Sword and Scale Nightmares - Gamer

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

On a quiet evening in Wichita, Kansas, flashing police lights suddenly flood a residential street. When 28-year-old Andrew Finch steps onto his front porch to see what’s happening, he’s shot by police responding to a reported emergency. In the days that follow, investigators start uncovering a strange chain of events that stretches far beyond that neighborhood and raises troubling questions about how a single moment can spiral into tragedy.Get commercial free access to over a decade of Sword and Scale's true crime podcasts at http://swordandscale.com

Nicole Davis yawns. Lately, she gets sleepy as soon as the sun sets. Outside, the last bit of daylight appears. She starts thinking about dinner, knowing her son will be hungry soon. She pulls out items from the pantry and sets them on a counter, scrolling through recipes she saved on her phone. She calls for her son to take out the trash. Her 12-year-old son shuffles in, sulking.

Before he can say anything, she tells him, You have to take the trash out, and I don't want to hear any complaints. He frowns and sticks out his bottom lip. Then he grabs the trash bag and makes a show out of how much he dislikes the chore. Yeah, we all do. He heads outside and slams the door. A few moments later, as she heats a pan, he comes back, as mood lifting as he smells dinner. See, that wasn't so bad, she says.

He grunts and goes to his room. room. She calls after him, You're already this grumpy and you're not even a teenager yet. A muffled groan comes from behind his closed door. She lets him be and focuses on making dinner. As she reads the recipe and measures ingredients, she hears a loud boom, like thunder, but much closer. She rushes to the window, spilling rice as she sets it down.

Her eyes widened as she looks. looks out from the second floor. The street below is filled with police. Weapons drawn. Her heart races. Red and blue lights flash between the buildings. She remembers her phone and starts recording. Her jaw drops.

A man is lying on his porch, shot. And just moments earlier, her son had been only a few feet away. Welcome to Sword and Scale Nightmares. True Crime for Bedtime. Where nightmare begins now. Just before Nicole Davis hears the loud boom, Andrew Finch is lying on his living room couch. He hears his mother watching TV and eating dinner in her room. His niece's muffled footsteps upstairs. And then the familiar sound of a car hitting a pothole in the air.

alley next to his house. The restaurant is closed, though. Reluctantly, he gets up and crosses the living room to the front door. He opens it. Flashing red and blue lights flood the room. He steps outside, pushing the screen door open, trying to see what's happening and who the police are after. A second later, he's bombarded. Voices shout from every direction. Another second passes. He looks to his left and he sees police at the corner of the street. He turns to the right and sees officers in his neighbor's front yard. Across the street, even more officers are aiming rifles at him. Another second.

He can understand them now, but he's confused. Why are they here? Another moment. Someone to his right yells, hands up in the air. Someone to his left yells, hands, hands, hands. Someone across the street yells, Show your hands, walk this way.

Another second passes. He doesn't know what to do. He puts his hands up, then down, then up again. Another second. Suddenly he's blinded by a spotlight from across the street. Another second passes. He tries to shield his eyes, but the screen doors is closing on him. and his pants are slipping down.

He pulls up his waistband and reaches back to stop the door from slamming into him. Then the rifle fires. The crack of the shot splits the air, echoing against the clapboard houses. For an instant, there's a stunned silence, all sound sucked from the night. When Andrew opened the door, his mother immediately noticed the flashing police lights. She got up to see what was going on. Then she heard the gunshot. When she walked into the hall, she saw her roommate poking his head out of his room as well.

He hadn't noticed the lights until after he heard the gunshot. They walked together to the side door. They were met with a bright light directly in their eyes and officers shouting, Come out with your hands up. Upstairs, Andrew's 17-year-old niece hears the shot. Her heart races as she hurries down the stairs. feeling confused and afraid. At the bottom, she sees her uncle lying face up just inside the front door. His chest and arm are covered in blood. He's breathing slowly and with difficulty.

For a moment, she stands frozen in fear. Then she moves past her uncle into the living room. Her eyes wide with panic. Suddenly, officers outside yell at her to come toward them. Their voices sharp and urgent. The members of the house are handcuffed and led to a front yard a few houses away. Andrew, clinging to life, is also handcuffed. His breath ragged and shallow. His mother and niece sit helplessly, time dragging on as they wait for an ambulance to arrive for Andrew. In those endless minutes, they learn the police are as as confused as they are. Officers explain that they are responding to a shots-fired call. That is why they have come.

Andrew's mother cries out in disbelief. It is impossible. No one in that house owns any guns. Andrew Finch would be pronounced deceased at 7.03 p.m. 35 minutes after he opened his front door. Ten minutes earlier, it's after hours at the Wichita City Building. The phone rings. Only a service officer is present.

