From Nairobi to New Jersey, a special agent

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.

“He really enjoyed how he stood up to the challenge of getting evidence from that situation,” said Lanza, who had worked beside Bush on the 12-member Public Corruption Squad in Kansas City, Mo., in the late 1980s and remained friends with the man he said showed him “the ropes.”

Bush, of Forks Township, was mortally wounded Thursday, probably by a bullet from another agent’s gun, as he and members of his FBI unit confronted bank robbery suspects in Readington Township, N.J. Two suspects were caught at the scene in front of a PNC Bank, and a third was captured Friday in nearby woods after trying to carjack a woman.

At 52, Bush was five years short of the FBI’s mandatory retirement age. He joined the force in 1987 after serving as a police officer in Boyertown and Pottstown, where he spent his childhood.

In a 1987 interview with the Pottstown Mercury on the occasion of his joining the FBI, Bush said he first dreamed of becoming an agent when he graduated from Pottstown High School in 1972. “The FBI is the ultimate in law enforcement, and I’m just glad to have a chance to join a high-quality organization,” he told the newspaper. Over the next 20 years, Bush’s work landed him in many courtrooms, where he served as a witness in several high-profile cases. He testified in the March 2001 trial in Manhattan federal court of four Al Qaeda operatives charged in the embassy bombing in Kenya. All were convicted.

Bush also played a key role in the prosecution of James C. Kopp, an abortion opponent convicted of killing Buffalo, N.Y., area obstetrician Barnett A. Slepian in 1998. While searching a Jersey City, N.J., apartment Kopp had rented under the name “Clyde Swenson,” Bush found a notebook containing the doctor’s name and office telephone number.

In a less momentous case, Bush led a team that turned the tables on Alan J. Weberman, who became famous in the 1970s for searching through the trash of celebrities. After a tip from an informant, FBI agents trailed Weberman in 2000 and went through his trash, finding several plastic bags with evidence of marijuana residue.

The FBI said Bush was its first agent killed in the line of duty since Leonard W. Hatton died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

“[Bush] was old-time FBI -- he loved to work the streets and he hated to do paperwork,” said Jack Jupin, a supervising special agent in the Newark, N.J., office who got to know Bush through countless hours spent staking out suspects. “He always wanted to take the bad guys off the streets, and that’s what he died doing.”

Jupin said Bush was effective at recruiting informants because “he never lied, and he never promised something he couldn’t deliver.” He added that on the news of Bush’s death, some people who had been arrested by Bush years earlier called the bureau to ask if they could make a donation to his family.

Bush had been part of a Newark-based team that was investigating a series of bank robberies in central New Jersey. Acting on a tip that three suspects were planning to rob the bank Thursday, the agents followed them to the location.

According to the FBI, Bush was struck when a fellow agent’s weapon discharged accidentally.

Two suspects, Wilfredo Berrios, 28, and Michael Cruz, 21, were apprehended at the scene. Pedro Ruiz, acting agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark office, said they had two assault rifles and a handgun but did not fire when Bush and the other agents closed in on them outside the PNC Bank.

A third suspect, Francisco Herrera-Genao, escaped into a woods near a golf course. The 22-year-old Herrera-Genao was taken into custody Friday morning after an extensive search by the FBI, New Jersey state police and local agencies.

Their break came at 7:30 a.m., when an alarmed woman called 911 to say a “muddy man” was trying to carjack her as she prepared to leave home for work, State Police Supt. Rick Fuentes said at a Newark news conference. The woman sped off and drove about a quarter-mile before pulling over to call police.

Police dogs quickly flushed Herrera-Genao out of the woods a few miles from the bank, authorities said. New Jersey state troopers found him unarmed, shirtless and shoeless. As they approached, he placed his hands in his pockets and said, “Please shoot me. Please kill me now,” Fuentes said.

The suspects, all from New Brunswick, N.J., are set to appear Monday in U.S. District Court in Newark.

In Forks, mourners filed into the Bushes’ Cornwallis Drive home carrying trays of sandwiches and liters of soda while a pair of FBI agents stood guard, keeping the media away from the house. “They need privacy,” said an agent who wouldn’t give her name.

Neighbors wouldn’t talk about Bush, saying agents asked that they decline interviews.

One resident did say the neighborhood was “devastated” by the death of Bush, whose family in the late 1990s was one of the first to move to the development of modern, two-story homes with immaculately landscaped yards.

“When anyone described Barry as outstanding, that was an understatement,” he said.

Friday afternoon, a caravan of black sport utility vehicles entered Bush’s neighborhood, bringing FBI Director Robert Mueller to offer his condolences to the family.

Lanza, the agent who worked with Bush in Kansas City, described him as a dedicated family man who always had the names of his wife, Karen, and his two children, Steven and Jennifer, tripping off his tongue. He was flawlessly professional, Lanza said, respected and kind.

“Everyone he came in contact with liked him,” Lanza said. “It’s a tremendous loss to his family, to the FBI, to the country.”