The Scourge of Torswats: Why Do Some Hoaxes Seek to Teach Children What They Don’t Know About Us?
Dennis, for his part, has settled on a simpler theory to explain Torswats’ behavior—and the entire scourge of swatting as a means to blindly terrorize strangers. He defaults to the same principle he used to explain why Dshocker swatted him nearly two decades earlier.
In a May interview with WIRED, Torswats admitted that he made his hoax calls partly for fame and partly for political reasons. “It’s taking money that would normally be used for welfare checks to Jews and to bankers and to oligarchs,” he said in his drawl, “and it’s being spent on searching schools.”
In November, just weeks after his 18th birthday, Filion pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his nationwide spree of swatting calls. He faces up to 20 years in prison for four counts of making interstate threats to injure another person. As of mid-December, the teenager is awaiting sentencing in a Seminole County, Florida, jail cell.
How he copes with the constant scrutiny from the Seattle police in the wake of a Torswats investigation (with an interview with Wired)
Dennis is in another form of purgatory. On a recent night, when a WIRED reporter visited him, he went through his usual routine: he ate breakfast, checked his email for leads on work, played the video game Rocket League, and idled aimlessly around his apartment. Throughout the evening, he carried a loaded glock in a holster, a round in the chamber, no safety. He drinks Red Bulls every two hours, exactly, now timed with alarms on his phone, to space out his caffeine intake. He no longer gets visits from the squirrels. He can’t be sure, but he believes that his favorites—Jackie, Jesse, Alvin, Doug—have died of old age or been killed by other animals. Dennis isn’t able to befriend new ones.
An 11-year-old girl was seen near a Krispy Kreme on one of his nighttime drives through Seattle. He recognized her from the poster. He helped local police find her after she thought he might be a customer and brought her to a foster family. He’s proud of that, just as he’s proud of having cracked the Torswats case. He has not been given much recognition by either police agencies or the FBI. His paid work as a private eye has largely evaporated. He has sold off items to remain afloat, including the computer that he used to find his father, and he took up driving for a time. It has been a bad year for him, he says.
Dennis doesn’t have any faith that things will change. The US remains a country awash in guns, where the prospect of a mass shooting has become a pervasive, looming menace. American police are considered to be a hair-trigger militarized force that anyone with modest technical skills and a convincing voice can exploit.
If Dennis is hopeful about anything, it’s that another high-profile case will come his way, one that will give him the same sense of purpose he felt during the Torswats investigation. As he drives around in the dark, he seems to hope that another monster will appear for him to hunt—that it might offer him a chance to repair his career and some part of the world.
He said from the driver’s seat of his Honda that things will change his life, as he looked out of the hood of his car. “Things will reveal themselves.”