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Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over his rare Twitter handle

536 points by miles 5y ago

TrackerFF 5y ago
Maybe I'm stupid here, but what did they plan? That the old guy would keel over, and then his twitter handle would magically become available to them?
- joshschreuder 5y ago
  Extortion I would guess? Give us the handle or we keep harassing you.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Listen to the latest Darknet Diaries
- mcguire 5y ago
  "The family eventually learned, earlier that day, an anonymous caller demanded Mark hand over his Twitter handle worth thousands of dollars. Mark refused. Hours later, the unthinkable happened." https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn-man-targeted-for-twitter-handle/ https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...
decremental 5y ago
People like that just need to be locked up for the rest of their miserable lives. There's absolutely no reason someone like that should be permitted to be part of society.
- hashbig 5y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted. I am _radically_ against prison punishments for non-violent crimes since they don't achieve anything, but for crimes like these, I honestly don't want to live in a society where someone with this kind of judgement is allowed to roam freely and cause more harm.
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    They are children. Children make mistakes.
    - ihsw 5y ago
      If you are old enough to do the crime then you are old enough to do the time.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      Yes, mistakes are another word for bad choices. How many violent criminals are making good choices?
    - mcguire 5y ago
      "The family eventually learned, earlier that day, an anonymous caller demanded Mark hand over his Twitter handle worth thousands of dollars. Mark refused. Hours later, the unthinkable happened. "Months later, the family learned about Shane Sonderman, who was a minor back in April 2020 when the crime was committed. "Sonderman is currently behind bars awaiting trial. A Federal Grand Jury indictment claims he had six victims across the country. Herring was the only one who died." https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn-man-targeted-for-twitter-handle/ https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    The problem is that a significant part of the population has this kind of judgment. Kids are stupid and 50‰ are dumber than average. It is possible that their judgment isn't that that far off the norm, and it was an unlikely string of events that led to this outcome. Clearly punishment is appropriate, but we rarely hand out life imprisonment for first degree murder. Seems like this would be more akin to manslaughter.
- whymauri 5y ago
  With the mass militarization of the police, malicious SWATing is basically attempted murder.
  - mancerayder 5y ago
    Sure, but if police aren't militarized, if you look at the gun stats you see that we are a heavily armed nation. This isn't the UK. What are police supposed to do, go in there with truncheons in one hand and pepper spray in the other? The gunplay is out of control at the moment. The cat's out of the bag and we've screwed up.
  - meowface 5y ago
    Especially since there've now been (at least) three incidents where SWATing has directly led to house residents dying, and many more incidents where pets have been shot and killed. It was always attempted murder, but at this point there's absolutely no way for them to deny it. Anyone who still SWATs people is fully aware of the potential consequences.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  The way I see it, swatting is attempted 1st degree murder and if the victim dies the death penalty should be on the table.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    First degree murder is a little much (do you really think this is equivalent to taking a gun and shooting someone with pre-planning and full intention to kill them?), but certainly involuntary manslaughter fits.
    - cstejerean 5y ago
      Not sure what about planning a swatting on Discord and then executing on that plan would qualify as involuntary. The actions were voluntary, intended to cause harm to the victim and a reasonable person would foresee that they could result in death.
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        I don't think the intent is to cause death though.
      - bawolff 5y ago
        Ianal but based on wikipedia that still sounds more like involuntary to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - bigwavedave 5y ago
      > First degree murder is a little much (do you really think this is equivalent to taking a gun and shooting someone with pre-planning and full intention to kill them?), but certainly involuntary manslaughter fits. IAMN[even_close_to_being]AL, but I think you're right about it being involuntary manslaughter. My very limited understanding is that when a drunk driver kills someone, it's involuntary manslaughter because they're undertaking a risky behavior with intent neither to kill nor cause bodily harm, but death occured as a result of that behavior anyway. I think it could only be voluntary manslaughter if the circumstances were wildly different, like if the man got swatted, had a heart attack or stroke or something life threatening after the police had left, and the perpetrators were the only ones watching the stream and decided, in the heat of the moment as they watched his death unfold, that they would let him die for some reason, like they were angry at him for having the audacity to keep streaming right after the swat... I dunno. I believe it could only be murder if in the premeditated steps ("hey, let's swat this guy!"), the guys deliberately planned on using the swat to give this man a heart attack or serious bodily injury. At least, that's my very limited understanding; I'm just some guy with a beard, I don't really know anything about anything.
- dang 5y ago
  Ok, but please don't post shallow fulminations to HN even when (especially when) something is enraging. It reliably lowers discussion quality, which only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
JasonFruit 5y ago
I hate when news articles fail to answer obvious questions like, "What was the Twitter handle?" EDIT: Clearly, I'm illiterate. I did read it, and then re-read it --- each time missing @tennessee.
- thrill 5y ago
  It's right there in the fine article.
- rdiddly 5y ago
  They answered it - it's @tennessee
- kickout 5y ago
  Did you read it? It clearly noted it
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jldugger 5y ago
  Was this not in the first paragraph of the article? > was organized on Discord in an attempt to intimidate Herring into handing over his valuable @tennessee Twitter handle.
- drfuchs 5y ago
  End of 2nd paragraph: “@tennessee“
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  I glossed over it the first time too, thinking an individual couldn't grab a .gov-like handle.
biomcgary 5y ago
Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call? It would be nice to know the stats on false alarms vs actual threats in SWAT deployments. Having a prior would help a Bayesian analysis.
- modriano 5y ago
  I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago. There were over 4000 shootings and 769 homicides here last year. AFAIK, there were 0 swattings here. So, I don't think it would be a good idea to set "assume it's a swatting" as the default response to 911 calls for service in response to violent crime. At least for Chicago.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    How many times did the SWAT team do something useful last year in Chicago?
    - modriano 5y ago
      Hundreds. You may be surprised to learn this, but shooters and killers often violently resist being arrested unless they face clearly overwhelming force. A lot of murderers and shooters have been peacefully arrested by CPD tactical officers. You can see the use of force incidents that resulted in complaints here, on the Civilian Office of Police Accountability case portal [0] (although not all of these involve tac officers). You can also see the statistics on rates of use of force in this dashboard [1], and see what counts as use of force (as well as when use of deadly force is authorized) here [2]. It's important that people actually check up on their police departments. Police serve a vital and life-saving role in society, but they have to be actually monitored. Just assuming they're all bad gives cover to the bad ones and discourages good ones from signing up, and as someone who checks, I can tell you that the people most abused by America disproportionately call the police for help, and many of their emergencies are truly harrowing. [0] https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/ https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/ [1] https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboards/use-of-force-dashboard/ https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboar... [2] https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G03-02_Use-of-Force_TBD.pdf https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G0...
saurik 5y ago
While the kids knew what they were doing and certainly have some responsibility here... all of them are (well, were) kids: can we really blame them for doing fucked up shit without considering the consequences? The core problem with swatting really seems to be the process of reaction by adult police officers starting with a fully-militarized force as their first interaction, as SWATting someone has clearly gotten so easy that we could probably just automate it by connecting GPT-3 to Twilio via Wavenet using data from public background check websites.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  In general I completely agree that it's not reasonable to say the cops have no responsibility for what they do because of what they were told on the phone. But in this case it's not as though they opened fire on the guy, so it's not clear what they should have done differently.
  - saurik 5y ago
    And we should be thankful for that: I know someone who lost a nephew to cops in December (who were called in by his sister to do a mental health check; when they arrived there was no active danger and yet they put him in a knee-to-neck restraint); but do we actually need a squadron of people to show up with guns in these situations? I know people who have gotten so afraid of cops that they don't even call the cops anymore when actual bad stuff is happening... like people shooting out their windows with pellet guns as part of what seemed like repeat targeted attacks against their house (a co-op).
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > but do we actually need a squadron of people to show up with guns in these situations? They received a call about a violent crime in progress. When they arrived, the man exited the house with a gun in hand, thinking he would need to defend himself from intruders. Are you really suggesting that the police should have sent one or two unarmed individuals to a report of an active gun crime in progress? By all accounts, the police appear to have acted appropriately and managed to both control and de-escalate the situation after the man exited the house holding a gun. Why are we trying to make the local police out to be the bad guys for following up on a report of armed violence and de-escalating the situation without shots fired? It doesn’t make sense.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
