Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over his rare Twitter handle

Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by jodrellblank on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @10:04PM (#27901524)

I went googling and found this: A study at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has demonstrated that sudden emotional stress can result in reversible heart failure[1]. It goes on "a traumatic event such as a breakup, the death of a loved one, or even the shock of a surprise party can provoke a heart attack in people who don't have heart disease and are otherwise healthy, researchers say". and

"Dr. Wittstein and his research team found that some people may respond to sudden, overwhelming emotional stress by releasing large amounts of adrenalin and other chemicals into the blood stream. These chemicals can be temporarily toxic to the heart, effectively stunning the muscle and producing symptoms similar to those of a typical heart attack: chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure. However, there are no further similarities between "broken heart" syndrome and cardiac arrest. Closer inspection using blood tests and magnetic resonance imaging scans failed to show the typical heart attack signs, such as irreversible muscle damage and elevated levels of certain enzymes."

If that happened, it would have been avoidable; it doesn't necessarily mean he was sickly and this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

(Aside: I wonder if anyone here would think comparable things of the organizers of a surprise party, 16 years after it's published in a medical journal that they can be fatal? What if the birthay person was known to hate surprise parties? Anyone calling for a death penalty or years in prison?)

[1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2005/03/sudden-shock-c...

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Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by michaelmrose on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @10:24PM (#27901674)

I meant the cops aren't necessarily at fault as the unavoidable stress of such a confrontation might have inevitably ended in a difficult to predict or mitigate health complications.

Swatting has a predictable risk of mortality thus the criminals don't get off morally because their victim died a different way than expected.

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Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by jodrellblank on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @10:46PM (#27901804)

> "because their victim died a different way than expected."

I haven't seen a claim that the perpetrators expected the man to die - didn't they want to harass and scare him until he gave up his Twitter handle? If he was dead they'd have no chance of getting access to it, therefore they likely were not planning for him to die, right?

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Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by michaelmrose on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @11:12PM (#27901953)

They were ok risking him being killed in order to obtain the expected benefit. If you beat someone killing them is a predictable risk. It constitutes merely a lesser crime in the same category.

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Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by jodrellblank on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @11:54PM (#27902155)

I am not agreeable to the claim that minors who called a SWAT raid internationally because of a Twitter account were really forseeing all the possible consequences and rationally deciding they were OK with them. I'm also not okay with you claiming a militarised police force SWAT raid was "unavoidable".

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Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by unishark on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @03:39AM (#27903433)

I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT or any kind of "raid". It was simply a bunch of cops according to the family members in the video. They did not enter his house, they merely approached it. He appears to live in a rural area.

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Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by jodrellblank on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @10:56AM (#27907160)

> "I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT or any kind of "raid"."

The article uses this picture: https://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2019/03/20...

Google reverse image search for that suggests a search term of "fbi swat team" and first result is a wikipedia link to "FBI Special Weapons and Tactics Teams". The picture is from the Wikipedia page on swatting which says it is "an FBI SWAT team during training". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting

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Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by unishark on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @11:58PM (#27915186)

Yes it's clearly not a photo of the actual event. Are you complaining that you were misled? or are you suggesting "techbase" uses of stock photos is more authoritative than their own primary sources which I just summarized for you?

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Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by jodrellblank on Friday July 23, 2021 @07:45AM (#27929610)

You said "I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT" and I'm pointing you to where the article implies actual SWAT was involved, with their use of a photo of an actual SWAT team.

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Re:Man dies of a heart attack after minors swatted him over ... by michaelmrose on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @04:52AM (#27903911)

Swatting is used to mean calling the authorities with a fake crisis so subject people at the address targeted to risk and inconvenience it has nothing to do with the resulting police response.

If Barney Fife showed up to kindly ask you if you were ok you would have been swatted just not very effectively.

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