“I made the police point a gun at my little brothers because of you. They could have been shot, they could have died. Because you chose to whack my stream. I don’t give a damn what you got against me, or what I did to you. I have no words for that. Your complaint is with me. But don’t involve my family in this. They don’t deserve it.”
Those were the tearful words of 27-year-old Joshua Peters, also known as Koopatroopa787, shortly after he was stabbed at his St. Cloud residence in Minnesota on Thursday.
Peters makes a living streaming his sessions clash of clans And RuneScape. At around 5:40 p.m. on his live Twitch.TV stream, he apologizes and says, “The police are here, just a second.” The session lasts about 15 minutes and he comes back upset.
What happened was that about 10 armed SWAT team members showed up at the door, which was answered by his 10-year-old brother.
Incidents of so-called swatting pranks seem to be on the rise as reports of what happened to Peters become all too well known in the gaming scene. And it was at least the second time since August that a swatting occurred during a Twitch broadcast.
Another incident occurred in November, when an executive of video game maker Bungie was the victim of a beating when a false caller claimed an assailant had an assault rifle and was holding his family hostage in Washington. And last month, a GamerGate critic was knocked down in Portland, Oregon.
St. Cloud Police said they investigated the joke that started with an emergency call to police that a gunman had killed someone in the house and was still inside. Gunshots were heard at the call.
The gamer told the Guardian that “before he knew it” he was lying face down.
“My channel isn’t insanely big like some of these other mainstream streamers. I just wasn’t expecting that. I went upstairs and before I knew it my face was on a tile on the floor, hands wide open and a bunch of police officers with assault rifles,” he said.
He said the officers were familiar with the whacking joke.
“When we all lay down, I spoke up. I said, ‘I’m streaming on Twitch.TV, I’m getting beat up, and someone probably made fun of this.’ And then the tone changed as soon as I said, ‘I stream on Twitch.TV.'”
The video of the swatting had more than 29,500 hits as of Friday.
Peters, who did not immediately respond to Ars for comment, was nearly the victim of another blow hours later, he said. Police reportedly received another call from one of his relatives saying that Peters was suicidal because of the raid. Authorities vetted the prank before responding with violence.
He said he didn’t understand why he was targeted.
“There are no possible people I can think of that would do something like this to me… I’ve seen this happen to other streamers, I just never thought I’d be the one to be targeted randomly. Never.”
This post has been updated to reflect the correct number of hits the video has received.
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