a black car that carried serial bank robbers armed with high-powered assault rifles in Hunterdon County.
Agents sensed another stickup was about to go down.
The plan called for Bush’s special operations team to perform surveillance that morning and a SWAT team to make the arrests.
But midway through the operation, with the bandits’ cars separated on Route 22 in Readington Township, that plan changed.
Bush, a veteran FBI agent from Forks Township, closed in on the white car in a garden center parking lot when orders came from the command post to do so. But the orders came from an agent unaware that SWAT was there, too, with the same responsibility.
Bush, 52, died when a SWAT agent opened fire with his M4 rifle, mistaking Bush and his black car for the other faction of bank robbers.
Almost six years after Bush’s death at the hands of a fellow agent, the FBI has released documents that detail how it happened.
The bureau’s administrative inquiry shows a series of miscommunications, conflicting orders, unfulfilled instructions and bad luck brought two FBI teams together with heavily armed felons under unexpected, confusing and ultimately deadly circumstances.
The inquiry reveals:
- The command post that ordered Bush’s unit to take the white car didn’t know the SWAT team was also there with the responsibility to arrest.
- When Bush’s unit received an OK to close in, it was communicated on a radio channel that only Bush’s unit could hear.
- Although written orders said Newark SWAT would maintain a presence in the command post and a tactical operations center, neither was staffed with a SWAT agent.
- SWAT and Bush’s unit had separate written orders, and a joint briefing was never held.
- The SWAT agent who mistakenly fired on Bush was a “new operator,” didn’t receive a detailed briefing on the case and never saw copies of an alert or operational orders. The information would have included photos and descriptions of the suspects and the types of weapons and vehicles they typically used.
- The agent who fired on Bush as he arrived had never met or seen Bush before. He also wasn’t told the makes and models of the robbers’ cars, only that one was white and one was black.
- Bush was in plainclothes and wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest. He was shot as he emerged from a black bureau-issued car, and he never unholstered his handgun.
The Express-Times used the Freedom of Information Act to access the FBI’s 10-page administrative inquiry into the friendly-fire death. All names of those involved except Bush were redacted prior to the FBI’s release of documents on Jan. 31 of this year.
The newspaper requested them in 2012 leading up to the fifth anniversary of Bush’s death. The administrative inquiry is dated April 9, 2007.
Danger in close quarters
It’s not clear whether the FBI considers Bush’s death preventable, whether anyone was disciplined or whether the FBI changed policies or strategies in light of it.
The FBI office in Newark, where Bush worked, directed recent questions to the national FBI office in Washington, D.C., which released the report. Special Agent Ann Todd, an FBI spokeswoman in Washington, said she couldn’t comment on the circumstances involving Bush’s death.
The FBI did say in the weeks after Bush’s death that the shooter was within the FBI’s guidelines for firing his weapon, and FBI Director Robert Mueller at the time called it “a tragic mistake.”
Todd said the FBI in January 2012 implemented new firearms training protocols and standardized training for every FBI field office with a focus on close-quarters encounters.
She said the changes were based on a review of nearly 200 agent-involved shootings over 17 years, three-fourths of which involved suspects within 3 yards of agents when shots were exchanged. Bush was shot from 4 yards away.
“The FBI recognizes that training is critical to officer safety,” Todd said. “All of the various types of law enforcement training underscore the new emphasis on armed confrontations in close quarters.”
'No one expected that'Emanuel Kapelsohn, a nationally prominent police trainer based in Fogelsville and a lawyer with the Lesavoy Butz & Seitz firm in Allentown, has testified in hundreds of cases involving law enforcement shootings across the U.S.
Trainers like him try to prevent so-called blue-on-blue tragedies, but he said it’s not fair to call the death of any law enforcement officer preventable.
“It’s understood that things almost never go according to plan,” he said. “I’ve never looked at one single police shooting situation where the officer performed perfectly. It’s just not going to happen.”
Many of the problems that preceded Bush’s death commonly plague law enforcement operations, Kapelsohn said, even successful ones.
But the problems usually don’t become publicly known unless they lead to catastrophe.
He pointed to a standoff in Kutztown, Pa., in recent years in which a police chief persuaded a suspect to exit the home. But the chief committed “a major, major mistake,” Kapelsohn said: The chief didn’t tell other officers the suspect agreed to come out.
The suspect could have been shot by police or come out firing at police. But aside from those at the scene, Kapelsohn said, few knew about the mistake because it didn’t result in a death.
Miscommunication and confusion arise in almost every high-stakes operation because officers can’t account for everything suspects might do.
“The military saying is the best made plan goes to pieces upon your first contact with the enemy,” Kapelsohn said. “There’s another team playing the game. You can’t control everything.”
Law enforcement can’t even fully account for how their colleagues will react.
“No one here expected Bush to pull up right next to the suspect vehicle, in a vehicle the same color as one of the suspect vehicles, in plain clothes,” he said. “No one expected that.”