A young-sounding man says his mother struck his father with a gun. The officer quickly transfers the call to 911 dispatch. It's 6.18 p.m. when the phone rings. The dispatcher answers, calm, and practiced. 911, the caller's tone is slow. He says he's at 103-3-West-E-E-E-Rexam. McCormick Street and just shot his dad in the head. He explains that his parents were arguing and it got out of hand.

Unsure, she heard it right, the dispatcher asks him to repeat it, but the connection fades. His words grow hard to make out. Not wasting time, she sounds the shots fired alert and quickly enters the address. Officers are dispatched. She keeps him on the line asking questions. What's your name? Ryan. That's when he shares another detail that chills her.

My mom and brother are really scared right now, so I'm just pointing a gun at them and holding them in the closet right now. Her fingers blur as she updates the information in the computer system. Mom and brother at gunpoint in the closet. The caller speaks up again. I don't want to get in trouble. I didn't really mean to kill my dad. I'm starting to think about it, like lighting the house on fire and then just committing suicide.

Moments later, the caller would hang up, but by then officers were already at the address. Officer Justin Rapp hears the call come over the radio. He and his partner turned the car around and race towards McCormick Street. They aren't the first ones at the scene. Rapp sees another patrol car already covering the west end of the road. That's the end with the closed restaurant. He opens the door and steps onto the street. With practiced motions, he retrieves his rifle from the trunk.

He knows the drill. Depending on how things go, they may have to set up a perimeter until SWAT arrives. Just then, the sergeant motions for him to follow. He leads rap to the front of a two-story home on the north side of the street opposite the caller's address. He instructs him to be ready in case they need long cover. Rapp shoulders the rifle and peers down the sights as the sergeant moves on to instruct other officers. He moves the reticle into position, aiming directly at the front door. Another officer points out motion on the second floor.

Rapp moves his sight. He sees a silhouette in a window. It appears to be bending at the waist and moving up and down. In his mind, it looks at the waist. Looks like someone performing CPR. He takes a controlled breath and anxiety heightens. That must be true, he thinks. He shot his father in the head.

He moves his focus back to the front door and takes another breath. Suddenly a silhouette appears behind the screen door. Rapp glances to his left at the group of officers staged in the neighboring front yard. He glances to his right at the small cluster of officers stationed. staged at the intersection. Then, the yelling starts. The screen door swings open, and the silhouette becomes a man standing in a doorway. Rap hears the officer's yelling. He's watching the man's movements intently. A beat of sweat runs down his forehead. An officer to the right yells, Hands, hands, hands. Officers to the left yell. Hands up in the air. The

The sergeant, standing next to him, yells, Show me your hands. Walk this way. Rap tightens his grip on the rifle. His trigger finger moves to the trigger, then back to rest. Then to trigger again. The man makes a movement. He reaches for his waist. It looks a lot like reaching for a gun.

Suddenly the man's shoulder drops and his hand moves up. In that instant, rap squeezes the trigger. A single shot rings out. The man hits the ground. It was 6.28 p.m. 10 minutes since the 911 call. The street falls silent for a moment before erupting into chaos again. Seconds later, a voice comes over the radio. Shots fired, one down.

The dispatcher asks the question no one on the scene. can answer. Is it the suspect? The reply comes back. We don't know. As officers moved towards the house, one realization settled over the street. The man they had just shot might not be the suspect at all. About 10 minutes later, the phone rang again at the Wichita City building. The service officer answered it and, like before, transferred it to 911. The dispatcher answers the call with surprise. It was the same caller. Her anxiety swells with the thought.

If this is the caller, who did the police just shoot? The caller details the same scenario, but when pressed, provides new information. He said his house was a one-story house and kept repeating the same address. 1033 West McCormick. This was a huge clue. that the caller wasn't who he claimed to be. Officers had already confirmed that the house at 103-Wes-McCormick Street had two stories. It didn't take long for police to understand what had happened.

The call was not real. There had been no domestic disputes that got out of hand. No father was shot. There were no hostages, especially not at this address. The entire thing was a hoax. And not just any hoax. It was a form of harassment known these days as swatting. Yeah, we're very innovative with our crimes these days.

It's a false emergency call designed to send armed police to someone's home. Usually someone who livestreams or is in the public spotlight. You know, like me. But identifying the caller would take time. The phone number on the caller ID appeared to be local to Wichita. But it wasn't. Within hours, investigators discovered the number had been spoofed. The call had actually been placed through an internet calling service

designed to hide the caller's real location. Yeah, you can do that too. Eventually, with the help of the FBI, investigators traced the call to a man nearly 1,400 miles away in Los Angeles. The man behind it all was 25-year-old Tyler Barris. And in certain corners of the Internet, Barris was already well known. He'd spent years making hoax emergency calls across the country. Bomb threats, active shooter calls, fake hostage situations, dozens of them.

online Barris had built quite a reputation, a reputation for swatting under the screen name, Swatistic. Yeah, yeah. The police arrested him the day after the event, by the way. Your little privacy and spoofing tools are no match for what the FBI can do. Trust me on that. We have no privacy in 2026 whatsoever, so keep telling yourself you do. You're in a Black Mirror episode right now and you don't even know it.

