Federal prosecutors announced Thursday that a Bremerton man had pleaded guilty to four felony charges that stemmed from his "extensive" history of swatting – or summoning law enforcement to a location on an urgent, false pretense.
Ashton Connor Garcia pleaded guilty to two counts of extortion and two counts of threats and hoaxes regarding explosives in U.S. District Court. Prosecutors are recommending that Garcia, who is scheduled to be sentenced in April, be sentenced to four years in prison.
Garcia made a series of swatting calls between June 2022 and March 2023 to law enforcement targeting victims in California, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, and Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, prosecutors said. Garcia called and made reports to various emergency dispatch services throughout the country, and in response to many of his calls, law enforcement officers were dispatched to targeted addresses, according to court documents, which note that Garcia used a social media platform to broadcast the calls.
In one incident in August 2022, Garcia called the Bremerton Police Department to falsely claim that he had shot his mother, and in another incident in September 2022, he falsely reported to Bremerton police that he needed help because his father shot his mother and was running around the house with a shotgun, according to court documents.
In another incident, he sent messages to an individual in Ohio in which he threatened to publish nude pictures of her and swat her and her family if she did not send him credit card information, and in another, he threatened to swat a person in New Jersey if she did not send him sexual images.
In others, he told Kentucky State Police that he was holding two people hostage with a pipe bomb and an AR-15 and that he would kill them unless he received $50,000 in cash, called police in Cleveland, Ohio, to report that he had planted a pipe bomb at a TV station in that city, told police in Charleston, Illinois, that he had planted a bomb at a park, and told police in Los Angeles, California, that he had stashed four pounds of explosive material at an airport that he would detonate unless he received $200,000 in Bitcoin.