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WICHITA, Kan. (AP) – A player from Ohio bet $ 1.50 while playing Call of Duty: World War II online was sentenced Friday to 15 months in jail for recruiting a joker to make a fictional call emergency that resulted in the death of a Kansas man killed by the police.
Casey Viner, 19, of North College Hill, Ohio, is also banned from gambling for two years. He is released under supervision after serving his sentence, US District Judge Eric Melgren said in announcing the sentence.
Viner swallowed several times and seemed discouraged when the judge announced his decision. He peeked in the gallery where his parents were sitting. His mother in tears stood up and left the audience room. His father, an officer of the Ohio police, put his head in his hands.
In April, Viner pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice, in the hope that he would not be sentenced to jail time. Viner admitted trying to hide his involvement in the 2017 incident when he realized that the old had had someone killed.
In a brief statement in court, Viner told the judge that he was "terribly sorry" about what had happened: "I have never intended to do anything about it. I think about it every day. "
In the plea agreement, prosecutors and defense lawyers had recommended a two-year probation sentence, provided Viner was confined to his home for six months, unless he went to court. at school, at work or at the church. They also jointly recommended gambling restriction.
But Melgren added that a jail sentence was needed to reflect the seriousness of the offense and to give the public a sense that the criminal justice system was working. It was foreseeable that something serious could happen by calling an armed police force to respond to what the police believed was a situation of growing violence, he said.
"We are imposing penalties not only for what people want, but for what has happened," said Melgren.
The death of 28-year-old Andrew Finch in Wichita, Kansas, has drawn national attention to "swatting," a form of retaliation in which one person reports a false urgency to force the authorities, particularly a team SWAT, to go down on an address.
Viner himself had been charged 20 days earlier with the Kansas incident, his lawyer, the defense attorney, Jack Morrison, told the court. He said that Viner was full of remorse, noting that he had lost about 20 pounds in recent months "because of the seriousness of what happened as a result of what he thought to be a harmless farce ".
According to the authorities, Viner recruited Tyler R. Barriss to "fight" an opponent, Shane Gaskill, then 19, in Wichita. But the address they used was old, leading the police to Finch, who was not involved in the conflict or video game.
Gaskill, who had previously given his former Wichita speech to Viner, was charged as a co-conspirator after knowingly giving Barriss the same address and causing him to "try something".
Barriss, a 25-year-old Los Angeles man known for his "reputation" online, called the Los Angeles police on December 28, 2017 to falsely denounce a shooting and kidnapping at Wichita's address . The police shot Finch when he opened the door to see what was happening outside.
Viner had just turned 18 about two weeks before the deadly incident, and US lawyer Debra Barnett said that probation would give her a better understanding of what he did and that she would be one. first step to help him grow up.
"At his age and his youth, I'm not sure that he'll get it if he sits in a cell block with more hardened and experienced people than him," he said. she declared.
The federal indictment alleged that a forensic examination of Viner's iPhone had found his outgoing messages deleted intended for strangers, including one in which Viner allegedly wrote : "I was involved in the death of someone".
Finch's family sued the city of Wichita and the officers involved. Police said that the officer who shot at Finch thought he was looking for a firearm because he had approached the belt. The District Attorney refused to charge the officer.
Gaskill has entered into an agreement for delayed prosecution that could allow the charges against him to be dropped.
US Attorney Stephen McAllister testified before the court that a distinguishing factor in the government's treatment of the two gamblers was that none of this would have happened if Viner had not contacted Barriss and had not started the whole process.
Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in prison in March, after pleading guilty to 51 counts of indictment for making false emergency and threatened calls throughout the country, including the appeal to the United States. Deadly hoax in Kansas. Prosecutors estimate that it is the longest prison sentence ever imposed for "crushing".
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An earlier version of the story had been corrected to show that Gaskill was 19 years old at the time of the swatting and that Barriss was 25 years old at the time.
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