The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office received a report about a false shooting threat at a De Soto-area home. The report was determined to be swatting, a term used when someone makes a false report to emergency services in an attempt to send a SWAT unit to a specific location, Sheriff’s Office spokesman Grant Bissell said.
It appears a man from the United Kingdom called in the false report, using a transfer service connected to the Skype internet video conferencing service, Bissell said.
The Sheriff’s Office got a call at about 11:25 p.m. July 9 to respond to the home in the 2300 block of Yellow Rock West Road west of De Soto. The person who made the call, which was routed to Jefferson County 911 through Skype, claimed to be a 16-year-old boy who had shot his mother, the report said.
The caller also said he had put his mother in the basement and barricaded himself in an upstairs room with an AR-15. The caller threatened to shoot deputies if they responded to the home and claimed to have poured gasoline around the exterior of the house, according to the report.
Deputies created a staging area near the home, but the call was determined to be a hoax before SWAT was activated, the report said.
Deputies were informed the transfer service could not determine where the call came from and could not contact the person who made the emergency. When deputies approached the home, they saw a woman dancing inside the house, the report said.
Jefferson County 911 found phone numbers associated with the address and contacted the homeowner’s former husband. He said his former wife and two daughters lived there but no males did, the Sheriff’s Office reported.
Deputies contacted the homeowner and were told one of the women who lives in the house had been involved in an internet relationship with a man in England, but had ended it. The English man allegedly had bragged about “swatting” people in the past and reportedly had south revenge following previous arguments by sending unwanted pizzas to the De Soto-area home, according to the report.
The dispatcher told deputies the caller had what sounded like a British accent, Bissell said.
However, he said he didn’t know if the Sheriff’s Office will be able to pursue the incident further.
“Because we believe this is international, there are a whole lot of challenges,” Bissell said. “If we would go after it, it would require the assistance of a federal agency.”