Finch swatting death remembered: ‘something that could happen to anybody, any time’
It was a caravan of grief, a caravan of protest, and in the end, a caravan of hope.
That hope being that no family will ever have to endure what the Finch family of Wichita has endured since Andrew Finch was shot to death by a Wichita police officer responding to a false “swatting” call.
“Andrew Finch was a father, he was a son, he was a brother and he was a young man that lost his life three years ago to this day,” said state Rep. Gail Finney, D-Wichita. “He lost his life in a way that no one should lose their life, being shot by the Wichita WPD ... This should never, ever, ever happen again to anybody, anybody.”
The remembrance and protest procession of about 25 cars marked the anniversary of the Dec. 28, 2017 fatal shooting of Finch by Wichita Police Officer Justin Rapp.
It began at Riverfront Stadium, slow-rolled by the house where Finch was killed and the Patrol South police station, and ended up in a cold and windy Walmart parking lot at Pawnee and Broadway, where Finney, House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer and Friends University professor Russell Fox made brief remarks on Finch and police reform.
The speakers paused at 7:03 p.m. to observe a moment of silence at the exact time Rapp fired the fatal shot.
Sawyer, who lives three blocks from the house where the shooting took place, said it’s a day he’ll never forget, like 9-11 or the day President Kennedy was assassinated.
“For people in our neighborhood, Dec. 28, 2017 is one of those days,” he said. “Andrew Finch was a law-abiding citizen, at home, minding his own business, and unfortunately was killed on his own porch,” Sawyer said. “No one will forget that because it’s something that could happen to anybody, any time.”
Finch was an innocent victim of “swatting” — a hoax designed to provoke a special weapons and tactics (or SWAT) team response to a nonexistent emergency.
Rapp fired on Finch while responding to a fake call from a man claiming to have killed his father and to be holding other family members hostage. The fatal shot came seconds after Finch came to the front porch of the home to investigate the commotion he heard from police who were deploying to the scene.
Tyler Barriss of Los Angeles is serving a 20-year prison sentence for the bogus call that brought police to Finch’s house and other similar crimes.
Barriss, a serial swatter known within the online gaming culture, was hired to perpetrate the deadly hoax by a gamer wanting revenge on another player over a disputed $1.50 bet on a game of Call of Duty.
Finch had nothing to do with the game or the gamers, but happened to live at a house where one of the gamers had previously lived.
Following the shooting, the Legislature passed a law to increase penalties for swatting, a crime that had previously flown more or less under the radar.
On Monday, Sawyer presented Finch’s mother Lisa with a copy of the 2018 statute law book, bookmarked at the point where the Andrew T. Finch Act was contained among the laws passed that year.
“I want to give that to Lisa and the family so they’ll at least have that,” he said.
Lisa Finch said the law book meant a lot to her, because it reduces the chance that what happened to her son will happen to someone else.
“I’m going to cherish this for a long time,” she said.
She said the show of support for her son and their family was “overwhelming.”
“I feel wonderful that so many people still remember my son and (for) the outpouring of support that I get from the community,” she said.
A $25 million lawsuit filed on behalf of Finch’s two surviving children is ongoing in federal court.
The case currently rests in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the Finch family is arguing that the district court erred in dismissing the city of Wichita as a defendant, while allowing the case to proceed against Rapp.
The family has blamed two subsequent deaths on the swatting.
Andrew Finch’s niece, Adelina Finch, who witnessed the fatal shooting, took her own life in January 2019. Her grandmother, Lisa Finch, said the 18-year-old had been unable to cope with the trauma from the night her uncle was killed.
Adelina Finch’s boyfriend, 20-year-old Jeremy “J.C.” Arnold, who discovered her mortally wounded body in their shared apartment, also killed himself about two months later, in March 2019.
This story was originally published December 28, 2020 at 9:30 PM.
