Elijah Sierocki, a teenage gamer from the Bluegrass State, appears inset and on a Ring doorbell camera image after an accidental emergency call summoned local law enforcement.
A Kentucky teenager playing an online tactical shooter video game got more than he bargained for after notching two kills when an accidental emergency call summoned local law enforcement.
The game in question was Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, a popular online first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft that boasts well over 70 million players across all platforms.
During a Jan. 5 online party match with friends, 17-year-old Elijah Sierocki uttered a phrase that, in the context of the game, was both commonplace and innocent enough: “I killed two people.”
Unfortunately, he had pocket-dialed 911 immediately before the victorious utterance and a dispatcher on the other end of the line apparently believed they were privy to a double murder confession.
“I was sitting down on my couch playing Rainbow Six Siege with my two best friends, Tyler and Devan, and all of a sudden, we’re in the middle of a match and I killed two people, I got two kills, and after that I died,” Sierocki told Law&Crime’s Sam Goldberg in an exclusive podcast interview for After Hours earlier this week. “So, I got on my phone to watch TikTok – that’s what I’d usually do when I died – and I see a call on my phone. It’s 911.”
In his Law&Crime interview, the teenager said he thinks the call was made by the iPhone’s emergency call feature that occurs when the volume and the power button are pushed simultaneously.
“I started freaking out,” Sierocki continued.
He asked his friends what to do. They said to call the number back but he decided against it. So, dispatchers made the next few decisions.
“I got three calls from the dispatch trying to call me to figure out what’s going on,” the teenager continued. “And in no more than two minutes my dogs start barking at the front door. And they’re pretty smart dogs. So, they barked at the front door and they run over to me at the couch in the other room and they run back to the front door.”
Sierocki then, like any good Rainbow Six player facing a raft of guns, looked out and surveyed the potentially hostile landscape.
“There’s four police patrol cars out there,” he told Law&Crime.
The emergency call, he realized, had spanned some four minutes in length – during which he admittedly spoke of those two digital kills.
“I have two decisions: I either stay inside and they knock on the front door or I walk outside with my hands up,” Sierocki recalled. “So, I’m like, ‘if I walk outside with my hands up, what’s gonna go wrong?'”
As he walked outside, he said, he realized that one of the sheriff’s deputies to his right had a gun pointed at him.
“He scares me,” Sierocki said. “Because he kinda jumped a little bit.”
Sierocki’s Ring doorbell camera caught the interaction between himself and the cops on his own front porch. In the footage, the teenager can be seen exiting the front door with his hands raised before cautiously approaching law enforcement.
Video of the incident was shared by a friend and has since gone viral:
This guy accidentally called the cops while he was playing Rainbow 6 Siege
They heard him say “I killed 2 people” over the phone and thought it was a double homicide pic.twitter.com/OPUVvu9bWz
— GUARD Hunter (@HUN2R) January 6, 2023
During the resulting encounter, the teenager said he was quizzed about what was actually going on, subject to a pat-down, and asked to place his hands behind his back – all with a gun still pointed at him.
And, all the while, Sierocki said, he was “visibly shaking so hard.”
In an email, a spokesperson with the Boone County Sheriff’s Office said they would “need to learn more about the incident before providing a comment” and that they were “in the process of gathering body worn camera video in response to an open records request” filed by the Law&Crime Network.
But there’s apparently no hard feelings about the taxing ordeal.
“I did say I killed two people,” the teenager said, “I understand what they’re trying to do.”
“They went about the procedure very, very professionally,” Sierocki added later on. “They handled it pretty well.”
Confirming an earlier report, one of the deputies even joked around with the teenager as they checked the inside of his residence.
“One of them walked up to me, he was like: ‘Hey, what’s your favorite operator?'” Sierocki said of the five deputies who went inside the house. “I tell him, ‘Hey, it’s Ying, I use her a lot.’ He says, ‘Hey, I like her.'”
[image via screengrab/Law&Crime After Hours]
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