Can you not add felony murder to the charge? From the 5 year charge, this sounds like a felony, and the person died during and because of the commission of a felony. Second, can we get rid of allowing international phone calls to appear with domestic numbers. I don't care if companies can't hide the fact that they outsource their call centers to low-wage countries. At least, if all domestic phone numbers were assured to originate domestically, it would be a huge deterrent against this and all kinds of other scam phone calls since they would be subject to US law enforcement.
- parlortricks 5y ago
  How would you even enforce point 2? Most people at my work, regardless of location receive a Sydney number, because their soft phone connects to the Sydney VOIP infrastructure. I would imagine a lot of work places do similar things with their phone systems.
  - wombatpm 5y ago
    Your calls then show up as Sydney. Don’t like it change your VOIP provider. I’m tired of spam call centers using fake numbers
lolsal 5y ago
Why can minors wield SWAT teams without further due diligence?
- sooheon 5y ago
  1. Some situations are highly sensitive, and 2. any decision-making process for a fixed budget has a precision-recall tradeoff.
  - lolsal 5y ago
    I understand both of your points; my point is maybe we should reconsider our precision-recall tradeoff if we're sending SWAT units into innocent households that result in innocent people dying. All sorts of rights violations have to happen for that to occur.
    - sooheon 5y ago
      > All sorts of rights violations have to happen for that to occur. I agree in general, but in this specific case I don't think there were any rights violations. The guy sadly had a heart attack while complying with reasonable if forceful instructions.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      Well, innocent people die in both paths so we’re in an optimization problem unless you’ve decided you have concrete answers to the trolley problem that are number invariant.
avidiax 5y ago
Where's the outrage against Twitter? Couldn't they simply make it possible to recover any twitter handle, e.g. by providing proof that you were the original owner? Then the market value of a stolen twitter handle (at least an active one) would be zero, since any handle I buy will just be restored to the owner eventually.
- jeffwilcox 5y ago
  Right... time to solve this like Apple did with Find My + secure enclave + stopping phone thefts in their tracks.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Or like the time Sherlock Holmes put together all those clues and found the murderer.
vmception 5y ago
I don't think minors should be able to summon a SWAT team without a 3 kill streak first. We should contact the game publishers to remove these non-skill based incentives and lootboxes.
beprogrammed 5y ago
Harsher punishments. Nothing is stopping kids from going around and stabbing randoms but the fear of getting caught (and for some the distaste of hurting others). Kids believe they can swat someone and get away with it. Don't only go after the cases that result in deaths, crackdown on all such cases.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  That hasn't panned out with the death penalty (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/30/theres-still-no-evidence-that-executions-deter-criminals/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/30/there...). People don't go "gee, I wonder what the typical criminal penalty for this action is..." They just do it, especially kids with immature brains and only partially developed impulse control.
  - macintux 5y ago
    Many of those who commit crimes that could result in the death penalty are either in a high risk scenario (e.g., drug dealers) who face worse fates on a day-to-day basis. It’s understandable why the death penalty isn’t such a harsh deterrent for everyone.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Who said anything about death peanalty. There's a lot of evidence that once a punishment is big enough, it makes no difference on deterence, but that's very different from saying punishment vs no punishment is the same.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      Interesting.. can you provide a study I can read?
      - 5y ago
jrm4 5y ago
As a point of comparison -- let's say kids prank a random non-cop into going over to a guys house with a gun. Who gets in trouble, and why the difference?
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I can’t find any articles that say an actual SWAT team was dispatched. This article and the one it sources both say that police responded to a call. They have stock photos of SWAT teams and they talk about “swatting” but this sounds more like local police rushing to the scene. The homeowner actually went outside with a gun in hand to confront the police, but they de-escalated the situation without shots fired. The man died of a heart attack from the stress of confronting the police with a gun, not from being attacked by an actual SWAT team.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Yeah, people are essentially mad at the police for showing up.
- WesleyHale 5y ago
  The article does define swatting as a large armed response as opposed to a SWAT team responding, but it's splitting hairs. The guy walked outside to a squad of officers aimed at him. Whether they were SWAT or not seems mostly irrelevant.
- TaupeRanger 5y ago
  > The man died of a heart attack from the stress of confronting the police with a gun And even that is probably an exaggeration. Stressful situations don't cause fatal heart attacks by themselves...he probably had severe heart disease before this happened.
- decker 5y ago
  Does a swat team have to show up for it to be swatting?
_corym 5y ago
Perhaps we should consider why we allow the U.S. to have SWAT teams that respond in such a manner?
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  In which countries will armed police not show up if you call in an ongoing shooting?
  - nichos 5y ago
    In most countries, police are armed. The OP was asking about SWAT. The militarization of the police is a big problem.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      Do you have evidence that a SWAT team was involved in this case? I don't see it anywhere. (https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn-man-targeted-for-twitter-handle/ https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...)
failwhaleshark 5y ago
1. Don't give-out or publish your personal information online. 2. "MyLife.com" sites that dox people should be illegal. 3. Personal information including contact information and addresses should be legally personal property, not business property to be shared and resold. 4. Use anonymous, throwaway accounts for all "social" media. 5. Don't de-anonymize yourself to anyone untrusted.
coldtea 5y ago
>A swatting incident—the act of calling 911 to report a fake crime so armed responders storm an address—was organized on Discord in an attempt to intimidate Herring into handing over his valuable @tennessee Twitter handle. That the police in the US would stom an address - in full SWAT gear and attitude nonetheless - because somebody "called", is one of the most amusing examples of the incompetency and lunacy of the police system.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  In which country will armed police not show up if an ongoing shooting is called in?
  - coldtea 5y ago
    In which country the police has the worse death statistics in such situations (at least outside of some developing world backwater)? In which country would such people move forward with weapons drawn, shouting commands, and making things worse?
    - Thorncorona 5y ago
      > In which country the police has the worse death statistics in such situations (at least outside of some developing world backwater)? In which countries are there as many guns available to the public? > In which country would such people move forward with weapons drawn, shouting commands, and making things worse? Is this not what you would expect to happen in a so-called armed conflict? The situation was successfully de-escalated.
      - watwut 5y ago
        > Is this not what you would expect to happen in a so-called armed conflict? I think the point is to not make it into armed conflict between cops and person. > The situation was successfully de-escalated. Which situation was de-escalated?
_carbyau_ 5y ago
Seems like a case where the police on the frontline did everything fine. But the reputation of the police caused a fear response triggering a predisposition to a heart attack. If you knew that having multiple police turn up on your property was going to lead to a safe, reasonable, calm discussion between you and the police, why panic?
busterarm 5y ago
Hacker News: The place where if you used the wrong kind of language as a teenager it should destroy your life at any age, but if you manipulate the police into killing someone you're just a thoughtless child who doesn't deserve firm consequences.
doctorhandshake 5y ago
To be pedantic, aren’t all Twitter handles equally rare?
- javajosh 5y ago
  No, and in exactly the same way N arbitrary frequencies don't sound good together. There are infinite sound frequency combinations that sound good, but this is still a smaller infinity than all possible combinations of frequencies. That said, if you claimed "C Major" as your chord, you might get swatted.
  - jetru 5y ago
    Hah! Now this is why hacker news is hacker news. Here's an interesting and related 3Blue1Brown video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw
mcguire 5y ago
The complete story from the local news: https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn-man-targeted-for-twitter-handle/ https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...
ZoidCTF 5y ago
I was a victim of a swatting in July 2019. Someone called 911 and said a man was threatening a woman with a gun at my address. Police showed up, told me to put my hands up at gunpoint, cuffed me, searched my house and then left like nothing happened. There needs to be a better process for handling these calls. Just call the person at the address, or approach and use a loudspeaker or something. Walking out my front door to a bunch of guns pointed at me was the worst experience of my life.
- uha 5y ago
  I had the same thing happen to me in September 2020 and once again March 2021. This was a full SWAT response the first time and significant police response both times. We had little kids walking out of the house with hands up and many guns trained on them. It was a harrowing experience. This is far more common to have the police just shrug and say that nothing can be done.
  - notimetorelax 5y ago
    I wonder if they get paid extra for raids and false alarms are a nice way to earn extra cash while not risking your life.
- judge2020 5y ago
