A Hoax Call Sent a SWAT Team to the Home of Parkland Activist David Hogg 

From Time:

The team arrived at the home after authorities received a report of a barricaded subject inside the house, an official with the Broward County Sherff’s Office told TIME. The report turned out to be baseless, the official said, but the SWAT team cleared out the home as a precautionary measure. Local media helicopters were over the home during the incident.

What’s now known as “swatting” is when someone makes a false report of an emergency at a residence in the hopes that a SWAT team will show up, guns blazing, and scare the shit out of the inhabitants.

In January, officers in Wichita, Kansas shot and killed 28-year-old Andrew Finch after a phony 911 call led them to believe they were responding to a violent hostage situation. Police thought Finch was reaching for a weapon. The fake 911 call was made by a man in Los Angeles; he was allegedly recruited to make the call after two players were fighting on Call of Duty. Finch had no involvement with this dispute.

Fortunately, Hogg was with his family in Washington, D.C. to receive the Robert F. Kennedy human rights award for his work on March for Our Lives, a student-led demonstration calling for stricter gun policies and an end to gun violence. He knew why someone would target him for such a hoax: “I think it’s really a distraction from what we’re trying to fix here, which is the massive gun-violence epidemic in this country,” Hogg told Local 10 News on Tuesday.