American Mark Herring's final hours began with a call from the neighbors.

“They told him that his house was surrounded by police officers.

A man killed a woman and hid on the property, "said Herring's daughter Corinna Fitch, remembering the day in April 2020.

Her father, a 60-year-old programmer from Sumner, Tennessee, took his pistol and stepped outside. “He wanted to confront the stranger who was supposed to be on his property. Suddenly he saw the many police officers around him, ”Fitch told the TV station WKRN. The officers asked if he was Mark Herring and asked him to hold up his hands. “My father threw the gun away to show that he was not a threat. Then he put his hands up. ”A few seconds later, Herring slumped and died a little later in the hospital. “He had a heart attack. My father was scared to death. "

It wasn't until a few months later that Fitch and her family found out what the fatal mission was all about. Shane Sonderman, then eighteen years old from Tennessee, and a youth from Great Britain had called the police to report an alleged murder at Herring's house. The perpetrators claimed that the sixty-year-old had placed pipe bombs in front of the front door and the back entrance. As usual with similar crimes, a heavily armed SWAT ("special weapons and tactics") deployed. In the days before, Sonderman and his accomplice had harassed Herring with unsolicited pizza deliveries and emails.

The programmer had the user name @Tennessee registered on Twitter in 2006, in homage to the football team at the University of Tennessee.

Sonderman and his accomplice wanted to persuade Herring, like at least five other alleged victims, to release the coveted username.

They hoped to sell the "handle" for $ 3,000 to $ 4,000.

When Herring refused to release the username, Sonderman and his accomplice decided to swatting.

Not the first to die

Alleged emergency calls to put people under pressure by a police SWAT team continue to be made in the United States. It started almost ten years ago with a group of teenagers who sent home celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, and Ashton Kutcher to Special Task Groups from the Los Angeles Police Department. Two years ago, the then "Fortnite" champion Kyle "Bugha" Giersdorf met in Pennsylvania, and a few weeks later the author Ijeoma Oluo in Washington state. Both survived the operation of the SWAT teams with dogs, bulletproof vests and assault rifles unharmed.

The alleged prank of the Californian gamer Tyler Barriss, who wanted to send the police home to an adversary in Kansas in 2017, came to a fatal end, as with Herring. When Barriss stated that he had shot his father and that the other family members were being held hostage in a house, the heavily armed officers presented themselves to a stranger at the address given by Barriss. A twenty-eight-year-old died in the operation from a police bullet.

Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in prison for manslaughter. Sonderman, the programmer Herring sent a SWAT team, will also spend the next few years behind bars. A Tennessee court has now sentenced him to five years in prison. His British accomplice meanwhile went unpunished. Because he is a minor, he could not be extradited to the United States.