  On the other hand, if someone actually is threatening another with a gun and extradites them inside, giving them a heads up in such a manner could initiate a hostage situation. Surprise forced entry minimizes the chance of human death in such a situation since it's likely that the person doesn't have a gun constantly pointed at the victim while they're in the house.
  - jsjohnst 5y ago
    > Surprise forced entry minimizes the chance of human death Literally every bit of research on the topic says the exact opposite.
- quantified 5y ago
theHIDninja 5y ago
Just last week someone got doxed and swatted by Twitter as well. People get cancelled on an hourly basis by Twitter's narcissistic collective of soulless wretches that they call a userbase. Twitter should be globally nullrouted for the crimes its users commit on an hourly basis. Jack Dorsey is absolutely knowledgeable about this as well totally complicit in it happening.
- avs733 5y ago
  So you are suggesting that we cancel Twitter for cancelling people? Every time I see “cancel” used like this I feel compelled to remind that if this was a real issue preexisting terms indicative of bad behavior would be used…e.g., censorship…and they aren’t used because they don’t apply and cancel culture is made up to absolve people of consequences for their actions.
  - theHIDninja 5y ago
    You are saying that publicly shaming someone, making them lose their current job and making them un-hirable is a fair punishment for making an off-color joke, or holding beliefs that even slightly differ from Twitter's collective, or any number of innocuous things that people have had their lives ruined over. Cancel culture IS a problem. You are part of the problem for not acknowledging it.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      "Cancel culture" is nothing. We've long warned about how privacy online, using pseudonyms and being conscious of the data you present to others. If you're saying something that platform users dislike, they're probably going to stop engaging with it or dogpile the topic. It's a reality distortion field, a cause with no effect.
    - avs733 5y ago
      These arguments always attribute causality to someone with very little agency in those situations and minimize/victimize the actions of someone who did something problematic. Let’s walk through it… Person A says something bad (your ‘off color joke’) Person B dislikes that and says so on the internet, loudly Person C sees what B said and decides not to hire A Your argument is that B is more responsible for Cs actions than A or C is. This particular brand of American individual freedoms is bought into by one end of our political spectrum in particular and is nonsense.
asaddhamani 5y ago
And yet the minors will only get a slap on the wrist (if that). Causing serious harm to others should come with consequences, regardless of your age. Kids get away with all kinds of heinous crimes for which adults would be put behind bars for life, and that is wrong.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ya_boy_beef 5y ago
I sold my Twitter handle a few months ago for $8,000. After dozens of DMs from people wanting to pay $100, finally a well funded startup with a serial success founder went all-in. I don't care about their TOS and I hate domainers.. Since I wasn't using it beyond reading and retweeting, might as well put it to use by someone else.
- ya_boy_beef 5y ago
  SUCK A DICK BITCH I'M PRETTY LIKE A TRICK
throwaway984393 5y ago
How is issuing a SWAT team for every single call without validating them first not illegal yet?
coeneedell 5y ago
I've now read every comment in this thread and have not seen a single answer to the question: what happens in Europe if someone calls the police to report an active shooter incident? Can someone please answer this question in good faith? Everyone in this thread seems to be treating this question as an accusation.
- vages 5y ago
  I can’t answer for Europe as a whole, because European police is not federalised or centralised in any way. There is a multilateral Europol. My guess is that in countries with a recent history of war but now a more stable state (some Eastern European countries) you would probably get a quicker response. In Western European countries, there would probably be a long response time. In Norway we have had two terrorist attacks for the last ten years (both by right wingers, one aimed at the Social Democratic Party youth convention and the second at a mosque), and in both cases police were too slow to respond. This is based on nothing other than my gut feeling.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  This was shared 5 hours ago aka ~1:30–3:30am in Europe
- londgine 5y ago
  this is the first example that I can think of > At 12.03 p.m., a 112-distress call reached Halle fire-emergency HQ; one minute later, police were informed.[24] At 2.40 p.m., federal police quick responders BFE+ arrived in the city of Halle.[25][26] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle_synagogue_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle_synagogue_shooting So it took about 2 and a half hours for the BFE to arrive in the city.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hnaccount_rng 5y ago
    They are not the only tactical response force though. But in general I feel like, at least for Germany the response scenario for big events (like Halle) is more: 1) secure the situation, ie make it stationary and have a secured cordon 2) call in the pros (typically GSG9 out of Bonn) 3) take the time to establish communication and deescalate in the mean time And similar things for situation that don’t warrant escalation to GSG9. Ie the typical street cop will not be the one going in swat style. And even the typical cop in Germany has 3 years of on the job training before becoming a rookie… so training levels are not even close to comparable in the first place. That being said: these kinds of situations are exceedingly rare and as such can trigger a truely staggering amount of police response. The amok situation in Munich in 2016 for example literally pulled most of the on duty force of Bavaria to Munich (and was resolved before most of those arrived). The total response was iirc something like 3k police officers. So I wouldn’t call the response more limited https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Munich_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Munich_shooting
gorgoiler 5y ago
It is a crying shame that these children can have so little discipline or moral compass that they acted this way. Children are naughty because they want to test boundaries. If a child does this to you it’s really important to very firmly show them where that boundary lies. You’ll feel bad but there is plenty of time to be kind to them later.
- rchaud 5y ago
  They're minors, not children. Sonderman was 17 at the time. Not being tried as an adult is a legal distinction. It doesn't turn the perpetrators into kids without responsibility.
rmason 5y ago
Here's a case where the law is far behind a new crime. I had a guy who went after my Facebook handle. I won't go into details, but it went on for two years. Cops were of no help and I had to turn to a net savvy lawyer. It will continue to increase before Congress takes it seriously. When there's a clear law with penalties that interest prosecutors then it will end.
pengaru 5y ago
Consequences for the parents of such budding psychopaths should be so severe that they actually take their parental obligations seriously.
siruncledrew 5y ago
These “kids” are straight up psychopaths. All this over some dumb internet name. It’s just 100% calculated maliciousness. These criminals were already set on making someone’s life hell if they didn’t get what they wanted. The police were just the pawns that were part of the plan. This isn’t even close to “kids doing dumbass things”. Sure, maybe if they knocked over a mailbox or whatever. What even close-to-normal level of teenager ever does this? If they didn’t get caught, they would probably be laughing their asses off that they made a man die. Just needlessly cruel and evil.
- gpt5 5y ago
  Agree. You could listen to the 911 call that triggered the previous death and see how he tried to make the police more nervous. https://youtu.be/mFfwpOLXBqk https://youtu.be/mFfwpOLXBqk
- snarfy 5y ago
  If they are considered a minor and not accountable, then parents need to be 100% held accountable.
  - OrangeMusic 5y ago
    This sounds like pure thirst for vengeance, like "somebody must pay, no matter who".
    - snarfy 5y ago
      Accountability is not punishment. It's a thirst for justice. With nobody accountable there is no justice.
- fnordfnordfnord 5y ago
  The cops are just as bad. You don't go loaded for bear to some place where your only evidence of crime is an anonymous tip. These cops were looking for a reason to use force against people and they jumped at the slightest opportunity.
rhdxmr 5y ago
Don't call 911 to report a fake crime, kids.
ezoe 5y ago
I suspect the police used the taser or choked this man. A man who is active enough to carry a gun and protecting his property, conscious enough to follow the order of police to drop a gun... then suddenly got a heart attack from stress alone? That's too suspicious.
- cpach 5y ago
  We know nothing about his medical history. So maybe we should not jump to conclusions too fast.
- notdang 5y ago
  Worse than that, much more humiliating: Unable to disengage a lock on his back fence, Herring was instructed to somehow climb over the fence with his hands up. “He was starting to get more upset,” Billings recalled. “He said, ‘I’m a 60-year-old fat man and I can’t do that.'” Billings said Mr. Herring then offered to crawl under a gap in the fence, but when he did so and stood up, he collapsed of a heart attack. Herring died at a nearby hospital soon after. Source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-who-caused-death-gets-five-years-in-prison https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-who-cause...
rajbot 5y ago
If you ever used Fidonet or BBS mail, this was Mark “Sparky” Herring, who developed the .QWK file format, that tragically died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)
- shadilay 5y ago
  I'm surprised this isn't higher up.
- rajbot 5y ago
  Please see this heartbreaking Twitter thread from Jason Scott on Sparky Herring and QWK https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1417941046781259782?s=21 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1417941046781259782?s=2...
- CTOSian 5y ago
  Thats tragic! :( I never met with that guy but I spent some time making an QWK program for RISC-OS (Archimedes). RIP Mark!
- EricE 5y ago
  OMG - I loved .QWK and the universe around it. Indeed I often lament the wish that web forums would support something like QWK so I could use a reader/editor of my choice - web forums suck. What a senseless tragedy :(
edem 5y ago
5 years? Ridiculous. This person needs to be sent to a much worse place than a prison for life.
renewiltord 5y ago
Interesting. It’s a classic confused deputy problem. We provide a channel to summon police that default trusts the summoner for various reasons. Usually, we simply resolve post-hoc but it appears that all one has to do is be a foreign minor and one can do this with impunity. Very interesting.
Lio 5y ago
Something that didn’t seem quite clear to me from the article, what was their motivation? Was this straight up extortion with the aim to sell the Twitter id or did they just want to possess it for bragging rights?
