$5 million settlement reached, but doesn’t fix the damage from deadly Wichita swatting | Opinion

The Wichita swatting debacle probably won’t ever really be over, but it’s about as over as it’s ever going to be.

Andrew Finch’s children, now 7 and 11, will share in a $5 million settlement, in exchange for growing up without a father because he was shot to death in the biggest police screwup in recent memory.

Lisa Finch, the mother of Andrew, who has fought for justice for her son and grandchildren, won’t get any of the direct proceeds. But she will be paid a fee as an administrator of her son’s estate.

The City Council is right to settle the case, because there’s no way its Police Department wasn’t in the wrong.

It’s been five years since the winter night in 2017, when a dispute between online gamers over a $1.50 bet on a game of Call of Duty set in motion the events that led to Finch’s death at 28.

One of the gamers hired a Los Angeles dirtbag named Tyler Barriss to retaliate for the betting dispute via swatting, i.e. making a fake police call to prompt a response by a heavily armed Special Weapons and Tactics team.

Barriss called Wichita police with a bogus report that he had shot his father in the head, was holding his mother and brother hostage at gunpoint and was planning to set the house ablaze.

Police responded to surround the Finch house. Nobody in the home had any idea what was going on because Barriss had given dispatchers the wrong address.

Now, you might think that such a call coming in from an ordinary police business line, instead of 911, would cause someone to say, “Hey, there’s something fishy about this.”

Or you might think that they’d have caller ID, so they’d have known Barriss was calling in from half a continent away.

Or you might think that the officer in charge of the scene would have been in direct contact with dispatch and known Barriss was still on the phone with a dispatcher, so that Andrew Finch couldn’t have possibly have been the suspect.

Or, you might think that a competent incident commander would have taken control of the situation, rather than half the officers at the scene shouting incomprehensible instructions from different directions when Finch came out on his porch to figure out what all the noise was.

Or you might think the department would sack, or at least not promote, the officer who errantly fired the fatal shot that killed an innocent man, seconds after he stepped onto his porch to find out what the hell was going on in his yard.

If you thought any of those things, you’d be wrong.

“This community has dealt with this for way too long,” said council member Bryan Frye. “This should never have happened.”

True, if a bit understated.

The mother of Finch’s children, Tawny Unruh, issued a statement thanking supporters and the council members who voted for settlement.

“Thank you for making sure that my family can move on from this nightmare and begin to heal,” she wrote. “We will never forget or understand why our Andy had to die, but are grateful for all the support we’ve received from the community.”

The tragedy of errors committed in this case has links to three deaths:

▪ Andrew Finch, whose life ended with a rifle bullet to the chest during a police response that could be described, at best, as amateur and chaotic.

▪ Adelina Finch, Andrew’s niece who, at age 18, shot herself after a year of grappling with the trauma of witnessing her uncle’s death.

▪ Adelina’s boyfriend, 20-year-old Jeremy “J.C.” Arnold who also took his own life after finding her mortally wounded in the apartment they shared.

But for five oblivious years, the city has fought the case tooth and claw and racked up hundreds of thousands in attorney fees and costs.

So a “thank you” is in order today to the City Council.

Thank you for your compassion towards the Finch family and doing as right a thing as could be done under the circumstances.

And thank you for your courage in voting down those who wanted to prolong this already-too-long municipal nightmare.