The Most Prolific School Swatter in American History Hid in Plain Sight. The FBI Knew Who He Was For Months
It was 10 a.m. on a Wednesday in May 2023, and Sarah Jones was 11 hours and 49 minutes into a 12-hour emergency dispatch shift for the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office in Washington state. What came through her line that morning would go down as the worst call of her life.
The caller, who only identified himself as “Wayne,” came in through a public regional emergency line. His voice was unnaturally deep, drawn out, and pressed so close to the microphone that every breath hummed down the wire. “I’m walking into Central Valley High School in Veradale with an AK-47,” he told the first operator who answered. “I’m going to kill every person I see.”
That operator transferred the call to Jones (WIRED has changed her name at her request), a 42-year-old red-headed mother of three. The Spokane Regional Emergency Center was chronically understaffed, so Jones had pulled a forced overnight shift of overtime, sipping Dunkin’ Donuts coffee from the office Keurig between a steady stream of domestic violence and reckless driving calls. Jones had taken 911 calls for years, but only that week had she been promoted to “law dispatch”—the unit that handles “hot calls,” active crimes in progress. This would be her first.
When Jones read the transfer note from the first operator, adrenaline flooded her system: she was talking to a man claiming to be an active school shooter, and she had only seconds to talk him out of following through.
“Hi. Wayne? What’s going on?” she asked, forcing calm over her hammering heart.
“It’s too complicated,” the voice drawled, so grotesque that Jones first wondered if it was lifted straight from a horror film recording. “All you need to know is I want cops here now. After I kill everyone I see, I’m going to kill cops too.”
“Wayne,” Jones stretched the name out, leaning into her most gentle, sympathetic, motherly tone. “Are you right outside the school right now?”
“Yes. I’m walking in now.”
“OK, can you stop, please?” she asked, her words speeding up as desperation crept in.
The only reply was a rapid staccato burst: automatic gunfire.
“Shots heard, Andrea! Shots heard!” Jones yelled to her supervisor, her voice cracking with emotion.
A few feet away, Jones’ supervisor Andrea Lombard (her last name has also been changed) watched Jones set down the phone “as if it were on fire,” as she later described it. The caller had hung up; the entire exchange had lasted only 45 seconds. Lombard immediately sent an emergency alert to every officer in the region: a high-pitched alert tone followed by her warning that an active school shooting was underway. More than 50 police units, sirens blaring, were already en route to Central Valley High.
While Jones redialed the shooter, pleading “Come on, answer,” Lombard pulled up a map and noticed a children’s daycare just a block and a half from the high school. She reached the assistant director, who was outside in the play yard with a group of 1-year-olds. In a steady, controlled voice, she explained there had been gunfire at the nearby high school and they needed to lock down immediately. The assistant let out an involuntary wail, then shouted “Get inside!” as she scooped up as many toddlers as she could carry and ran for the building.
Lombard hung up and tuned into police radio, listening as rifle-armed officers entered the high school. They moved through hallways, weapons drawn, while teachers barricaded doors and students hid in dark, locked classrooms, crouching in silence. This was not Lombard’s first school shooting: in 2017, she’d listened to the same radio chatter as Spokane law enforcement responded to another local high school after a 15-year-old shot four classmates, one of whom died of his wounds. The broken voice of the first officer who found the dying teen still echoed in her memory. She sat next to Jones, waiting in dread to hear that same grief again.
Instead, as dozens of officers swept the entire school that May morning, they found nothing. The school resource officer posted near the entrance reported no sign of a shooter, no gunfire matching what Jones had heard. Slowly, Lombard’s dread curdled into anger. Could this entire thing be a hoax? As hundreds of students and teachers waited in terrified silence, two questions burned into her mind—questions she still asks more than a year later: Who would do this? And why?
The chaos, fear, and disruption triggered by that one haunting call was not unique to Spokane. That call was one of dozens made in just over 24 hours across Washington state by a young troll who operated under the online alias Torswats.