okareaman 5y ago
I thought calls could be traced? If an emergency call comes in from another country claiming to be reporting a local situation, I'd think police would do a little more checking before going in full throttle, guns at the ready.
Andy_G11 5y ago
The most prevalent countermeasure deployed against lying seems to be identity verification. For example, to combat lies about the source of money from crime, banks are required to verify the ID (photographic, residential address) of depositors, as are other transactors e.g. property sales intermediaries. Lies can easily be disseminated via technology, and identity verification as retrospective tracing to origin can be done at the device level, the network level, or both. However, perhaps we are getting to a point where the default of communications tech will be a much higher level of user identity checking as a precursor to communication and operation of devices. Although this is a dystopian scenario where a centralised controlling system regulates who can actually even use tech or to what degree, it is easy to imagine that it would be technologically possible. The concern is that the actions of criminals will be used as an excuse to apply this kind of system and make possible the oppressive restriction of freedoms in future.
sinuhe69 5y ago
Is the police not at least in-part responsible for the death? From my POV, it’s the inappropriate charging of the police force that caused the death of the man. And clearly the police can handle the case differently. Of course, the kids must face consequences as well but I believe the police can not be acquitted. I don’t think such incidents can happen anywhere else in the world.
- rob74 5y ago
  If they have credible information that an armed and dangerous person has killed someone and may be about to harm other people, what should they do? Just ignore it? Or send some unarmed officers over first to check, who may then get shot?
  - isolli 5y ago
    Except that the information was not credible. Assessing the credibility of information should be part of the operating procedure.
- libertine 5y ago
  Honestly I don't judge the police MO. How are you supposed to approach this report when firearms and rifles are extremely common? It's easy to say you have to give the benefit of doubt when you're sitting behind a desk, but when you're in the front line I don't think it's that simple. At this moment it looks like it's a roll of a dice.
flipstone 5y ago
I highly recommend the latest episode of the Darknet Diaries podcast, which discusses a campaign of harassment aiming to get someone to give up a highly-valuable Instagram handle: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/
petercooper 5y ago
The latest episode of Darknet Diaries is on a similar topic: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/ - basically someone owned a desirable Instagram handle and got harassed into giving it up.
3finmunchousen 5y ago
There is a word for when a false 911 call prompts a potentially lethal police response.Tell me again how police haven't been militarized?
RickJWagner 5y ago
I'm glad to read about the 20 year sentence for the other swatter. That needs to be widely publicized so people realize it just doesn't pay to jerk people around for fun.
thoughtstheseus 5y ago
Mark - we will do better. RIP
okprod 5y ago
These kids know exactly what they're doing, and they shouldn't be absolved because they're young or "boys will be boys". Frankly punishment should be directed at the minors involved and their parents. If I'm a young person I can go around murdering and committing crimes because I'm "young" and "didn't know any better"?
- clcaev 5y ago
  > and their parents How exactly do you suggest parents accomplish the surveillance necessary to avoid liability?
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Maybe by not framing the issue as one of 'liability' and 'surveillance', and just teaching the kid right from wrong. As for how that's accomplished, that's the parents' responsibility. They failed here, so the state will be stepping in for the next few years.
    - clcaev 5y ago
      What should the parents' punishment be? How do you evaluate that the parents have reasonably met their duty? Are both parents equally culpable? What about divorcees with alternative live views? Why should this parental failure liability end at 18, what about 19 year olds, or those in their 30's? What about kids previously diagnosed with mental illness?
      - rchaud 5y ago
        Those questions will make up the bulk of the defense's case, I imagine.
- TheHypnotist 5y ago
  Well if you read the article you'd see one is being charged. The other is ambiguous but it appears authorities know who it is.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
How the hell did the kids get his personal details?
Guthur 5y ago
The size of the fine illustrates a sort of perversity here. If paid who's actually getting the money the state or the victims (family of the deceased). I'm quite sure many will think blood money abhorrent but why should the state get any either?
trymas 5y ago
How a thing like "swatting" exist at all? AFAIK it can happen multiple times to the same location and directed against same people too [0]. It happens for baseless unconfirmed allegations against someone.. "Oh I have heard that he/she is a drug dealer and they are walking with a gun in their backyard" - and whole swat unit is sent - no questions asked. What the hell? This happens to the super rich and famous too [1]. SWAT team comes to the neighbourhood full of 20MM+ houses and is not second guessing what's going on? [0] a bit too lazy to search, though there were infamous swattings of famous youtubers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Other_notable_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Other_notable_cases
- tim333 5y ago
  The whole Special Weapons and Tactics things seems a bit over the top, especially coming from the UK where maybe some cop will maybe knock on the door and ask if everything is ok.
  - consumer451 5y ago
    I imagine that police responding to a home in a country which is armed to the teeth is quite different.
- vorticalbox 5y ago
  to play devils advocaat. Is it not better for the police to wrongfully turn up to a potentially dangerous situation then to not and people get hurt or killed?
  - trymas 5y ago
    Problem is how violent US policing is [0]. Police/SWAT do not turn up to assess the situation. It looks like they turn up to release their anger, aggression and "play" with their assault weapons. Swatters do this, because it will cause big material and mental losses to the victim, with a high chance of death [1]. In this case police/swat is a "poor man's assassin". It's very funny for me to read "Measures against swatting" from that wiki article ([1]), when it happens only in US (and maybe Brazil). This does not happen in other 1st world country, because police is accountable for their ammunition and especially citizens shot. In US you can instigate fake raids and kill innocent people in their sleep, and nothing will happen to you as long as you say that you feared for your life. [2] [0] I know I am stereotyping, though from western 1st world countries US is undoubtedly the leader in police violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_due_to_swatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor
zenexer 5y ago
Why isn’t law enforcement being held accountable as well? As long as it’s possible to wreak havoc with a single phone call or text message, there will always be people who will do it. Law enforcement needs to be prepared for that. Why is this still happening?
mindcrime 5y ago
One aspect of this that I haven't seen addressed yet, is the role the 911 dispatchers play. I'm not sure what (if any) training they receive today specific to detecting SWAT'ing instances, but it seems likely that there are steps dispatchers could take to try and help separate pranks from real incidents, and - in turn - relay that to the responding officers who can mediate their response based on that. Disclaimer: I am a former 911 dispatcher myself, but I've been away from that world for 25 years or so, so my knowledge of training standards, procedures, technology, etc. used in a modern 911 center is pretty thin. That said... there should be some red flags to a dispatcher that call might be of questionable veracity. One would, to my mind, simply be if the call is received from a much different geographic region than where the incident is reported as happening. For direct calls to 911 the callers location is generally shown, although not with super high precision in the case of cell-phones. If somebody wants to call a 911 center that isn't "their" PSAP, they can call the 10 digit number for the center (if they know it. I guess these can probably be found online). I think you will also get location information on the admin line, but don't quote me on that. Additionally, the dispatcher can tell if you called 911 or "the admin line" - and a member of the public calling in on the admin line should probably raise a least a hint of suspicion. A call being relayed / bounced to your center through multiple other agencies is also something that might indicate that the caller is not physically present and may not have the full picture. There are probing questions that could be used to help validate the call. "Did you hear/see these events yourself?" "Where were you when you say/hear them?" "How old are you?" "What's your name?" Some of these are, in fact, questions a 911 dispatcher would ask anyway, not specific to SWAT'ing. What I'd be curious to know, is are there more specific ways to probe to detect a likely SWAT'ing event. If there is a report of gunfire or something, a dispatcher would also typically notice if they only get one call, and no additional confirming calls. While it is possible, especially in a rural area, to only get one call on something like that, reports of gunshots would often-times come from multiple sources. So if the incident is reported as being in a busy/urban area, but there is only one call, that could be an indicator that things aren't kosher. Anyway... just some stream of consciousness stuff here that occurred to me. Not sure if anybody has looked deeply into this aspect yet, or is working on it. If not, maybe somebody should be. Edit: looks like this has gotten at least some attention within the public safety communications world: https://www.ems1.com/tactical-ems/articles/swatting-guidance-for-emergency-responders-and-911-telecommunicators-8CpURyBEClWJJcH2/ https://www.ems1.com/tactical-ems/articles/swatting-guidance... https://www.911.gov/pdf/National_911_Program_State_of_911_Webinar_September_2015.pdf https://www.911.gov/pdf/National_911_Program_State_of_911_We...
blooalien 5y ago
Update: https://www.techspot.com/news/90483-grandfather-died-heart-attack-after-minors-swatted-over.html https://www.techspot.com/news/90483-grandfather-died-heart-a...
aprdm 5y ago
That's so sad.
dgudkov 5y ago
The person who arranged the swatting goes to jail for 5 years: https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/22/qwk_swatting_death/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/22/qwk_swatting_death/
leafywashere 5y ago
What a bunch of Twats

