Netflix Airs Episode on Kansas 'Swat' Perpetrator, While Victim's Family Sues Policeman

In June Netflix launched Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies, and the Internet, a true-crime series. It began with an episode documenting the 2017 death of a 28-year-old Kansas man named Andrew Finch after California gamer Tyler Barriss faked an emergency call from Finch's home to the Wichita, Kansas police department.

So where are they now? Barriss is now serving a 20-year prison sentence, Bustle reports. 'Barriss, a resident of Los Angeles, California, pled guilty to a total of 51 charges, all having to do with hoax emergency calls he'd made, including the call that resulted in Finch's murder.' Barriss received as 12-and-a-half year sentence for the Kansas call, and then another 8-and-a-half-year sentence for all the other illegal calls placed between 2015 and 2017 to 17 different U.S. states. 'He also received another five years of supervised release in Washington, D.C., for phoning in bomb threats to the FBI and Federal Communications Commission in 2017.'

And the 19-year-old who'd hired Barriss 'received a 15-month prison sentence in 2019 after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice.'

Meanwhile, Andrew Finch's surviving family members filed legal actions against the police department responsible for Finch's death. And while police officers normally receive 'qualified immunity' protecting them from lawsuits over the performance of their duties, there was an update last month:

An officer with the Wichita Police Department will face a civil trial in connection with the December 2017 swatting incident... Justin Rapp was the officer who shot the unarmed man. A U.S. appeals court sided with the Kansas district court in denying Officer Rapp qualified immunity in Finch's death. The court said a reasonable jury could believe Finch was unarmed and unthreatening when Rapp fired the shot that killed him.

Finch's family brought the excessive force civil suit. Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett declined to prosecute Rapp for fatally shooting Finch. The Wichita Police Department conclude Rapp didn't violate department policy....

Along with its conclusion that the civil case against Rapp can move forward, the appellate court also affirmed the district court's summary judgment on liability claims against the City of Wichita. This decision essentially maintained the city and the WPD as a whole weren't liable in Finch's death. The court of appeals dismissed arguments saying, in sum, '[the lawsuit from Finch's family] has failed to show any deliberately indifferent policies or customs that caused Rapp to use excessive lethal force.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.