SICK: After “swatting” death in Kansas, 25-year old arrested in Los Angeles.
Tyler Barriss, a 25-year old from South Los Angeles, was taken into custody Friday night, according to the local ABC News affiliate. (ABC also notes that “Glendale police arrested a 22-year-old man with the same name for making bomb threats to KABC-TV” back in 2015.) NBC News, speaking to unnamed local “sources” in LA, says that Barriss “had been living at a transitional recovery center.”
Barriss is alleged to have a called in a lengthy threat to Wichita police on Thursday night after a Call of Duty game in which two teammates got into an altercation over a $1.50 wager. Screenshots posted to various Twitter accounts show the dispute escalating. Shortly thereafter, the Wichita police received a call alleging that someone at that address had killed his father, taken his family hostage, poured gasoline around the home, and was ready to light it on fire. Cops descended on the area and cordoned it off. When 28-year old Andrew Fitch opened the front door of his home to see why all the lights were flashing outside, he was shot and killed.
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What happened next was broken down on Friday by the Wichita police in a press conference, which you can watch online. According to the officer giving the briefing, a threatening call came in to City Hall at around 6:15pm local time. The caller said he had shot his dad in the head and was holding his mother and brother in the closet. He had a black handgun and wanted to kill himself. The call apparently continued for a full 20 minutes, even as police dispatch was looped in and officers headed to the scene.
Once there, police surrounded the Fitch residence. Andrew Fitch opened the door, saw police cars all over the place, and heard a police officer with a drawn weapon begin to shout at him: “Walk this way!” (You can see the whole ghastly incident, as captured on police cameras at the scene, along with the 911 call that began it, on the Wichita Police Facebook page. The camera footage comes at the end.)
Fitch appears confused and drops his hands, then a police spotlight shines on him, and he appears to raise his hands again. In the middle of a police officer shouting, “Walk this way!” a second time, a single shot rings out, killing Fitch.
The call and the video are on Facebook here.
This is next-level doxxing, gaming America’s militarized police departments to try and settle private disputes with deadly effect. Fitch was not even involved in the dispute, and as one Facebook commenter noted, “No one was in any actual danger before the police arrived.”