Mark Herring, a 60-year-old Tennessee resident, died of a heart attack during a police response to a false emergency call. The call was retaliation by a group trying to force him to hand over the @Tennessee Twitter handle. One of them posted his home address in a Discord server after he refused to sell.
What happened
On April 27, 2020, Sumner County, Tennessee deputies responded to a 911 call reporting a violent crime at the home of Mark Herring, 60, in Bethpage. The call was a hoax. During the police response, Herring collapsed and died of a heart attack.
Federal prosecutors established that the call was the final step in an extortion campaign to take Herring's Twitter handle, @Tennessee. He had held the handle for years and had refused repeated offers to sell it.
How it started
Shane Sonderman was part of a group that tried to seize valuable Twitter and Instagram handles through intimidation. Prosecutors traced the group's swatting and extortion of handle holders back to at least 2018. After Herring refused their demands, Sonderman posted Herring's home address in a Discord server used by the group. An unnamed minor in the United Kingdom then placed the false emergency call.
Prosecutors did not detail how the group found Herring's address. A name tied to a home address was all they needed to send police to his door. Public records and people-search sites routinely expose that link.
Sonderman pled guilty to one count of conspiracy and was sentenced in July 2021 to five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.
What this means for you
For officers, judges, healthcare workers, and other first responders with public-facing online accounts, the home address is the enabling detail. Once a harasser has it, sending police to your door or showing up in person becomes far easier.
Removing your address from data broker listings does not end the harassment risk, but it makes the address harder to find. Frontline Privacy scans data broker sites for your information and files removals when it appears.
For more on how swatting works and how to recover from it, see /swatting and /swatting/recovery.
Sourcing: This page covers a publicly reported incident and cites public sources. We do not name victims who were not already public. Each factual claim about this incident is supported by at least one cited source above.
What reduces this risk
Herring's home address was the pivot point of the extortion. Once Sonderman posted it in the Discord server, placing the false emergency call took little effort. Prosecutors did not say how the group found the address, but public records and people-search listings routinely expose the link between a name and a home. Removing those listings raises the difficulty of the one step an attacker depends on: turning a name into a home address.
Public sources
- 2020 Tennessee swatting — Wikipedia, 2026-04-01
- Tennessee man, targeted for his Twitter handle, dies after 'swatting' call sends police to his home — NBC News, 2021-07-23
- Shane Sonderman sentenced in 'swatting' death of Mark Herring over @Tennessee Twitter name — Washington Post, 2021-07-24