In some calls, he told dispatchers he planned to kill students for Satan. In others, he claimed he was new to town and locals had treated him “like shit.” In calls like the one to Spokane, he didn’t bother making up a reason at all. Armed with nothing more than a menacing modified voice, an internet calling app routed through an anonymous proxy, and a recording of automatic gunfire pulled from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Torswats terrorized half the state, locked down school after school, weaponized local police against communities, and shut down entire towns again and again.
He crossed out each county he hit on a screenshot of a Washington state map, then posted the image to a private Telegram channel between calls. He bragged he intended to hit at least one school in every county in the state, and tallied up the tens of millions of dollars in economic damage he hoped to inflict. “It was funny as all fuck. SHOTS HEARD,” he joked, a clear jab at Jones. “2/3rds done with washington,” he wrote, before bragging about a bomb threat against the Pentagon. “There’s nothing I can’t do.”
In fact, Torswats had been tormenting schools across the entire United States for more than a year before that Washington spree. He was the most active member of a loose network of young trolls responsible for hundreds of swatting calls—hoaxes designed to send heavily armed police to an unsuspecting victim’s location—and bomb threats that triggered mass evacuations nationwide.
At a Michigan high school, a police officer responding to a swatting call rammed his cruiser through the school’s locked front doors. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an officer fired a round while clearing a university building after a hoax call. In other swattings, students hid in janitor’s closets, too scared to move, so they urinated in mop buckets before armed officers pulled them out with their hands up to search for weapons. A Texas parent reportedly cut his arm open breaking into a locked school to rescue his child.
Torswats stood out as likely the most prolific school swatter in American history. And for months, federal law enforcement had everything it needed to unmask him. The FBI already knew his real name and home address. But they did nothing to stop him—a fact that is particularly appalling to the man who basically handed Torswats’ identity to the FBI: a lone private investigator living outside Seattle named Brad Dennis.
As Torswats carried out his May 2023 Washington swatting spree, Dennis watched every move unfold on his computer screen. He saw the maps Torswats posted to Telegram, crossing out counties in Dennis’ home state one by one. A pale, bearish, baby-faced 36-year-old, Dennis was chilled to recognize some of the schools: he’d run track meets there as a teenager.
For months leading up to that May offensive, Dennis had been tracing Torswats’ online footprints, digging up his social media accounts, meticulously tying those clues to real-world identifying information, and sharing every scrap with law enforcement. Even after he gave the FBI everything he thought they could possibly need to make an arrest, Dennis couldn’t stop monitoring the swatter’s every move. Working from a corner of his one-bedroom apartment, lit only by two dim red and blue lamps flanking his couch, he had become as fixated on taking Torswats down as Torswats was on his malevolent hobby. And as the spree unfolded, Dennis couldn’t shake the feeling that the swatter was closing in on him.
By May 2023, Torswats consumed nearly every waking minute of Dennis’ life. Like every year, Dennis shifted to a fully nocturnal routine as spring turned to summer, to escape the anxiety of heat, traffic, and other people. For days at a time, he was so isolated that his only real-world companions were neighborhood squirrels—Jackie, Jesse, Alvin, Doug—that he’d trained to visit his apartment by feeding them peanuts. When he wasn’t at his desk, which he sometimes cordoned off from the rest of the apartment with a blackout curtain, Dennis would speed along Puget Sound highways late at night in his Honda Civic to clear his head.
Visions of Torswats haunted him everywhere. “It was very difficult to live with every day: that he’s out there, and I physically can’t do anything about it,” Dennis says. “I knew how many people he was terrorizing all over the country.”
Yet when Dennis pictured Torswats, whose face he’d never seen, he thought of another man: a hulking young hacker who 15 years earlier had sent a caravan of heavily armed police to Dennis’ own childhood home, altering the course of his life forever.
