archive.is/GuYpz
lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/index.ssf/2013/02/missteps_confusion_reigned_as.html
" 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. "
