Broward County Sheriff's Detective Todd Fatta was shot to death, and his partner Sgt. Angelo Cedeno was wounded in the same August 19 attack, when trying to serve a child porn search warrant on a suspect who fired a high-powered weapon at them – a suspect known to have threatened law enforcement in the past when they tried to stop his child porn activities.
The suspect, Kenneth Wilk, had been arrested in 1993 for threatening officers who came to serve a different child porn warrant, according to several reports, while his roommate Kelly Ray Jones – an already-registered sex offender – was arrested last month for sending child porn images to an undercover detective by Internet.
Wilk is believed to have had several high-powered weapons in the house, including the one he fired at Fatta and Cedeno. Fatta was hit in the chest when his bulletproof vest was penetrated, while Cedeno suffered hand and shoulder wounds. Cedeno is in stable condition following surgery. Other officers on the scene are reported to have fired in return at Wilk but the suspect was uninjured.
Jones remains behind bars and was not at the house when Fatta and Cedeno arrived to serve the warrant. Wilk refused to accept the warrant, then fired on the deputies when they came into the house, according to Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne, who was reported fighting tears as he spoke to the press.
Adult Sites Against Child Pornography executive director Joan Irvine said she was saddened by the news of Fatta's killing and expressed sympathy for Fatta's and Cedeno's families.
"It's bad enough that these criminals are distributing child pornography," an outraged Irvine told AVNOnline.com. "But then to kill one deputy and wound another shows the type of criminal who is involved in distributing child pornography. These people are the worst as they make money off the sickness of pedophilia."
Whether Fatta is the first American law enforcement officer to be killed in the line of duty involving a child porn case is not yet known. Irvine did say that a case like this is almost entirely unusual, with an FBI agent having told ASACP that, as a rule, child pornographers and pedophiles usually offer no resistance when arrested.
Fatta and Cedeno were part of the multi-agency Law Enforcement Against Child Harm task force. The warrant they were trying to serve was aimed at finding additional material, after Wilk reportedly bragged at the previous month's visit that law enforcement had not found all the child porn at the time, Jenne told reporters. Exactly what kind of weapon Wilk used has yet to be disclosed.
Jones's arrest last month was also a violation of a federal probation agreement, according to a broadcast news report, because the deal included formal orders that he stay off the Internet. The undercover detective to whom he sent child porn via Internet last month turned out to be the same detective who arrested him in early 2001 on six child porn charges, according to Officer.com.
Fatta was 33 years old and the first Broward County sheriff's deputy killed in the line of duty since April 2003, when 25-year-old Philip Billings was shot to death by a pair of would-be auto part thieves who were subsequently found dead in a reported murder-suicide act.
