A Jacksonville family says a false emergency call led to a frightening encounter with law enforcement when dozens of officers surrounded their home and ordered them outside at gunpoint Saturday evening.
– A Jacksonville family says a false emergency call led to a frightening encounter with law enforcement when dozens of officers surrounded their home and ordered them outside at gunpoint Saturday evening.
The incident appears to be a case of “swatting,” a dangerous hoax in which someone falsely reports a serious crime in an effort to trigger a large police response. Sherika Phillips said she and her family were relaxing at home around 7:30 p.m. when they heard a voice over a megaphone coming from outside.
“Saturday around 730 p.m. I hear a loud voice over the speaker telling me to come out, me and my family come out with our hands up,” Phillips said. “We came out, it was so many police. This whole street, both ends blocked off. Over here blocked off, it were shooters surrounding us,” Phillips said.
“It was so scary, and my kids was crying, they didn’t know what was going on. Nobody knew what was goin’ on,” she said.
“They had rifles pointed at my babies and my babies was crying. It was a scary situation. They never seen a gun in their life and they had 30 of them pointed at them. It was, it was bad,” Phillips said.
Video captured by a neighbor’s Ring camera shows officers throughout the neighborhood and issuing warnings to residents to remain indoors. Phillips said she had no idea why officers were targeting her home.
“It was so scary. And later on, after they checked the house, they said it was all clear. But they gave us two different stories.
First, they told us it was five hostages being held in a house and one active shooter. And then they said something about it was shots fired. We didn’t know what was going on. I’m like, shots?
No. Nothing was going. We just ate dinner, and we was relaxing,” Phillips said.
“No. But whoever did it will be found and I’m gonna make sure of it,” Phillips said. “They traced the number back and it came up to be like a bogus number. It was a prank call,” she said. Phillips said her son had been livestreaming himself playing Fortnite online about four hours before officers arrived.
Authorities have said swatting incidents sometimes target online gamers and streamers, with perpetrators using personal information obtained online to make false emergency reports.
“Even though they say it’s no damage is done, the door wasn’t kicked in, nobody got hurt. We left with damages, we are, we’re mentally scarred. They need to provide some type of services to help people cope with this. It’s just not no harm, no foul, no. We still gonna have to deal with this for the rest of our lives,” Phillips said.
News4JAX reached out to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office for information about the incident and is awaiting a response. Tiffany comes home to Jacksonville, FL from WBND in South Bend, Indiana. She went to Mandarin High School and UNF. Tiffany is a former WJXT intern, and joined the team in 2023 as Consumer Investigative Reporter and member of the I-TEAM.
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