536 points by miles 5y ago

Maybe I'm stupid here, but what did they plan? That the old guy would keel over, and then his twitter handle would magically become available to them?

joshschreuder 5y ago
Extortion I would guess? Give us the handle or we keep harassing you.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
Listen to the latest Darknet Diaries
mcguire 5y ago
"The family eventually learned, earlier that day, an anonymous caller demanded Mark hand over his Twitter handle worth thousands of dollars. Mark refused. Hours later, the unthinkable happened." https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn-man-targeted-for-twitter-handle/ https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...

decremental 5y ago

People like that just need to be locked up for the rest of their miserable lives. There's absolutely no reason someone like that should be permitted to be part of society.

hashbig 5y ago
Not sure why this is downvoted. I am _radically_ against prison punishments for non-violent crimes since they don't achieve anything, but for crimes like these, I honestly don't want to live in a society where someone with this kind of judgement is allowed to roam freely and cause more harm.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  They are children. Children make mistakes.
  - ihsw 5y ago
    If you are old enough to do the crime then you are old enough to do the time.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Yes, mistakes are another word for bad choices. How many violent criminals are making good choices?
  - mcguire 5y ago
    "The family eventually learned, earlier that day, an anonymous caller demanded Mark hand over his Twitter handle worth thousands of dollars. Mark refused. Hours later, the unthinkable happened. "Months later, the family learned about Shane Sonderman, who was a minor back in April 2020 when the crime was committed. "Sonderman is currently behind bars awaiting trial. A Federal Grand Jury indictment claims he had six victims across the country. Herring was the only one who died." https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn-man-targeted-for-twitter-handle/ https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  The problem is that a significant part of the population has this kind of judgment. Kids are stupid and 50‰ are dumber than average. It is possible that their judgment isn't that that far off the norm, and it was an unlikely string of events that led to this outcome. Clearly punishment is appropriate, but we rarely hand out life imprisonment for first degree murder. Seems like this would be more akin to manslaughter.
whymauri 5y ago
With the mass militarization of the police, malicious SWATing is basically attempted murder.
- mancerayder 5y ago
  Sure, but if police aren't militarized, if you look at the gun stats you see that we are a heavily armed nation. This isn't the UK. What are police supposed to do, go in there with truncheons in one hand and pepper spray in the other? The gunplay is out of control at the moment. The cat's out of the bag and we've screwed up.
- meowface 5y ago
  Especially since there've now been (at least) three incidents where SWATing has directly led to house residents dying, and many more incidents where pets have been shot and killed. It was always attempted murder, but at this point there's absolutely no way for them to deny it. Anyone who still SWATs people is fully aware of the potential consequences.
jimmaswell 5y ago
The way I see it, swatting is attempted 1st degree murder and if the victim dies the death penalty should be on the table.
- bawolff 5y ago
  First degree murder is a little much (do you really think this is equivalent to taking a gun and shooting someone with pre-planning and full intention to kill them?), but certainly involuntary manslaughter fits.
  - cstejerean 5y ago
    Not sure what about planning a swatting on Discord and then executing on that plan would qualify as involuntary. The actions were voluntary, intended to cause harm to the victim and a reasonable person would foresee that they could result in death.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      I don't think the intent is to cause death though.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      Ianal but based on wikipedia that still sounds more like involuntary to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bigwavedave 5y ago
    > First degree murder is a little much (do you really think this is equivalent to taking a gun and shooting someone with pre-planning and full intention to kill them?), but certainly involuntary manslaughter fits. IAMN[even_close_to_being]AL, but I think you're right about it being involuntary manslaughter. My very limited understanding is that when a drunk driver kills someone, it's involuntary manslaughter because they're undertaking a risky behavior with intent neither to kill nor cause bodily harm, but death occured as a result of that behavior anyway. I think it could only be voluntary manslaughter if the circumstances were wildly different, like if the man got swatted, had a heart attack or stroke or something life threatening after the police had left, and the perpetrators were the only ones watching the stream and decided, in the heat of the moment as they watched his death unfold, that they would let him die for some reason, like they were angry at him for having the audacity to keep streaming right after the swat... I dunno. I believe it could only be murder if in the premeditated steps ("hey, let's swat this guy!"), the guys deliberately planned on using the swat to give this man a heart attack or serious bodily injury. At least, that's my very limited understanding; I'm just some guy with a beard, I don't really know anything about anything.
dang 5y ago
Ok, but please don't post shallow fulminations to HN even when (especially when) something is enraging. It reliably lowers discussion quality, which only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

JasonFruit 5y ago

I hate when news articles fail to answer obvious questions like, "What was the Twitter handle?" EDIT: Clearly, I'm illiterate. I did read it, and then re-read it --- each time missing @tennessee.

thrill 5y ago
It's right there in the fine article.
rdiddly 5y ago
They answered it - it's @tennessee
kickout 5y ago
Did you read it? It clearly noted it
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jldugger 5y ago
Was this not in the first paragraph of the article? > was organized on Discord in an attempt to intimidate Herring into handing over his valuable @tennessee Twitter handle.
drfuchs 5y ago
End of 2nd paragraph: “@tennessee“
Tempest1981 5y ago
I glossed over it the first time too, thinking an individual couldn't grab a .gov-like handle.

biomcgary 5y ago

Maybe police should default to assume swatting and develop techniques to evaluate actual risk prior to storming in based on an anonymous phone call? It would be nice to know the stats on false alarms vs actual threats in SWAT deployments. Having a prior would help a Bayesian analysis.

modriano 5y ago
I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago. There were over 4000 shootings and 769 homicides here last year. AFAIK, there were 0 swattings here. So, I don't think it would be a good idea to set "assume it's a swatting" as the default response to 911 calls for service in response to violent crime. At least for Chicago.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  How many times did the SWAT team do something useful last year in Chicago?
  - modriano 5y ago
    Hundreds. You may be surprised to learn this, but shooters and killers often violently resist being arrested unless they face clearly overwhelming force. A lot of murderers and shooters have been peacefully arrested by CPD tactical officers. You can see the use of force incidents that resulted in complaints here, on the Civilian Office of Police Accountability case portal [0] (although not all of these involve tac officers). You can also see the statistics on rates of use of force in this dashboard [1], and see what counts as use of force (as well as when use of deadly force is authorized) here [2]. It's important that people actually check up on their police departments. Police serve a vital and life-saving role in society, but they have to be actually monitored. Just assuming they're all bad gives cover to the bad ones and discourages good ones from signing up, and as someone who checks, I can tell you that the people most abused by America disproportionately call the police for help, and many of their emergencies are truly harrowing. [0] https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/ https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/ [1] https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboards/use-of-force-dashboard/ https://home.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/data-dashboar... [2] https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G03-02_Use-of-Force_TBD.pdf https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/G0...

saurik 5y ago

While the kids knew what they were doing and certainly have some responsibility here... all of them are (well, were) kids: can we really blame them for doing fucked up shit without considering the consequences? The core problem with swatting really seems to be the process of reaction by adult police officers starting with a fully-militarized force as their first interaction, as SWATting someone has clearly gotten so easy that we could probably just automate it by connecting GPT-3 to Twilio via Wavenet using data from public background check websites.

emodendroket 5y ago
In general I completely agree that it's not reasonable to say the cops have no responsibility for what they do because of what they were told on the phone. But in this case it's not as though they opened fire on the guy, so it's not clear what they should have done differently.
- saurik 5y ago
  And we should be thankful for that: I know someone who lost a nephew to cops in December (who were called in by his sister to do a mental health check; when they arrived there was no active danger and yet they put him in a knee-to-neck restraint); but do we actually need a squadron of people to show up with guns in these situations? I know people who have gotten so afraid of cops that they don't even call the cops anymore when actual bad stuff is happening... like people shooting out their windows with pellet guns as part of what seemed like repeat targeted attacks against their house (a co-op).
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > but do we actually need a squadron of people to show up with guns in these situations? They received a call about a violent crime in progress. When they arrived, the man exited the house with a gun in hand, thinking he would need to defend himself from intruders. Are you really suggesting that the police should have sent one or two unarmed individuals to a report of an active gun crime in progress? By all accounts, the police appear to have acted appropriately and managed to both control and de-escalate the situation after the man exited the house holding a gun. Why are we trying to make the local police out to be the bad guys for following up on a report of armed violence and de-escalating the situation without shots fired? It doesn’t make sense.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

Can you not add felony murder to the charge? From the 5 year charge, this sounds like a felony, and the person died during and because of the commission of a felony. Second, can we get rid of allowing international phone calls to appear with domestic numbers. I don't care if companies can't hide the fact that they outsource their call centers to low-wage countries. At least, if all domestic phone numbers were assured to originate domestically, it would be a huge deterrent against this and all kinds of other scam phone calls since they would be subject to US law enforcement.

