California police arrest suspect in deadly swatting prank

Swatting prank leads to police killing of innocent, unarmed man
Bonnie Kristian
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Police in California have arrested a Los Angeles man, Tyler Barriss, in connection to the prank 911 call that brought a SWAT team to the Kansas home of an unarmed father of two, Andrew Finch, who was killed Thursday when one of the officers opened fire after Finch opened his front door. Barriss is held without bond and will not appear in court until Tuesday at the earliest. It is not yet known what charges may be filed against him or whether he is believed to be the hoax caller.

There is no specific federal law against swatting, but CNN legal analyst Paul Callan said federal authorities might choose charges of "reckless homicide, because when you do something like this to set up a raid by a SWAT team on an innocent family, you're putting people's lives in danger." An additional option would be wire fraud, which Callan explained serves as "a catchall statute for these new crimes that haven't been anticipated."

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Bonnie Kristian
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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