‘In a way I was famous.’ WA state man sentenced for ‘swatting’ hoax calls across U.S.

A 21-year-old man was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma to three years in prison for making hoax phone calls in more than a dozen states, terrorizing people by sending police rushing to their homes for fake emergencies.

Ashton Connor Garcia of Bremerton pleaded guilty earlier this year to two counts of threats and hoaxes regarding explosives and two counts of extortion. Federal prosecutors said Garcia made at least 20 “swatting” calls between June and September 2022 in the United States and Canada, falsely reporting bomb and shooting threats and at times extorting his victims for money.

Assistant U.S. attorney Jessica Manca said in court Tuesday that Garcia called himself a “terrorist” for the online harassment he engaged in and bragged about it to others in chat rooms he created that were devoted to swatting. He recruited others, she said, in an attempt to form a group of cyber criminals that would harass people for money.

Manca acknowledged that the online communities Garcia was steeped in are toxic, but few others harass people at the level the defendant did, and she said some tried to convince him to stop what he was doing.

“Not everyone is calling across the United States, sometimes multiple times a day, live streaming their illegal activities to an audience, extorting people, including minors, and going out of their way to openly taunt police as Mr. Garcia did,” Manca said. “And the few who are doing that absolutely need to be held accountable.”

The sentence Judge Benjamin H. Settle imposed was below the sentencing guideline range of 41 to 51 months in prison. Prosecutors recommended 48 months. Garcia’s extortion charge carried a maximum sentence of two years, and the threats and hoaxes charge had a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

The prosecutor asked Settle to consider audio clips submitted to the court of some of Garcia’s calls in Ohio, New Jersey and Canada. She said she thought it was important for him to hear the urgency and distress the defendant intentionally put in his voice, his fake crying and fake circumstances of murder and rape that were designed to convince law enforcement they had to rush to a life-or-death emergency.

Daniel Grispino, a police commander from Shaker Heights, Ohio, described for the court one of Garcia’s calls from June 2022 when he said his officers were dispatched for a call from a young man who reported that his father was raping his mother and that he was armed with a firearm and an explosive device.

Grispino said he felt something wasn’t right about the call, and he asked the caller numerous times if the report was a hoax, but it wasn’t until they determined there was only a 12-year-old girl alone in the home that police knew it was fake. The police commander said he would never forget the terrified look on the young girl’s face.

“I told you on the phone that day, Mr. Garcia, that you would be held accountable,” Grispino said, turning to face the defendant directly. “You laughed at me, you mocked me, and you said we would never find you behind several VPNs.”

Grispino said Garcia put his officers and their community at risk, wasted countless hours when officers could have been responding to real emergencies and used up thousands of dollars of taxpayer money.

Settle then heard from one of Garcia’s federal public defenders. Attorney Heather Carroll said it was hard to reconcile the smart, inquisitive and endearing young man she’d come to know with the person portrayed in his actions.

“What Ashton did was awful,” Carroll said. “It was dangerous. It hurt a lot of people although thankfully no one was physically injured.”

Carroll said there were mitigating factors that made Garcia deserving of a shorter, 18-month sentence. His early life was marked by abandonment, she said. Garcia was given up by his birth mother and went through several homes before he came to the people he calls Mom and Dad. In fourth grade, he was taken out of public school and continued his education online. Carroll said she was sure Garcia’s parents were doing what they thought was best, but she thought it fed into a “perfect storm” that led to his conduct in this case.

Garcia was socially isolated, Carroll said, and coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic he didn’t have any friends outside of those he knew online.

“He had a strong need for acceptance and affirmation,” Carroll said. “And he found an online community, or formed an online community with other people who praised him, encouraged him for engaging in behavior like this.”

Before Settle handed down Garcia’s sentence, the young man stood to address the court. He was in a beige uniform and wore his brown hair in a bowl cut, occasionally looking down at a document in front of him as he spoke.

He said he’d watched some of the videos of police responding to his calls and watched as a family’s door was broken down with an infant inside. It would be false to say he didn’t know right from wrong at the time, Garcia said, but he didn’t realize the full gravity of his actions.

“Looking back, I can see how disconnected from reality I actually was,” Garcia said. “I was in an environment where toxicity was key. The more toxic that I was, the more praise, the more friends I had.”

Garcia said at one point he got a call from a Pennsylvania detective who told him he was being investigated for making threats and false reporting, but he continued what he’d been doing.

“I was so entwined in my online persona that I couldn’t let go of it,” he said. “In a way I was famous — and for the wrong reason.”

Garcia said he was remorseful for what he’d done, and he extended an apology to all of the law enforcement agencies that he taunted and for the time that he’d wasted.

Settle said the hours of police response Garcia created could add up to “tens of thousands of dollars,” but that was the least of the court’s concerns compared to the human harm and terror that had been caused.

The fact that no one was physically injured doesn’t change the reality that such violence can and does occur in swatting incidents, the judge said.

“There is in this case a great need to send a clear message throughout the country that engaging in swatting will not go simply punished with a slap on the hand,” Settle said.