Month: July 2021

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News (b)

Persevering was a big part of Tai’s growing up in a rough neighborhood outside Tampa, Florida. Drugs and crime were constants, and Tai insulated herself by focusing on school and extracurricular activities like band, soccer, and track. “It kept me on a good path,” she said.

One day she saw U.S. Marshals deputies in her neighborhood serving a warrant. One of them was a Black female—the first she had ever seen wearing a badge. Tai approached her, asked her about it, and received the deputy’s business card to keep in contact—a moment that has stuck with Tai.

San Juan SWAT Senior Team Leader Mike Dubravetz, who has been an agent for 18 years, said those kinds of early impressions can set someone’s future course.

“If somebody wouldn’t have come to me at one point in my young days and said, ‘Mike, you should try out for SWAT’ and me not thinking it was ever for me, I probably never would have done it,” said Dubravetz. “I’d be somewhere different. And people seeing that there are opportunities like Tai has, it just opens up doors for people who may not know that those opportunities exist.”

Tai’s successes in high school earned her a scholarship to Bethune-Cookman University, a historically Black university in Daytona Beach. There she studied criminal justice, with an eye toward becoming a police officer. 

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

In January 2020, a Pennsylvania police department investigated a missing person report. A young woman had disappeared in late summer 2019, and she had not contacted family or friends. The case had gone cold, and investigators were short on leads.  
  
The big break in the case came when an intelligence analyst in an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and a Delaware task force officer contacted the police department. The analyst and task force officer shared information they had received from a confidential source—the name of an associate, the first name of a potential suspect, and information about the possible disposal of a body.

The FBI analyst searched the N-DEx System using the names and found a police report involving the suspect. These two seemingly unconnected pieces of information were brought together using N-DEx, a powerful tool for criminal justice agencies. The database allows law enforcement personnel to search, link, analyze, and share federal, state, local, and tribal records to help fill gaps in the information in a case. That’s exactly what happened in this case.
  
Using the N-DEx System, investigators identified the suspect, found her location, and discovered a probation violation. Upon entering the suspect’s home, investigators noticed the odor of decomposition. During their search, investigators located the missing woman’s body in a plastic storage bin in the suspect’s basement. They charged the suspect with first-degree murder and drug delivery resulting in death.  

Learn more about N-DEx.