Being 17, the young man will not have his name revealed; however, he will be facing court and slammed with 23 offences including extortion, public mischief and criminal harassment. The young man is from British Columbia, Canada and was pulled up last year in September for calling out the SWAT team on numerous female League of Legend streamers, schools, amusement parks and houses.
Swatting is the act of making a false call that leads to the SWAT team entering and securing a home or location specified. The intent is usually done as a goof by the individual or for whatever reason unbeknownst to common sense. The reasoning however in this situation; is distressingly malicious. In many cases, this was done to video game streamers in the last few years.
The start of all of this began with the young man being extremely obsessive with a female gamer and was rejected when he tried to connect with them. According to Tri-City news; who have been following this story:
“…after she repeatedly rejected him, the teen called the Tucson police to prompt a swat of her home, claiming he had shot his parents with an AR15 rifle, had bombs and would kill the police if he saw any marked vehicles.”
And afterwards:
“Five days later, he pulled the same prank while her mother was visiting, as well as swatted her parents’ home in Phoenix, identifying himself as the woman’s brother and telling the police department there: “I shot my parents with an AR15 rifle.” Police and a helicopter were on scene within minutes and the father and son were removed from the home at gunpoint.”
To add even more to his rap sheet:
“The next month, the teen sent the woman a message to inform all her parents’ credit card information was online. Three days late, the teen used a program to send his victim 218 text messages simultaneously”
Quite clearly this boy has some unresolved issues. Having to systematically try and ruin people’s lives as a knee jerk reaction to being rejected is an extreme. The mental state he’s in is clearly in question as he’s reported to be seen during his proceedings in front of a judge to be smirking and ‘showing little emotion during the proceeding’.
He will be undergoing psychiatric assessment in the next few days until his courtroom sentence on June 29th where light on his fate will be shed. The power of the internet and to remain anonymous is still such a frightening thing. To have people who abuse this power in this way and make lives horrible will create new precedence to trying to monitor the internet; and it’s something we can’t have done. But neither can we accept this sort of damage.