Three days after last Christmas, a 25-year-old Los Angeles man named Tyler Barriss allegedly called police in Wichita, Kansas, and pretended that he’d murdered his father and was holding hostages in a house near the city’s downtown. Barriss thought the house belonged to an avid Call of Duty gamer he wanted to harass, but he was mistaken about the address. (WIRED has published a detailed account[1] of the case.)
When the cops showed up in force, 28-year-old Andrew Finch opened his front door to see what the commotion was about; seconds later he was dead, shot by a police sniper across the street. It was the first time this sort of vile prank—commonly known as swatting—had resulted in a death, and Barriss was charged with a litany of crimes in state and federal court, including involuntary manslaughter. He was extradited to Kansas, where he’s currently being held.
Now Barriss’ considerable legal troubles have become even more complex. Late yesterday, federal prosecutors in the Central District of California filed a criminal information document that accuses Barriss of a vast new array of crimes. The earliest date back to September and October of 2015, when prosecutors allege that Bariss phoned in a series of bomb threats to schools in Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Illinois. (Barriss told me[2] that he “evacuated” these schools because his online Halo friends were students there, and he wanted to give them a day off class.)
But the bulk of the 46 crimes detailed in the document occurred during the last four months of 2017, shortly after Barriss was released from Los Angeles County Jail after having served nearly two years behind bars. (He had pled no contest to two separate crimes: Making bomb threats