The 2020 attack on Judge Esther Salas's family: the case behind Daniel's Law

What happened

On the evening of July 19, 2020, a man dressed as a delivery driver came to the North Brunswick, New Jersey home of US District Judge Esther Salas. The judge's 20-year-old son, Daniel, opened the door and was shot and killed. Salas's husband, Mark Anderl, was shot and critically wounded. Judge Salas was in the basement and was not hurt.

The attacker was Roy Den Hollander, an attorney who had appeared before Judge Salas in 2015. He left the scene and was found dead the next day in upstate New York from a self-inflicted gunshot. According to the FBI, he had compiled a file on the judge that included her home address, the names of her family members, and details about their routines.

The killing eight days earlier

The Salas attack was not the first that month. On July 11, 2020, Den Hollander shot and killed California attorney Marc Angelucci at Angelucci's front door in Cedarpines Park, near San Bernardino. A man rang the bell and said he had a package for Angelucci, and Angelucci was shot when he came to the door. Angelucci was a men's rights attorney and a rival of Den Hollander's in that legal circle. Investigators later matched the same handgun to both killings.

Both attacks used the same approach: a delivery-driver cover at a home address the attacker had researched in advance.

How he found them

Den Hollander had represented a client before Judge Salas in 2015, in a case challenging the military's male-only draft registration. After the attack, reporting established that he had researched the judge at length, including her home address and information about her family. He knew Angelucci from the men's rights legal circle they both worked in. The FBI recovered a list of additional potential targets, including other judges and doctors, in a vehicle linked to Den Hollander.

The addresses on that kind of list are not secret. A person's home address, phone number, and relatives are commonly collected and sold by data broker and people-search sites, which can turn a name into a home address that anyone is able to look up.

The laws this case produced

New Jersey passed Daniel's Law in 2020, shortly after the attack. It lets covered public servants, including judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers, require data brokers and others to stop publishing their home address and unlisted phone number. Covered people can sue for violations.

In December 2022, Congress passed the federal Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act as part of the annual defense bill. It lets federal judges require government agencies, companies, and data brokers to remove their personal information on request, and it bars data brokers from selling it. The law is named for Daniel Anderl.

Both laws exist because the personal information used to find these targets was publicly available.

What this means for your own exposure

If your work can make you a target, the risk in this case was not exotic. It did not require access to a sealed court file or an agency database. It came from personal information that is collected and sold about adults generally, including home addresses tied to the people who live there.

The laws above create a right to have that information removed. Using that right, and checking for the information to reappear, is the ongoing part of the work. Frontline Privacy finds that kind of exposure and files the removals; you can see what is currently public about you with a free scan.