Special Agent

Floyd B. Barrus, a retired special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, died March 8 at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks. He was 83. Barrus was born March 7, 1916, in Fairview, Wyo., where he was raised on a ranch. Barrus worked as a page in the U. S. Senate and also served as a special agent for the FBI for more than 30 years. His work took him to Boston, San Francisco, Sacramento and elsewhere. He also served in the Marines.

The FBI set up shop at the home of a 91-year-old man near Indianapolis, saying he has thousands of artifacts and cultural items originating from at least a dozen different countries and Native American tribes - some of them acquired improperly. Agents and scientists, working in tents erected outside the house last week, were taking items from the home of Donald C. Miller and packing them up for further analysis. “I have never seen a collection like this in my life except at some of the largest museums,” said Larry Zimmerman, an anthropology and museum studies professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who is helping the FBI figure out what's what in the private collection.

A supervisory special agent for the Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service has been indicted on charges of perjury, the first INS special agent in memory to be charged with a crime. The federal grand jury indictment of Alvaro A. Bracamonte, 56, of Huntington Beach was released Thursday. No decision has been made on Bracamonte's job status, pending the outcome of the criminal charge, according to William Carroll, deputy director of the INS Los Angeles district.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The FBI special agent who shot and killed a friend of one of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers was cleared Tuesday of any criminal wrongdoing after he told investigators he feared for his life when Ibragim Todashev hit him in the head with a coffee table and lunged at him with a long pole. In a letter to FBI Director James Comey, Jeffrey L. Ashton, the Florida state attorney in Orlando where Todashev was shot, said he based his decision not to prosecute the special agent largely on eyewitness accounts from Massachusetts State Police troopers who witnessed much of the brawl in Todashev's condo in May. “The actions of the special agent of the FBI were justified in self defense and in defense of another,” Ashton concluded.

William Gore, FBI special agent in charge of the San Diego office, will retire at the end of January and become chief of investigations for the San Diego County district attorney's office.

Special Agent Barry Lee Bush loved his job. He reveled in the challenges crime scenes presented and took pride in what he managed to extricate from them, fellow FBI Agent Jeff Lanza said. Nearly a decade after the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, Bush still told Lanza stories about his work scavenging the Nairobi offices of the Mercy International Relief Agency, a Saudi Arabian charity with strong ties to Al Qaeda.

When Larry Lawler arrived from Minneapolis in April, 1988, to take over the FBI's Los Angeles office, he found the nation's third largest bureau battered by an espionage scandal, discrimination allegations and agents despondent over low pay. "Morale was pretty low," Lawler said in an interview last week in his office in the Federal Building in Westwood. What's more, things got worse.

The gig: Leading the fight against Medicare fraud in Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii, Glenn Ferry is special agent in charge for the Los Angeles regional office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general. Scene of the crime: Ferry's first brush with crime-fighting came at age 7. On a trip to the grocery store with his mother in the Philadelphia suburbs, they stumbled upon a robbery in progress. Within seconds, the police arrived and gunshots were shattering glass.

The FBI has launched a preliminary civil rights investigation into the death of a Bakersfield man who was shot and killed by an off-duty IRS agent after a traffic dispute on the Golden State Freeway in Arleta in July. A spokesman for the Department of Justice confirmed this week that his agency requested the investigation into the shooting of Mickey Jay Smith after a complaint filed with the department. FBI spokesman John Hoos said the investigation was opened Sept.

A Los Angeles Secret Service official has been named special agent in charge of the Spokane, Wash., office of the U.S. Secret Service, the agency announced Monday. Neil J. Goodman, 45, who was assistant to the special agent of the agency's Los Angeles office, succeeds Tim Trombly, who has headed the Spokane office for nine years and has been named special agent in charge of the agency's office in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Authorities are searching for a man who shot an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Friday afternoon near Sacramento. The special agent, who was not identified, was shot about 3 p.m. while working with investigators from the Roseville Police Department, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agent was taken to a hospital and was in stable condition, the agency said. The gunman fled and remained at large Friday afternoon. Roseville is about 18 miles from Sacramento.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot Friday near Sacramento was assisting local police in apprehending a wanted parolee, authorities said. The suspect, Sammy Duran, remained at large Friday evening, but authorities said they have him contained in a Roseville neighborhood, said Lt. Cal Walstadt of the Roseville Police Department. Roseville Police Department officials said Duran was barricaded in a house alone and officers were communicating with him by telephone. Two Roseville Police Department officers were injured by shrapnel during a gun battle, Walstadt said.

A college student mistakenly left in a Drug Enforcement Administration interrogation room for five days will receive $4.1 million from the government in a settlement in advance of a lawsuit. The settlement was announced Tuesday in San Diego by the student, Daniel Chong, 25, and his lawyer, Eugene Iredale. "It was an accident, a really bad, horrible accident," said Chong, who added that he now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. The bizarre event in April 2012 began when Chong, an engineering student at UC San Diego, went to a house near campus to smoke marijuana with friends and found himself swept up in a DEA raid.

The gig: Leading the fight against Medicare fraud in Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii, Glenn Ferry is special agent in charge for the Los Angeles regional office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general. Scene of the crime: Ferry's first brush with crime-fighting came at age 7. On a trip to the grocery store with his mother in the Philadelphia suburbs, they stumbled upon a robbery in progress. Within seconds, the police arrived and gunshots were shattering glass.

Just before pulling the pistol he would use to shoot himself at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Carnell Moore apparently tried to keep bystanders out of harm's way, authorities said. In a suicide note quoted by authorities Friday, Moore wrote: “The monster within me was getting stronger and while I could not save myself I could spare others.” The airport's Terminal B was closed down for about 10 hours Thursday after Moore, 29, a  maintenance worker from Beaumont, Texas, shot himself in the head as he was being approached by a Homeland Security agent in the ticketing area.

A phone tip, perhaps prompted by a $25,000 reward, led investigators to the man suspected in the kidnapping and assault of a 10-year-old Northridge girl, authorities said. Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said authorities received the information late Tuesday night about Tobias Dustin Summers, roughly three weeks after surveillance footage captured Summers crossing into Tecate, Mexico. Authorities then focused their search south of the border, he said, where the FBI offered a "highly publicized" $25,000 reward.

Federal and local authorities arrested 38 gang members and confiscated dozens of weapons in South Los Angeles this week, the culmination of two investigations into increased violence in the Baldwin Village neighborhood early this year, officials said. The arrests of members of the Black P-Stone Bloods and Rollin' 20s Crips occurred in early-morning raids Wednesday and Thursday, said John Torres, special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The gang members were booked on a variety of narcotics and firearms charges.

An Orange County pharmacist who admitted to wiring $2,050 to Pakistan to be used to fund terrorist activities was sentenced Friday to five years in federal prison. Oytun Ayse Mihalik, 40, a Turkish national and permanent U.S. resident, pleaded guilty in August to one count of providing material support to terrorists after sending three money orders over a month in late 2010 and early 2011. Mihalik used a false name, “Cindy Palmer,” to send the funds, according to authorities.

A reputed Mexican drug cartel leader was charged in the ambush slaying this year of a U.S. immigration officer in Mexico — a killing that set off a massive search for the assailants on both sides of the border. Julian Zapata Espinoza, an alleged chief with the Zetas cartel, pleaded not guilty in a brief court appearance Wednesday in the killing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime Zapata on Feb. 15. He and another agent, who was wounded, were ambushed in their car by a convoy of vehicles in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi.