The international scheme to obtain a coveted Twitter handle ended on a sleepy, country road in Tennessee when police surrounded the home of Mark Herring and ordered him to come out with his hands up.
Authorities were called to the Sumner County address in April 2020 in response to a report that a woman had been fatally shot and pipe bombs would go off if officers arrived, according to court records.
In the hours before, Herring, 60, and his family had been harassed by several people aiming to acquire and then resell lucrative social media handles through a range of intimidation — from phone calls and text messages to false reports of fires and unexpected, cash-only pizza deliveries at their homes.
But Herring’s refusal to give up his @Tennessee handle, federal prosecutors say, led to police surrounding his home with their weapons drawn, and caused the computer programmer to suffer a massive heart attack that killed him. His death in Bethpage, Tenn., was triggered by “swatting” — the illegal practice of calling in fake life-threatening emergencies to provoke a heavily-armed response from police.https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-man-targeted-his-twitter-handle-dies-after-swatting-call-n1274747