LA County teen ‘serial swatter’ is sentenced to prison

LOS ANGELES — A Lancaster teen was sentenced to four years in prison after making more than 375 hoax calls that included threats to detonate bombs, conduct mass shootings and “kill everyone he saw,” authorities said.

The calls targeted high schools, colleges and universities, places of worship, government officials and individuals across the United States, according to prosecutors.

The serial swatter, 18-year-old Alan W. Filion, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats to injure others, which frequently led to massive law enforcement responses and rendered officers unavailable to assist with other emergencies, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He made hundreds of calls from August 2022 to January 2024, according to his plea agreement.

Filion was both a recreational swatter and a swatter-for-hire who advertised his services of mass disruption on social media platforms, prosecutors said.

In a January 2023 social media post, he claimed that when he swatted someone, he usually got police “to drag the victim and their families out of the house cuff them and search the house for dead bodies.” In some instances, officers entered the targeted buildings with their weapons drawn and detained individuals who were inside, prosecutors said.

He was arrested in January on Florida charges connected to a threat he made to a religious organization in Sanford, Fla., prosecutors said. Filion threatened to commit a mass shooting at the site and claimed to have an illegally modified AR-15, a Glock 17 pistol, pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails.

He pleaded guilty in federal court to making this threat and three others.

They included an October 2022 call in which he claimed to have planted bombs throughout a public high school in western Washington state. In a May 2023 call to a historically Black college in northern Florida, he told dispatchers he had hidden bombs in the walls and ceiling of campus housing that would detonate in an hour.

Lastly, he pleaded guilty to a July 2023 call to a police department in western Texas in which he claimed to be a senior federal law enforcement officer who had killed his own mother. In this call, he gave the federal officer’s home address and threatened to kill any responding police officers, prosecutors said.

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigations and U.S. Secret Service with assistance from law enforcement agencies across the country, include the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. It was prosecuted in the Middle District of Florida.