Amazingly, even after he is convicted, the lax and lackadaisical slackers of Canadian law enforcement still threaten anyone who names “Obnoxious” — his own chosen screen name, and a fitting one — with consequences far more dire that the tap on the wrist that his crimes brought him.
Obnoxious was a swatter, a woman-hating teen pervert who takes joy in sending SWAT teams to the homes of female video game players with bullshit crime stories, hoping to get the girls killed. Most law enforcement was supine before him.
And he was a juvenile, literally, as well as emotionally. So he can’t be named.
‘‘UNTOUCHABLE,’’ Finley saw him tweet once. ‘‘UNEXTRADITEABLE.’’
And he knew that as long as he targeted USians, Canadian law didn’t give a hairy rat’s ass about him. (The situation would be the same if reversed). As a minor, he could get away with anything, and he was going to see if he could get away with murder by false police report.
It took one small town detective, BA Finley of Johns Creek, GA, and one FBI agent willing to pursue a case served to him on a platter — after swarms of other agents blew the case off — to finally give the Canadians enough evidence to shame them out of their inertia.
Obnoxious often sent a text to his target telling her that the SWAT team was on its way — too late to stop it — just so she would know it was him. Sometimes victims received phone calls from the police before the SWAT team arrived. A Canadian Twitch streamer named Maple Ong got a call one night in January 2014, telling her to leave her house with her hands up, along with her panicked father and younger brother, so the police could search it for bombs that Obnoxious had told them were placed there. Allison Henderson, a 26-year-old artist and streamer who lived with two other streamers in Costa Mesa, Calif., received a phone call one night from a woman with the Police Department, asking her how many people were in her apartment and what she was wearing. Allison and her roommates had recently been DDoSed and harassed by Obnoxious. The policewoman told Allison to step outside with her hands above her head.
‘‘I held my breath and slowly opened the door to the sight of rifles pointed at me from every direction,’’ she says. ‘‘It was the most terrifying experience of my life.’’ When officers questioned her, she couldn’t make them understand. ‘‘They were completely lost on the idea of a stranger harassing us over the Internet,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s a feeling like you’re drowning, and the person doesn’t understand what water is.’’
A few months after Obnoxious swatted Janet and her family, he swatted them again. The officers who showed up this time seemed irritated at Janet, ‘‘like it was my fault that I got swatted, because I do what I do, because I play video games.’’ She says one told her, ‘‘Just pick up a book.’’ The officers who responded to these calls did a professional job — in the sense that they assessed the situation, de-escalated it and didn’t fire their weapons. At the same time, they misjudged what they were seeing. They didn’t grasp that each swatting was merely a spike in a long-running pattern of abuse that would continue when they drove away.
via The Serial Swatter – NYTimes.com.
In the end, BA Finley, the small-town investigator, taught himself how to follow an investigation into the maze of cyberspace — described in enough detail to make it worth your while to Read The Whole Thing™, and he and his FBI agent finally got the Canuckistanis off the X.
The Canadian police arrested the suspect on Dec. 5, four days after he tried to swat Hayli. Much of the case against him had been shipped up from Georgia. Prosecutors eventually charged him with 46 counts, including criminal harassment, public mischief and extortion; he pleaded guilty to 23 counts. (His Vancouver lawyer didn’t return phone calls.) He was interviewed at length by a social worker, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, who confirmed that the swatter’s childhood had been tragic, marred by an abusive father and a mentally ill mother. The psychiatric report noted that he had essentially no remorse: ‘‘His description of the pleasure he gets from causing humiliation and harm … is suggestive of quite significant emerging psychopathic traits.’’ At a court appearance in May, he wore a sweatsuit, ankles shackled together; a local reporter observed him smiling occasionally and flicking his brown hair. In July, a judge sentenced him to 16 months in youth jail, with credit for time served while awaiting trial. He is scheduled to be released in March, at age 18.
There you have it. A huge investigation — 1,000 of Finley’s hours alone, literally half a working year — and this complete waste of sperm and egg plea-bargained his way into an even faster turn of the revolving door than is normal for North American criminals.
He is a worthless waste of protoplasm, a miscue of sperm and egg, an assemblage of defective parts that even Planned Parenthood would hesitate to place on the market. And the Canuckistani courts are putting him back on the internet in three months.
