UPDATED: 9-1-1 Call Confessing Killing 'Swatting' Hoax

This story has been updated:

Police said Thursday they were tricked into sending a SWAT team to a Grosse Pointe Park home, where a man claimed he had already killed one person, was holding two children hostage and would shoot any uniformed officer who approached with an AR-15 assault rifle.

Grosse Pointe Park Police Chief David Hiller said three 9-1-1 calls that came into the dispatch center beginning about 5 a.m. Thursday were phony, but police didn’t know that when they closed several city blocks in the vicinity of Lakepointe and Charlevoix and dispatched at least two armored vehicles to the home.

“We obviously took it as a very serious call,” Hiller told The Detroit News. “We locked down the area with uniform personnel and then called in our SWAT team.”

Police ordered the man out of the house over a PA system.

“Can you imagine answering your front door and finding a SWAT vehicle on your lawn,” Hiller said. “The homeowner and his wife came out and were taken into custody. We started talking to them in the station. They were shocked and fully cooperative.”

Hiller said the homeowners’ story didn’t jibe with the information relayed on the call, and he and the woman were released.

“Chasing a Ghost”

When recordings were reviewed, police realized they had been lured to the home in a hoax known as “swatting.” Using technology and a blocked phone number, the caller makes it appear the emergency call is coming from the victim’s home, usually with the intent of drawing a heavy police response.

Hiller said authorities have some leads, but didn’t get into the details. The technology used by swatters is so sophisticated “they could just bounce us all around the Internet,” he told The Detroit News.

“We may be chasing a ghost,” Hiller told The Detroit Free Press. “We are certainly going to keep chasing.”

Swatting began as a prank online video game players would play on each other. One gamer would call in a threat directed at another gamer’s home, and watch online via that person’s computer camera as cops searched their home. In those situations, gamers would go online and claim responsibility, seeing it as a badge of honor.

“Potential Here Was Deadly”

The swatting phenomenon has grown to epidemic proportions since the first such hoax was reported to the FBI in 2008. Since then, as many as 400 swattings occur in a single day, The Daily Mail reports.

That may be a conservative estimate. Police officials a wary of copycats or giving the pranksters the publicity they’re after, so they don’t always report the incidents.

But they do consider swatting a serious public safety risk and a danger to police officers. In a statement, the FBI said swatting is “extremely dangerous and places first responders and citizens in harm’s way.”

“It is a serious crime, and one that has potentially dangerous consequences,” the FBI said, adding “it’s only a matter of time before somebody gets seriously injured as a result of one of these incidents.”

Hiller told The Detroit News police aren’t taking the matter lightly.

“The potential here was deadly,” he said. “We take this sort of thing very seriously, especially in today’s times.”

Our earlier report:

Police are holding a man who allegedly called about 5:15 a.m. Thursday and confessed to killing someone inside a Grosse Pointe Park home.

The suspected gunman, who reportedly had barricaded himself in the home near the on the 1300 block of Lakepointe Street, was taken into custody about 7:30 a.m.

Police responded with a SWAT vehicle, but the situation ended peacefully without injuries, the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News report.

Grosse Pointe Park Police Chief Dave Hiller said 37-year-old suspected gunman’s girlfriend and her child were inside the home, but are OK.

“When they said he was in custody, it was a huge relief,” Hiller told The Detroit News.

Guns were found inside the home, police said.