Growing up in Seattle’s suburbs in the early 1990s, Dennis often accompanied his mother to her job as a secretary for the county’s emergency services department. He loved wandering the large dispatch room, examining the computer systems and radio equipment, fascinated by both their technical complexity and the life-or-death work that depended on them.
But Dennis was born to be a hacker, not a dispatcher. When he was just 4 years old, his mother installed an alarm on the fridge door to stop him from raiding it for Diet Cokes. Dennis quickly learned to remove the alarm’s batteries, grab his soda, then quietly replace them before anyone noticed. At 6, his mother bought a Hewlett-Packard PC, and Dennis spent years compulsively clicking every button and exploring every menu in every piece of software for hours on end. By the time he was a preteen, his mother started hiding the keyboard in her bedroom at night to limit his screen time; Dennis would silently army-crawl into the dark room to retrieve it without waking her.
Technology was an escape from the poverty and instability of Dennis’ childhood: his father was in and out of his life through a “revolving door,” he remembers, and his mother struggled to provide emotional support even as she worried endlessly about his well-being. Growing up in a crime- and drug-plagued Seattle suburb, many of Dennis’ childhood friends later became addicted to meth and opioids, or were killed in drug-related violence. “A lot of the people I grew up with ended up hooked on drugs,” Dennis says. “I got hooked on computers.”
By 11 years old, Dennis was chatting with professional cybercriminals on the early IRC chat protocol. At 12, he gained access to 400,000 credit cards stored insecurely by a software company. His brother Bryan remembers random electronics and toys showing up at their house, things they could never afford. At one point, Dennis grinned and told Bryan he’d hacked the White House communications network and stolen a list of phone numbers. When Bryan rolled his eyes, Dennis gave him a number to dial. Someone picked up and said briskly: “Situation Room.”
In 10th grade, Dennis discovered a Windows vulnerability that let him gain administrator access to school computers and change students’ grades. When a teacher looked over his shoulder and saw him browsing the school network’s restricted section, Dennis was already fed up with school—he dropped out before he could face any punishment.
Around 2007, when he was 19, Dennis met a hacker named Dshocker on IRC, and the two built a scheme to exploit stolen and leaked credit cards: they would order items via UPS and ship them to the actual cardholder’s address to avoid fraud detection, then a contact of Dshocker’s at UPS would reroute the package to one of their own addresses.
It was a lucrative racket, but Dennis was dismayed to learn Dshocker was involved in far more malevolent hacking. Dshocker was an early pioneer of swatting, sending armed police to anyone who crossed him, even random targets just for fun. The fact that Dshocker knew Dennis’ home address from their shipping scheme left Dennis deeply uneasy.
Over his years dabbling in blackhat hacking, Dennis had had occasional unfriendly visits from law enforcement, including at least one from the Secret Service. This time, he went to the FBI with information on Dshocker and helped the agency identify the hacker’s accounts. Dshocker had made a critical mistake: he’d logged into one account without masking his home IP address. He turned out to be Nathan Hanshaw, a 17-year-old from Massachusetts. Hanshaw was charged, pleaded guilty, and sentenced to 11 months in juvenile detention—but not before he sent a team of police with loaded weapons to Dennis’ home.
On that day in 2008, Dennis was in his bedroom, headphones on, deep in his computer, and never heard the sirens of Snohomish County Sheriff’s cruisers tearing down his quiet neighborhood street. Only when a man yelled his name through his bedroom door did Dennis snap back to reality: he opened the door to see a sheriff’s deputy pointing an AR-15 at his chest.
Dennis was cuffed and pushed onto the living room couch. He tried to explain to the crowd of heavily armed officers that he had been swatted, that he knew exactly who made the fake 911 call, that he was actually working with the FBI to investigate serial swatter Dshocker, that the entire “active crime” was a lie. But sitting there in gym shorts with his hands cuffed behind his back, it felt futile: cops labeled him mentally ill over the radio, and threatened to arrest him if he didn’t stop talking.