The good thing is they caught the guy. Almost immediately, he started talking. He admitted to making the phone call. He said the address didn't come from him. He got the address from an 18-year-old gamer named Casey Viner. When detectives contacted Viner, another layer of the story emerged. At first, it didn't make sense. Everything that followed, the police response, a man's death, the nationwide search for the caller.

It wasn't driven by revenge or hatred or any real motive whatsoever. It was about a video game with a monetary reward and the overinflated egos of youth. Kids are just fucking dumb. Stop putting them up on a pedestal in particular. like there are future and know everything about everything. Usually they're just complete retards that are full of shit, egotistical, self-centered, and unaware of consequences. On the day of the swatting, Viner had been playing Call of Duty, World War II online.

During one match, an argument broke out between teammates after one accidentally killed the other. It started as the kind of argument that happens thousands of times every day in online games. Insults, trash talk, the occasional N-word. Threats typed out in seconds, but this time one of those threats escalated. Another player in the match, 19-year-old Shane Gaskill started taunting Biner. At some point during the argument, Gaskill challenged him. He dared someone to. swat him. It was meant as a joke, a bluff, a way to prove he wasn't afraid. But there's only one

problem with that. You see, people on the internet can be anyone. They can be just like you and me or they can be bat-shit crazy. So when you go on this thing that connects to every other human being in the world, please try and remember that. The address he gave to Viner, who then gave it to Barris, wasn't his anymore. It belonged to Andrew Finch. And the prize for winning the match that led to this argument and a man's death wasn't thousands of dollars, as you might think. It wasn't even hundreds.

It was just $1.50. A man died for $1.50. Welcome to this brave new world. In the months after Andrew Finch's death, lawmakers moved to make sure a tragedy like this could never be dismissed as a harmless prank again. Kansas legislators passed what became known as the Andrew Finch Act, increasing criminal penalties for swatting calls and allowing harsher charges when a false emergency report leads to an injury or death. The case also pushed federal prosecutors to treat swatting as a serious

interstate crime, setting a precedent that hoax callers could be held responsible for the consequences of the police response they trigger, which is an interesting shift of responsibility, to say the least. In the years that followed, Andrew Finch's family fought for accountability in civil court. They filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Wichita and the officer who fired the fatal shot, arguing that the police response had escalated too quickly to deadly force. After years of legal battles, the city ultimately agreed to a $5 million settlement with the Finch family in 2022. While the settlement could never bring Andrew back, it marked an acknowledgement that the events on McCormick Street had ended in a devastating and preventable loss.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the actions of Officer Justin Rapp were placed under intense scrutiny. The Sedgwick County District Attorney conducted a formal review of the shooting and ultimately determined that Rapp's use of force was legally justified under Kansas law. No criminal charges were filed against him. The decision sparked anger among many of the Wichita community, who believed someone should be held accountable for Andrew Finch's death. In the years that followed, Rapp remained with the Wichita Police Department and was later promoted to detective. Tyler Barris was ultimately charged in federal court in Kansas with a wide range of crimes, tied to the Wichita swadding and numerous other hoaxes.

There were 51 total charges, and some included conspiracy, interstate threats and hoaxes, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and making a false report resulting in death. He would accept a plea agreement and plead guilty. He was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. And with that, Barris kind of became famous all over again. His conviction was the first time a swatting call led to a federal sentence. His sentence was also the longest ever imposed for swatting crimes. Shane Gaskill was charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice in federal court.

He too accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison, two years of supervised release and restitution payments. Although Gaskill did not make the call, his actions were part of the chain that led to the deadly swatting. K.C. Viner was charged with conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Once again, he accepted a federal plea agreement and was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Two years, supervised release and restitution. But the effects of that night didn't stop in courtrooms or with new laws being passed. Inside the house on McCormick Street, Andrew Finch's family lived with the memory of that night.

His teenage niece, who ran downstairs and found her uncle struggling to breathe, never recovered from what she saw. Her family said the trauma stayed with her. Two years later, she died by suicide. Not long after her boyfriend also took his own life. Andrew Finch wasn't a suspect. He wasn't armed. He wasn't even the person they were looking for.

And yet, in less than 10 seconds, he was dead. Just like that. It makes you think how easy it is. And it wasn't because of something he did, but it was because of what someone, miles away, said. The person who made that call sat behind a screen, oblivious to any repercussions that might come from his actions. There were no sirens, no commands, no spotlight in their eyes,

just a phone and a lie. that killed an innocent man. If you enjoyed the show, please consider joining plus at sword and scale.com slash plus. But if you can't, consider leaving us a positive review

on your preferred listening platform. Sweet dreams, and good night.