The 2020 attack on Judge Esther Salas's family — the case that led to Daniel's Law

What happened

On the evening of July 19, 2020, a man dressed as a FedEx delivery driver arrived at the home of US District Judge Esther Salas in North Brunswick, New Jersey. The judge's son Daniel, 20, opened the door. The attacker shot Daniel, killing him. Mark Anderl, Salas's husband, was also shot and critically wounded. Judge Salas was in the basement and was uninjured.

The attacker, Roy Den Hollander, was a self-styled men's rights attorney who had appeared before Judge Salas in 2015. He fled and was found dead the following day in upstate New York from an apparent suicide. Investigators recovered evidence that he had compiled a detailed file on the judge, including her home address, family member names, and routines.

The 8-day precursor

The Salas attack was not Den Hollander's first that month. On July 11, 2020, eight days earlier, he shot and killed California attorney Marc Angelucci at Angelucci's front door in San Bernardino County. Angelucci was a fellow men's rights attorney and a rival in that small legal world. Den Hollander used the same playbook for both killings: a deliveryman pose, a residence reached through publicly available data, a doorstep ambush.

The deliveryman cover is operationally simple. The home address is the part that has to be researched in advance. For both targets, that research ran through commercially available people-search sources.

How it started

Den Hollander had appeared before Judge Salas in 2015 representing a client in a case challenging the Selective Service System. Reporting after the attack established that he had spent significant time researching Salas through publicly accessible information sources, including data sold by people-search and commercial data brokers. The dossier reportedly contained Salas's home address, the names of her husband and son, and information about her family's routines.

The "men's rights attorney" self-identification was not incidental. It was how he found Angelucci, his rival in that movement, and it shaped the network he drew his targets from. The data broker layer is what converted those targets from names into doorsteps.

The case that produced the Anderl Act

This case directly produced the federal Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, also called the Lieu Act after primary sponsor Rep. Ted Lieu. It was signed in late 2022 as part of the FY2023 NDAA. The act bars federal agencies and private companies from publicly sharing personal information of federal judges and their families, and forces data brokers to remove that info on request.

New Jersey passed Daniel's Law at the state level first, in 2020. Both statutes exist because Salas's home address was sitting on a broker page when an aggrieved litigant came looking.

What this means for you

If you're a sworn officer, a judge, a prosecutor, or anyone whose work makes enemies: the data that Den Hollander used to find his targets is the same data that's on a broker page about you right now. The broker layer was the upstream vector. It was not insider information, not a leak from the courthouse, not a docket pull. It was a name converted to an address by the same lookup that runs every day on every first responder in the country.

Daniel's Law lets covered persons in NJ sue brokers themselves for failing to remove their info. The federal Anderl Act gives federal judges and their families the same mechanism nationally.

The legal mechanisms work after the fact. Continuous broker cleanup is the part that works before the next attempt.

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