parlortricks 5y ago
How would you even enforce point 2? Most people at my work, regardless of location receive a Sydney number, because their soft phone connects to the Sydney VOIP infrastructure. I would imagine a lot of work places do similar things with their phone systems.
- wombatpm 5y ago
  Your calls then show up as Sydney. Don’t like it change your VOIP provider. I’m tired of spam call centers using fake numbers

lolsal 5y ago

Why can minors wield SWAT teams without further due diligence?

sooheon 5y ago
1. Some situations are highly sensitive, and 2. any decision-making process for a fixed budget has a precision-recall tradeoff.
- lolsal 5y ago
  I understand both of your points; my point is maybe we should reconsider our precision-recall tradeoff if we're sending SWAT units into innocent households that result in innocent people dying. All sorts of rights violations have to happen for that to occur.
  - sooheon 5y ago
    > All sorts of rights violations have to happen for that to occur. I agree in general, but in this specific case I don't think there were any rights violations. The guy sadly had a heart attack while complying with reasonable if forceful instructions.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Well, innocent people die in both paths so we’re in an optimization problem unless you’ve decided you have concrete answers to the trolley problem that are number invariant.

avidiax 5y ago

Where's the outrage against Twitter? Couldn't they simply make it possible to recover any twitter handle, e.g. by providing proof that you were the original owner? Then the market value of a stolen twitter handle (at least an active one) would be zero, since any handle I buy will just be restored to the owner eventually.

jeffwilcox 5y ago
Right... time to solve this like Apple did with Find My + secure enclave + stopping phone thefts in their tracks.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Or like the time Sherlock Holmes put together all those clues and found the murderer.

vmception 5y ago

I don't think minors should be able to summon a SWAT team without a 3 kill streak first. We should contact the game publishers to remove these non-skill based incentives and lootboxes.

beprogrammed 5y ago

Harsher punishments. Nothing is stopping kids from going around and stabbing randoms but the fear of getting caught (and for some the distaste of hurting others). Kids believe they can swat someone and get away with it. Don't only go after the cases that result in deaths, crackdown on all such cases.

ceejayoz 5y ago
That hasn't panned out with the death penalty (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/30/theres-still-no-evidence-that-executions-deter-criminals/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/30/there...). People don't go "gee, I wonder what the typical criminal penalty for this action is..." They just do it, especially kids with immature brains and only partially developed impulse control.
- macintux 5y ago
  Many of those who commit crimes that could result in the death penalty are either in a high risk scenario (e.g., drug dealers) who face worse fates on a day-to-day basis. It’s understandable why the death penalty isn’t such a harsh deterrent for everyone.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bawolff 5y ago
  Who said anything about death peanalty. There's a lot of evidence that once a punishment is big enough, it makes no difference on deterence, but that's very different from saying punishment vs no punishment is the same.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Interesting.. can you provide a study I can read?
    - 5y ago

jrm4 5y ago

As a point of comparison -- let's say kids prank a random non-cop into going over to a guys house with a gun. Who gets in trouble, and why the difference?

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I can’t find any articles that say an actual SWAT team was dispatched. This article and the one it sources both say that police responded to a call. They have stock photos of SWAT teams and they talk about “swatting” but this sounds more like local police rushing to the scene. The homeowner actually went outside with a gun in hand to confront the police, but they de-escalated the situation without shots fired. The man died of a heart attack from the stress of confronting the police with a gun, not from being attacked by an actual SWAT team.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Yeah, people are essentially mad at the police for showing up.
WesleyHale 5y ago
The article does define swatting as a large armed response as opposed to a SWAT team responding, but it's splitting hairs. The guy walked outside to a squad of officers aimed at him. Whether they were SWAT or not seems mostly irrelevant.
TaupeRanger 5y ago
> The man died of a heart attack from the stress of confronting the police with a gun And even that is probably an exaggeration. Stressful situations don't cause fatal heart attacks by themselves...he probably had severe heart disease before this happened.
decker 5y ago
Does a swat team have to show up for it to be swatting?

_corym 5y ago

Perhaps we should consider why we allow the U.S. to have SWAT teams that respond in such a manner?

MattGaiser 5y ago
In which countries will armed police not show up if you call in an ongoing shooting?
- nichos 5y ago
  In most countries, police are armed. The OP was asking about SWAT. The militarization of the police is a big problem.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    Do you have evidence that a SWAT team was involved in this case? I don't see it anywhere. (https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn-man-targeted-for-twitter-handle/ https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...)

failwhaleshark 5y ago

1. Don't give-out or publish your personal information online. 2. "MyLife.com" sites that dox people should be illegal. 3. Personal information including contact information and addresses should be legally personal property, not business property to be shared and resold. 4. Use anonymous, throwaway accounts for all "social" media. 5. Don't de-anonymize yourself to anyone untrusted.

coldtea 5y ago

>A swatting incident—the act of calling 911 to report a fake crime so armed responders storm an address—was organized on Discord in an attempt to intimidate Herring into handing over his valuable @tennessee Twitter handle. That the police in the US would stom an address - in full SWAT gear and attitude nonetheless - because somebody "called", is one of the most amusing examples of the incompetency and lunacy of the police system.

MattGaiser 5y ago
In which country will armed police not show up if an ongoing shooting is called in?
- coldtea 5y ago
  In which country the police has the worse death statistics in such situations (at least outside of some developing world backwater)? In which country would such people move forward with weapons drawn, shouting commands, and making things worse?
  - Thorncorona 5y ago
    > In which country the police has the worse death statistics in such situations (at least outside of some developing world backwater)? In which countries are there as many guns available to the public? > In which country would such people move forward with weapons drawn, shouting commands, and making things worse? Is this not what you would expect to happen in a so-called armed conflict? The situation was successfully de-escalated.
    - watwut 5y ago
      > Is this not what you would expect to happen in a so-called armed conflict? I think the point is to not make it into armed conflict between cops and person. > The situation was successfully de-escalated. Which situation was de-escalated?

_carbyau_ 5y ago

Seems like a case where the police on the frontline did everything fine. But the reputation of the police caused a fear response triggering a predisposition to a heart attack. If you knew that having multiple police turn up on your property was going to lead to a safe, reasonable, calm discussion between you and the police, why panic?

busterarm 5y ago

Hacker News: The place where if you used the wrong kind of language as a teenager it should destroy your life at any age, but if you manipulate the police into killing someone you're just a thoughtless child who doesn't deserve firm consequences.

doctorhandshake 5y ago

To be pedantic, aren’t all Twitter handles equally rare?

javajosh 5y ago
No, and in exactly the same way N arbitrary frequencies don't sound good together. There are infinite sound frequency combinations that sound good, but this is still a smaller infinity than all possible combinations of frequencies. That said, if you claimed "C Major" as your chord, you might get swatted.
- jetru 5y ago
  Hah! Now this is why hacker news is hacker news. Here's an interesting and related 3Blue1Brown video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw

mcguire 5y ago

The complete story from the local news: https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn-man-targeted-for-twitter-handle/ https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn...

ZoidCTF 5y ago

I was a victim of a swatting in July 2019. Someone called 911 and said a man was threatening a woman with a gun at my address. Police showed up, told me to put my hands up at gunpoint, cuffed me, searched my house and then left like nothing happened. There needs to be a better process for handling these calls. Just call the person at the address, or approach and use a loudspeaker or something. Walking out my front door to a bunch of guns pointed at me was the worst experience of my life.

uha 5y ago
I had the same thing happen to me in September 2020 and once again March 2021. This was a full SWAT response the first time and significant police response both times. We had little kids walking out of the house with hands up and many guns trained on them. It was a harrowing experience. This is far more common to have the police just shrug and say that nothing can be done.
- notimetorelax 5y ago
  I wonder if they get paid extra for raids and false alarms are a nice way to earn extra cash while not risking your life.
judge2020 5y ago
On the other hand, if someone actually is threatening another with a gun and extradites them inside, giving them a heads up in such a manner could initiate a hostage situation. Surprise forced entry minimizes the chance of human death in such a situation since it's likely that the person doesn't have a gun constantly pointed at the victim while they're in the house.
- jsjohnst 5y ago
  > Surprise forced entry minimizes the chance of human death Literally every bit of research on the topic says the exact opposite.
quantified 5y ago

theHIDninja 5y ago

Just last week someone got doxed and swatted by Twitter as well. People get cancelled on an hourly basis by Twitter's narcissistic collective of soulless wretches that they call a userbase. Twitter should be globally nullrouted for the crimes its users commit on an hourly basis. Jack Dorsey is absolutely knowledgeable about this as well totally complicit in it happening.