The standoff only ended when Dennis asked an officer to retrieve his wallet from his bedroom. Inside was the business card of the FBI agent he’d been working with. Cops called the number, confirmed his story, uncuffed him, and drove away, leaving Dennis and his shell-shocked mother in silence. Dennis’ brother later recalled that his mother blamed Dennis for the entire horrific incident, seeing it as another consequence of his all-consuming obsession with computers.
For Dennis, the swat left him “scarred,” with anxiety and panic attacks for years. He still believes Hanshaw never even knew he was helping the FBI track him down. So why would Dshocker swat his own partner, traumatizing Dennis and his mother? Dennis eventually arrived at an explanation he now sees as the common thread running through all serial swatting: “He did it because he could.”
After that swatting, Dennis knew he had to leave the cybercriminal world behind. His hacking schemes were growing in scale, and he knew if he didn’t walk away, he’d end up in prison eventually. It took him years to extricate himself, a process that required cutting ties with almost all of his old friends.
After a string of odd jobs in his 20s—from network administrator to warehouse laborer—he eventually found work as a skip tracer tracking missing people, then a repo man. These private investigation jobs fit his hacker skills perfectly: patiently hunting through datasets for the tiniest clue, jumping from connection to connection until he located his target.
His go-to repo trick was a classic honeypot: create a fake social media profile as an attractive young woman, catfish the target into meeting at a restaurant, then seize their car from the parking lot while they waited inside for their imaginary date. Dennis says he learned from those encounters how a sufficiently enticing reward—namely, sex—can shut off a target’s rationality. “You temporarily overload their brain with excitement,” he says, “and you can then get them to do things.”
Eventually he moved to the lower-stakes work of tracking down subjects for divorce proceedings and lawsuits to serve them legal papers. But Dennis, an anxious and private person, hated the work of physically confronting often dangerous people. Then in 2020, the pandemic hit: courts closed, divorces were put on hold, and his work dried up. He sold his car to buy time to build a new career.
One of Dennis’ favorite Twitch streamers at the time was a gaming celebrity who’d carefully hidden his location from millions of fans. On a lark, while looking for new work, Dennis decided to see if he could track the streamer down using his skip-tracing skills and a handful of scattered online clues. When he succeeded, he reached out to the streamer and offered to help clean up his digital security profile. Dennis says the streamer hired him, then referred him to other Twitch creators. By early 2022, he had half a dozen clients.
As Dennis built this new career, he realized that swatting—the source of his own lifelong trauma—had plagued video game streamers for years. Many Twitch stars had been swatted mid-livestream, thrown to the ground by cops and held at gunpoint in front of thousands of viewers.
A few months later, a prominent streamer was brutally swatted—pulled out of his home at gunpoint in front of his wife and baby—and hired Dennis to find the culprit. A week later, Dennis’ first original client was also swatted. The two streamers pooled a five-figure sum to hire Dennis to track down who was responsible.
Dennis never expected to be drawn back into the swatting underworld he’d spent years escaping. But he felt a duty to protect his clients, and he told himself he’d helped the FBI catch a serial swatter before. Maybe he was the right person for the job. “I believed,” he says, “that I was the perfect person to take this guy down.”
Dennis’ investigation started with a post he found on Doxbin—an anarchic, fully unmoderated forum where hackers frequently publish the private information of victims and rivals to incite harassment. One user named “Ringwraith” had posted a data dump that included Dennis’ first Twitch client’s home address, plus the address and phone number of the streamer’s 75-year-old father. “I am not responsible for what happens with this info,” Ringwraith added with mock innocence. Other posts from the same account shared other targets’ home addresses and suggested users use “prank call” services on Telegram to troll them.
Dennis searched Telegram and quickly found one such service called Nazgul’s Swats. He knew his Lord of the Rings lore well enough to connect the dots: the Nazg