Federal prosecutors sentenced a serial “swatter” to prison time for a deadly scheme to get a Twitter handle and indicted a pastor on child sexual exploitation charges, both men from West Tennessee.
Deadly swatting sentence
Shane Sonderman, 20, of Lauderdale County (north of Memphis) was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison Tuesday for his participation in a swatting call that led to the death of a grandfather in Sumner County last April. Swatting is the act of calling in a fake emergency to law enforcement officials to provoke a large, usually armed police response (like a SWAT team) at someone else’s home.
Mark Herring, the Sumner County man, held the Twitter handle @Tennessee. Desirable handles like these can be sold for thousands of dollars, according to federal officials.
Sonderman and co-conspirators from across the U.S. and other countries would extort holders of such handles with harassing text messages, sending unpaid-for food deliveries to their targets’ homes, and, sometimes, by swatting them. The court said Sonderman’s group did this from July 2018 to May 2020.
Sonderman got personal information about Herring and his family. He posted those details to an online chat platform where one of his co-conspirators could get it and use the information to place a plausible call to emergency services.
In April 2020, SWAT teams were called to Herring’s home, north of Nashville. The caller told police that he had shot a woman in the head and she was dead. First responders arrived and found Herring on his porch. With guns drawn, they ordered him to approach with his hands in the air. Herring suffered a fatal heart attack before anyone on the scene knew the call was a hoax.
The group also sent emergency services to the Ohio residence of another victim’s parents. Afterward, the victim received anonymous text messages on her phone that read “did your parent’s (sic) enjoy the firetrucks?” and “i (sic) plan on killing your parents next if you do not hand the username on instagram (sic) over to me.”
Predatory pastor
A former West Tennessee pastor and elementary school girls’ basketball coach was indicted Tuesday for using three minors to create sexual abuse material and for transporting a minor interstate to engage in criminal sexual activity.
Joshua Henley, 32, of Evansville, Indiana, served as pastor of the Holladay Church of Christ in Holladay, Tennessee (east of Jackson), and as a girls’ basketball coach at Holladay Elementary School (K-8) from approximately 2017 through March 2021. He previously held similar positions in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, and was working as a youth pastor in Indiana until his arrest.
Henley was charged with four counts of producing child sexual exploitation material and one count each of transporting and possessing such materials. He was also charged with one count of transporting a minor to another state to engage in criminal sexual activity and with one count of sending obscene material to a minor under 16.
If convicted on all counts, Henley could face up to 160 years in federal prison. There is no parole in the federal system.