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A 60-year-old man from Tennessee suffered a heart attack and died after being “run over” for control of a Twitter account.
Mark Herring, 60, “just wanted to be @Tennessee because he loved Flights,” his daughter, Corinna Fitch, told a local radio station. The Volunteers are the University of Tennessee football team.
Swatting is the practice of falsely reporting life-threatening situations to the police, prompting them to send officers and sometimes heavily armed Swat teams.
Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County in Tennessee, used swatting as part of a harassment campaign to force people to hand over desirable usernames. Authorities said Sonderman worked with an unidentified British minor, identified in court documents by initials and not extradited, through Discord, an online video game chat platform.
On April 27 of last year, Herring was the victim of harassing calls, text messages, and cash-only pizza deliveries. Then the British miner called the police in Sumner County, Tennessee.
According to court documents, the appellant gave Herring’s address and said “he shot a woman in the back of the head and she was dead, and would use homemade bombs placed in front of the front and back doors if the police intervened.
“Emergency responders were dispatched and when they arrived at Herring’s home, guns drawn, called on Herring to walk towards them, keeping his hands visible. In doing so, Herring, 60, appeared to lose his balance and fell to the ground, unresponsive. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital; the cause of death was determined to be a heart attack.
Her daughter told the Washington Post: “I didn’t understand how it happened. We’ve seen all this news come out about these people wanting his Twitter handle and how that was the reason he died. It was just mind boggling to know that the man who always preached internet safety died this way.
Sonderman pleaded guilty to conspiracy. He and his co-conspirators are accused of using similar harassment tactics with others. They are accused of harassing the parents of a victim in Ohio by sending unwanted food deliveries and falsely reporting a fire on April 14, 2020.
They then sent the victim a message saying, “Did your parents like the fire trucks? “Followed by” I plan to kill your parents next if you don’t give the username on instrgam [sic] mine ”, according to the indictment. Federal documents list other victims in New York, Virginia and Michigan.
U.S. District Judge Mark S Norris on Wednesday sentenced Sonderman to five years in prison with limited internet access and mental health treatment.
Sonderman’s attorney, Bryan Huffman, told the Post that his client had “expressed regret over Mr. Herring’s death. He was also able to convey his sincere remorse to the other victims. “
Fitch told the Post that shortly before Mark Herring’s death, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, he attended a neighborhood parade but maintained social distancing, waving to him and his grandson, who had just turned seven.
“He said, ‘I wish I could kiss you,'” she said. “A few days later he was gone.
Herring’s ex-wife, Fran Herring, told WKRN she believed he was “scared to death.”
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