A California man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to making several hoax calls and reporting fabricated emergencies, one of which ended in the death of another man in Wichita, Kansas, in December 2017.
Tyler Barriss, 26, accepted a plea deal in Wichita that will result in a sentence of 20 to 25 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to a total of 51 charges, including federal charges stemming from California and Washington, D.C., regarding a multitude of fake emergency calls and threats.
In December 2017, Barriss made an emergency call to the Wichita City Hall, which was later transferred to the Wichita Police Department, claiming that he had killed his father and was holding two other family members hostage.
Barriss provided an address to police that was not his own. Barriss claimed to have been requested to make this call by an online Call of Duty player after a dispute emerged from a wager match, with $1.50 on the line. This practice, known as "swatting," has become increasingly common, particularly in the gaming and esports communities, as a form of retaliation and intimidation.
Upon arrival, Wichita police surrounded the outside of an address in a suburb. When Andrew Finch, 28, answered the door, Wichita police officer Justin Rapp fired a fatal shot after a startled Finch lowered his hands to his waistband. Rapp claimed he believed that Finch was armed.
After an investigation, it was found that Finch was unarmed and was believed to have been pulling up his pants. Rapp was not charged with a crime, with Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett stating that Rapp had reason to believe there was imminent danger.
The two Call of Duty gamers whose dispute led to contacting Barriss -- Casey Viner, 18, of North College Hill, Ohio, and Shane Gaskill, 20, of Wichita -- face a series of federal criminal charges, including conspiracy to obstruct justice, wire fraud and other counts. Both have pleaded not guilty. Their trial is scheduled for Jan. 8 in Wichita.
Prosecutors say that Viner enlisted Barriss to swat Gaskill but that Gaskill provided a false address for his home.
In the case from the District of Columbia, Barriss pleaded guilty to two counts for making hoax bomb threats in phone calls to the headquarters of the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C.
In the California case, Barriss pleaded guilty to 46 counts for making false reports that bombs were planted at high schools, universities, shopping malls and television stations. He called from Los Angeles to emergency numbers in Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, Massachusetts, Illinois, Utah, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Missouri, Maine, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, New York, Michigan, Florida and Canada.
In correspondence with Wired, Barriss admitted to not only causing the Wichita incident but also to making bomb threats related to multiple evacuations of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas on Dec. 8-10, when the facility hosted Major League Gaming's annual Dallas Call of Duty event. Barriss was previously arrested in December 2015 in Los Angeles after he called in bomb threats to KABC-TV in Glendale, California.
In March, Kansas congressman Ron Estes introduced the Andrew T. Finch Memorial Act of 2018 into the U.S. House of Representatives. That bill would make false emergency calls punishable with up to five years in prison, with up to 20 years if the call resulted in serious injury. As of April, that bill had been referred to the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.