Two squads, two plans
To put it in overly simple terms, the problems that preceded Bush’s death amounted to the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.
The SWAT team and a Special Operations Group that included Bush were assigned to stop a quartet of robbers who had burst into four New Jersey banks.
In increasingly violent shows of force in the prior weeks, the robbers fired warning shots from powerful weapons to scare bank workers into turning over at least $70,000.
The change in arrest orders brought SWAT and SOG together with the robbers without either team knowing the other was supposed to be there.
But the fatal meeting might have been avoided if not for other problems.
The written orders said SWAT would use two vehicles, but it actually used six. With two SWAT vehicles engaging the robbers’ black car, it wasn’t clear to everyone that more SWAT vehicles were available to take the white car.
And even though only SOG could hear the change in plans, SWAT agents presumably could have nixed it had they been in the command post as orders called for.
When it appeared imminent the suspects were about to rob a PNC Bank in Readington Township, part of the SWAT team engaged the robbers’ black car in the bank parking lot on Route 22.
Another part of the SWAT team moved to engage the robbers’ white car across the highway in the Arvins Farm & Garden Center parking lot.
At the same time, after getting the OK to arrest, Bush sped his black Chevrolet Impala past a SWAT vehicle on the highway and into the garden center lot.
Just as an agent threw a flash-bang device and SWAT agents spilled out of a van, Bush pulled up to the passenger side of the robbers’ car and emerged in plain clothes.
The new agent mistook the flash-bang and its echo for enemy fire, the service car for the robbers’ car and Bush for a robber. He fired three .233-caliber rounds, striking Bush once in the right shoulder.
No one else fired a shot.
Friend or foe?
Any time a law enforcement officer works in plain clothes, said Kapelsohn, the police trainer, there’s a risk fellow officers will mistake him for a suspect.
Officers are trained how to enter a critical situation when they’re off duty or in plain clothes. But human nature makes it hard for law enforcement to identify a fellow officer in a life-or-death situation.
When a person’s life is on the line, Kapelsohn said, vision is tunneled toward the deadly threat — a gun, for instance, instead of the person holding the gun.
Bush was white and in his 50s while the robbers were Hispanic and in their 20s, but the agent who shot Bush said he didn’t see Bush’s face. He said in the FBI report that he focused on a dark object on Bush’s right side, likely Bush’s service weapon.
Kapelsohn said he never heard of someone mistaking a flash-bang for enemy fire, but he wasn’t surprised that it happened. He said he recently worked on two cases where an officer accidentally fired his own weapon and mistook it for enemy fire. He also said he worked on another case where an officer shot himself in the leg then looked for the shooter.
In an extreme case of mistaken gunfire, New York police fired scores of shots at a man who never fired. Kapelsohn said officers continually mistook shots fired by fellow officers for shots fired by the suspect, who was unarmed.
'A great friend, neighbor'
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Karen Bush and Joe Douress pose in this 2008 photo with a photo of Barry Bush, the FBI special agent killed in 2007 during a bank robbery. The American flag in the background flew at the site were Bush was killed.
On Cornwallis Drive in Forks Township, Barry Bush isn’t best known for an FBI career that took him to investigate the U.S. embassy bombing in Kenya and other high-profile cases around the world.
He’s not known as the first FBI agent killed in the line of duty in New Jersey. He’s not known as the second FBI agent killed by a fellow agent since the bureau was founded in 1908. He’s not even known as an agent so admired that people he arrested called the FBI to ask if they could donate to his family.
He’s known for throwing his clubs after a bad golf shot. For lamenting the failures of the Philadelphia sports teams. For being a regular guy and good friend.
“There’s probably nothing in that report that would be necessarily illuminating to me about what happened that tragic day,” said Joe Douress, Bush’s best friend who still lives across Cornwallis Drive from Bush’s wife of 19 years, Karen. “At the end of the day, none of this brings Barry back.”
Karen Bush, who has rarely spoken publicly about her husband’s death, couldn’t be reached for comment for this story.
Douress said Karen Bush is very familiar with the circumstances of Barry Bush’s death, but Douress didn’t want to speculate on what went wrong.
Instead, he spoke of meeting Karen Bush and other volunteers last weekend to plan the golf tournament they hold each year in the fallen agent’s memory. Scheduled for May 25 this year at Green Pond Country Club in Bethlehem Township, Pa., it raises money for law-enforcement scholarships and ill children.
“I’m doing my best to memorialize a great guy,” Douress said. “We lost a great friend and a great neighbor, not an FBI agent.”
The FBI report says Bush was the only SOG agent to go for the arrest. Other SOG agents saw the SWAT team and decided to guard the perimeter.
“We’ll never know what was in Bush’s mind … what he thought or saw or heard or didn’t see,” Kapelsohn said. “This is probably something that the other agents are going to ask for a million years: Why did he do that?”