avs733 5y ago
So you are suggesting that we cancel Twitter for cancelling people? Every time I see “cancel” used like this I feel compelled to remind that if this was a real issue preexisting terms indicative of bad behavior would be used…e.g., censorship…and they aren’t used because they don’t apply and cancel culture is made up to absolve people of consequences for their actions.
- theHIDninja 5y ago
  You are saying that publicly shaming someone, making them lose their current job and making them un-hirable is a fair punishment for making an off-color joke, or holding beliefs that even slightly differ from Twitter's collective, or any number of innocuous things that people have had their lives ruined over. Cancel culture IS a problem. You are part of the problem for not acknowledging it.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    "Cancel culture" is nothing. We've long warned about how privacy online, using pseudonyms and being conscious of the data you present to others. If you're saying something that platform users dislike, they're probably going to stop engaging with it or dogpile the topic. It's a reality distortion field, a cause with no effect.
  - avs733 5y ago
    These arguments always attribute causality to someone with very little agency in those situations and minimize/victimize the actions of someone who did something problematic. Let’s walk through it… Person A says something bad (your ‘off color joke’) Person B dislikes that and says so on the internet, loudly Person C sees what B said and decides not to hire A Your argument is that B is more responsible for Cs actions than A or C is. This particular brand of American individual freedoms is bought into by one end of our political spectrum in particular and is nonsense.

asaddhamani 5y ago

And yet the minors will only get a slap on the wrist (if that). Causing serious harm to others should come with consequences, regardless of your age. Kids get away with all kinds of heinous crimes for which adults would be put behind bars for life, and that is wrong.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ya_boy_beef 5y ago

I sold my Twitter handle a few months ago for $8,000. After dozens of DMs from people wanting to pay $100, finally a well funded startup with a serial success founder went all-in. I don't care about their TOS and I hate domainers.. Since I wasn't using it beyond reading and retweeting, might as well put it to use by someone else.

ya_boy_beef 5y ago
SUCK A DICK BITCH I'M PRETTY LIKE A TRICK

throwaway984393 5y ago

How is issuing a SWAT team for every single call without validating them first not illegal yet?

coeneedell 5y ago

I've now read every comment in this thread and have not seen a single answer to the question: what happens in Europe if someone calls the police to report an active shooter incident? Can someone please answer this question in good faith? Everyone in this thread seems to be treating this question as an accusation.

vages 5y ago
I can’t answer for Europe as a whole, because European police is not federalised or centralised in any way. There is a multilateral Europol. My guess is that in countries with a recent history of war but now a more stable state (some Eastern European countries) you would probably get a quicker response. In Western European countries, there would probably be a long response time. In Norway we have had two terrorist attacks for the last ten years (both by right wingers, one aimed at the Social Democratic Party youth convention and the second at a mosque), and in both cases police were too slow to respond. This is based on nothing other than my gut feeling.
srcreigh 5y ago
This was shared 5 hours ago aka ~1:30–3:30am in Europe
londgine 5y ago
this is the first example that I can think of > At 12.03 p.m., a 112-distress call reached Halle fire-emergency HQ; one minute later, police were informed.[24] At 2.40 p.m., federal police quick responders BFE+ arrived in the city of Halle.[25][26] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle_synagogue_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halle_synagogue_shooting So it took about 2 and a half hours for the BFE to arrive in the city.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hnaccount_rng 5y ago
  They are not the only tactical response force though. But in general I feel like, at least for Germany the response scenario for big events (like Halle) is more: 1) secure the situation, ie make it stationary and have a secured cordon 2) call in the pros (typically GSG9 out of Bonn) 3) take the time to establish communication and deescalate in the mean time And similar things for situation that don’t warrant escalation to GSG9. Ie the typical street cop will not be the one going in swat style. And even the typical cop in Germany has 3 years of on the job training before becoming a rookie… so training levels are not even close to comparable in the first place. That being said: these kinds of situations are exceedingly rare and as such can trigger a truely staggering amount of police response. The amok situation in Munich in 2016 for example literally pulled most of the on duty force of Bavaria to Munich (and was resolved before most of those arrived). The total response was iirc something like 3k police officers. So I wouldn’t call the response more limited https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Munich_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Munich_shooting

gorgoiler 5y ago

It is a crying shame that these children can have so little discipline or moral compass that they acted this way. Children are naughty because they want to test boundaries. If a child does this to you it’s really important to very firmly show them where that boundary lies. You’ll feel bad but there is plenty of time to be kind to them later.

rchaud 5y ago
They're minors, not children. Sonderman was 17 at the time. Not being tried as an adult is a legal distinction. It doesn't turn the perpetrators into kids without responsibility.

rmason 5y ago

Here's a case where the law is far behind a new crime. I had a guy who went after my Facebook handle. I won't go into details, but it went on for two years. Cops were of no help and I had to turn to a net savvy lawyer. It will continue to increase before Congress takes it seriously. When there's a clear law with penalties that interest prosecutors then it will end.

pengaru 5y ago

Consequences for the parents of such budding psychopaths should be so severe that they actually take their parental obligations seriously.

siruncledrew 5y ago

These “kids” are straight up psychopaths. All this over some dumb internet name. It’s just 100% calculated maliciousness. These criminals were already set on making someone’s life hell if they didn’t get what they wanted. The police were just the pawns that were part of the plan. This isn’t even close to “kids doing dumbass things”. Sure, maybe if they knocked over a mailbox or whatever. What even close-to-normal level of teenager ever does this? If they didn’t get caught, they would probably be laughing their asses off that they made a man die. Just needlessly cruel and evil.

gpt5 5y ago
Agree. You could listen to the 911 call that triggered the previous death and see how he tried to make the police more nervous. https://youtu.be/mFfwpOLXBqk https://youtu.be/mFfwpOLXBqk
snarfy 5y ago
If they are considered a minor and not accountable, then parents need to be 100% held accountable.
- OrangeMusic 5y ago
  This sounds like pure thirst for vengeance, like "somebody must pay, no matter who".
  - snarfy 5y ago
    Accountability is not punishment. It's a thirst for justice. With nobody accountable there is no justice.
fnordfnordfnord 5y ago
The cops are just as bad. You don't go loaded for bear to some place where your only evidence of crime is an anonymous tip. These cops were looking for a reason to use force against people and they jumped at the slightest opportunity.

rhdxmr 5y ago

Don't call 911 to report a fake crime, kids.

ezoe 5y ago

I suspect the police used the taser or choked this man. A man who is active enough to carry a gun and protecting his property, conscious enough to follow the order of police to drop a gun... then suddenly got a heart attack from stress alone? That's too suspicious.

cpach 5y ago
We know nothing about his medical history. So maybe we should not jump to conclusions too fast.
notdang 5y ago
Worse than that, much more humiliating: Unable to disengage a lock on his back fence, Herring was instructed to somehow climb over the fence with his hands up. “He was starting to get more upset,” Billings recalled. “He said, ‘I’m a 60-year-old fat man and I can’t do that.'” Billings said Mr. Herring then offered to crawl under a gap in the fence, but when he did so and stood up, he collapsed of a heart attack. Herring died at a nearby hospital soon after. Source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-who-caused-death-gets-five-years-in-prison https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-who-cause...

rajbot 5y ago

If you ever used Fidonet or BBS mail, this was Mark “Sparky” Herring, who developed the .QWK file format, that tragically died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)

shadilay 5y ago
I'm surprised this isn't higher up.
rajbot 5y ago
Please see this heartbreaking Twitter thread from Jason Scott on Sparky Herring and QWK https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1417941046781259782?s=21 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1417941046781259782?s=2...
CTOSian 5y ago
Thats tragic! :( I never met with that guy but I spent some time making an QWK program for RISC-OS (Archimedes). RIP Mark!
EricE 5y ago
OMG - I loved .QWK and the universe around it. Indeed I often lament the wish that web forums would support something like QWK so I could use a reader/editor of my choice - web forums suck. What a senseless tragedy :(

edem 5y ago

5 years? Ridiculous. This person needs to be sent to a much worse place than a prison for life.

renewiltord 5y ago

Interesting. It’s a classic confused deputy problem. We provide a channel to summon police that default trusts the summoner for various reasons. Usually, we simply resolve post-hoc but it appears that all one has to do is be a foreign minor and one can do this with impunity. Very interesting.

Lio 5y ago

Something that didn’t seem quite clear to me from the article, what was their motivation? Was this straight up extortion with the aim to sell the Twitter id or did they just want to possess it for bragging rights?

okareaman 5y ago

I thought calls could be traced? If an emergency call comes in from another country claiming to be reporting a local situation, I'd think police would do a little more checking before going in full throttle, guns at the ready.

