On Sunday, July 19, 2020, a federal judge’s son was met with fatal shots from an alleged FedEx delivery person at the family’s home in New Jersey. Judge Esther Salas’s 20-year-old son, David Anderl, life was taken from him and his father, Mark Anderl, was shot and badly wounded at their home in New Brunswick. Mark was rushed to the hospital and is in stable condition, Womack told local media.
Law enforcement is weighing all possible causes. The shootings could have been a robbery gone wrong, among other possibilities, the gunman reportedly came to the door disguised as a delivery person.
The U.S. District Judge Esther Salas was at home in the basement at the time of the shooting but was not harmed. The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office will continue to investigate. Although they have identified the suspect as Roy Den Hollander— a self-described “anti-feminist” lawyer, that was found dead Monday, July 20th. It appeared he suffered from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was found in Rockland, New York (about a two-hour drive from the judge’s home).
When Mr. Den Hollander’s body was found, they also discovered an empty package nearby that was addressed to Judge Salas, according to a law enforcement official.
In fact, Den Hollander had a case challenging the military’s all-male draft pending before Salas, according to court documents. Mr. Den Hollander had a long history of filing lawsuits against programs that he believed favored women. In 2008, he told The New York Times that his anger toward feminists stemmed from his bitter divorce from a woman he married in Russia.
He called women “the real oppressors” in a 2008 Fox News appearance and wrote online about his grievances against female judges.
Salas, 51, is New Jersey’s first Hispanic woman to serve as a U.S. District Court judge. President Barack Obama nominated her for the position in 2010, and she was confirmed by the Senate in 2011. She has been on the bench for recent cases involving the Grape Street Crips, a gang charged with running a drug-trafficking operation, according to N.J. Advance Media. Salas was recently assigned to an ongoing lawsuit by investors in Deutsche Bank against the financial institution, who accused it of misleading them about its safeguards against money laundering and “high-risk” customers. The bank was fined $150 million earlier this month by New York’s Department of Financial Services for failure to monitor suspicious activity by clients including the late financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Two law enforcement officials, cautioning that the investigation was in its earliest stages, said federal authorities were examining whether Mr. Den Hollander might be linked to the July 11 killing of another men’s rights lawyer, Marc Angelucci, in San Bernardino County, Calif.
According to the federal docket, the only case that Mr. Den Hollander had before Judge Salas was a class-action lawsuit filed in 2015. He accused the Selective Service System, the independent government agency that maintains a database of Americans eligible for a potential draft, of violating women’s equal protection rights by requiring only men to register with the service.
In a 2018 ruling, Judge Salas allowed the case to proceed, a victory for Mr. Den Hollander. But in his views online, he criticized the judge for not moving the case along fast enough.