Andy_G11 5y ago

The most prevalent countermeasure deployed against lying seems to be identity verification. For example, to combat lies about the source of money from crime, banks are required to verify the ID (photographic, residential address) of depositors, as are other transactors e.g. property sales intermediaries. Lies can easily be disseminated via technology, and identity verification as retrospective tracing to origin can be done at the device level, the network level, or both. However, perhaps we are getting to a point where the default of communications tech will be a much higher level of user identity checking as a precursor to communication and operation of devices. Although this is a dystopian scenario where a centralised controlling system regulates who can actually even use tech or to what degree, it is easy to imagine that it would be technologically possible. The concern is that the actions of criminals will be used as an excuse to apply this kind of system and make possible the oppressive restriction of freedoms in future.

sinuhe69 5y ago

Is the police not at least in-part responsible for the death? From my POV, it’s the inappropriate charging of the police force that caused the death of the man. And clearly the police can handle the case differently. Of course, the kids must face consequences as well but I believe the police can not be acquitted. I don’t think such incidents can happen anywhere else in the world.

rob74 5y ago
If they have credible information that an armed and dangerous person has killed someone and may be about to harm other people, what should they do? Just ignore it? Or send some unarmed officers over first to check, who may then get shot?
- isolli 5y ago
  Except that the information was not credible. Assessing the credibility of information should be part of the operating procedure.
libertine 5y ago
Honestly I don't judge the police MO. How are you supposed to approach this report when firearms and rifles are extremely common? It's easy to say you have to give the benefit of doubt when you're sitting behind a desk, but when you're in the front line I don't think it's that simple. At this moment it looks like it's a roll of a dice.

flipstone 5y ago

I highly recommend the latest episode of the Darknet Diaries podcast, which discusses a campaign of harassment aiming to get someone to give up a highly-valuable Instagram handle: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/

petercooper 5y ago

The latest episode of Darknet Diaries is on a similar topic: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/97/ - basically someone owned a desirable Instagram handle and got harassed into giving it up.

3finmunchousen 5y ago

There is a word for when a false 911 call prompts a potentially lethal police response.Tell me again how police haven't been militarized?

RickJWagner 5y ago

I'm glad to read about the 20 year sentence for the other swatter. That needs to be widely publicized so people realize it just doesn't pay to jerk people around for fun.

thoughtstheseus 5y ago

Mark - we will do better. RIP

okprod 5y ago

These kids know exactly what they're doing, and they shouldn't be absolved because they're young or "boys will be boys". Frankly punishment should be directed at the minors involved and their parents. If I'm a young person I can go around murdering and committing crimes because I'm "young" and "didn't know any better"?

clcaev 5y ago
> and their parents How exactly do you suggest parents accomplish the surveillance necessary to avoid liability?
- rchaud 5y ago
  Maybe by not framing the issue as one of 'liability' and 'surveillance', and just teaching the kid right from wrong. As for how that's accomplished, that's the parents' responsibility. They failed here, so the state will be stepping in for the next few years.
  - clcaev 5y ago
    What should the parents' punishment be? How do you evaluate that the parents have reasonably met their duty? Are both parents equally culpable? What about divorcees with alternative live views? Why should this parental failure liability end at 18, what about 19 year olds, or those in their 30's? What about kids previously diagnosed with mental illness?
    - rchaud 5y ago
      Those questions will make up the bulk of the defense's case, I imagine.
TheHypnotist 5y ago
Well if you read the article you'd see one is being charged. The other is ambiguous but it appears authorities know who it is.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

How the hell did the kids get his personal details?

Guthur 5y ago

The size of the fine illustrates a sort of perversity here. If paid who's actually getting the money the state or the victims (family of the deceased). I'm quite sure many will think blood money abhorrent but why should the state get any either?

trymas 5y ago

How a thing like "swatting" exist at all? AFAIK it can happen multiple times to the same location and directed against same people too [0]. It happens for baseless unconfirmed allegations against someone.. "Oh I have heard that he/she is a drug dealer and they are walking with a gun in their backyard" - and whole swat unit is sent - no questions asked. What the hell? This happens to the super rich and famous too [1]. SWAT team comes to the neighbourhood full of 20MM+ houses and is not second guessing what's going on? [0] a bit too lazy to search, though there were infamous swattings of famous youtubers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Other_notable_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Other_notable_cases

tim333 5y ago
The whole Special Weapons and Tactics things seems a bit over the top, especially coming from the UK where maybe some cop will maybe knock on the door and ask if everything is ok.
- consumer451 5y ago
  I imagine that police responding to a home in a country which is armed to the teeth is quite different.
vorticalbox 5y ago
to play devils advocaat. Is it not better for the police to wrongfully turn up to a potentially dangerous situation then to not and people get hurt or killed?
- trymas 5y ago
  Problem is how violent US policing is [0]. Police/SWAT do not turn up to assess the situation. It looks like they turn up to release their anger, aggression and "play" with their assault weapons. Swatters do this, because it will cause big material and mental losses to the victim, with a high chance of death [1]. In this case police/swat is a "poor man's assassin". It's very funny for me to read "Measures against swatting" from that wiki article ([1]), when it happens only in US (and maybe Brazil). This does not happen in other 1st world country, because police is accountable for their ammunition and especially citizens shot. In US you can instigate fake raids and kill innocent people in their sleep, and nothing will happen to you as long as you say that you feared for your life. [2] [0] I know I am stereotyping, though from western 1st world countries US is undoubtedly the leader in police violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_due_to_swatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor

zenexer 5y ago

Why isn’t law enforcement being held accountable as well? As long as it’s possible to wreak havoc with a single phone call or text message, there will always be people who will do it. Law enforcement needs to be prepared for that. Why is this still happening?

mindcrime 5y ago

One aspect of this that I haven't seen addressed yet, is the role the 911 dispatchers play. I'm not sure what (if any) training they receive today specific to detecting SWAT'ing instances, but it seems likely that there are steps dispatchers could take to try and help separate pranks from real incidents, and - in turn - relay that to the responding officers who can mediate their response based on that. Disclaimer: I am a former 911 dispatcher myself, but I've been away from that world for 25 years or so, so my knowledge of training standards, procedures, technology, etc. used in a modern 911 center is pretty thin. That said... there should be some red flags to a dispatcher that call might be of questionable veracity. One would, to my mind, simply be if the call is received from a much different geographic region than where the incident is reported as happening. For direct calls to 911 the callers location is generally shown, although not with super high precision in the case of cell-phones. If somebody wants to call a 911 center that isn't "their" PSAP, they can call the 10 digit number for the center (if they know it. I guess these can probably be found online). I think you will also get location information on the admin line, but don't quote me on that. Additionally, the dispatcher can tell if you called 911 or "the admin line" - and a member of the public calling in on the admin line should probably raise a least a hint of suspicion. A call being relayed / bounced to your center through multiple other agencies is also something that might indicate that the caller is not physically present and may not have the full picture. There are probing questions that could be used to help validate the call. "Did you hear/see these events yourself?" "Where were you when you say/hear them?" "How old are you?" "What's your name?" Some of these are, in fact, questions a 911 dispatcher would ask anyway, not specific to SWAT'ing. What I'd be curious to know, is are there more specific ways to probe to detect a likely SWAT'ing event. If there is a report of gunfire or something, a dispatcher would also typically notice if they only get one call, and no additional confirming calls. While it is possible, especially in a rural area, to only get one call on something like that, reports of gunshots would often-times come from multiple sources. So if the incident is reported as being in a busy/urban area, but there is only one call, that could be an indicator that things aren't kosher. Anyway... just some stream of consciousness stuff here that occurred to me. Not sure if anybody has looked deeply into this aspect yet, or is working on it. If not, maybe somebody should be. Edit: looks like this has gotten at least some attention within the public safety communications world: https://www.ems1.com/tactical-ems/articles/swatting-guidance-for-emergency-responders-and-911-telecommunicators-8CpURyBEClWJJcH2/ https://www.ems1.com/tactical-ems/articles/swatting-guidance... https://www.911.gov/pdf/National_911_Program_State_of_911_Webinar_September_2015.pdf https://www.911.gov/pdf/National_911_Program_State_of_911_We...

blooalien 5y ago

Update: https://www.techspot.com/news/90483-grandfather-died-heart-attack-after-minors-swatted-over.html https://www.techspot.com/news/90483-grandfather-died-heart-a...

aprdm 5y ago

That's so sad.

dgudkov 5y ago

The person who arranged the swatting goes to jail for 5 years: https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/22/qwk_swatting_death/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/22/qwk_swatting_death/

leafywashere 5y ago

What a bunch of Twats