A terrifying phone call last week sent emergency crews scrambling in Fayetteville.

On March 14, Steve McLeod said he was asleep in his bed before hearing someone outside his home on Sarasota Drive in Fayetteville.

Other WRAL Top Stories

“I heard a loud bam!” McLeod said.

Fayetteville police officers rushed to the home. Ambulances were dispatched too.

“I have a male subject,” a Fayetteville 911 call dispatcher said. “[A] male subject that advises he shot his mother. Use caution, he cautions he’ll shoot officers if they come.”

The call turned out to be a hoax.

“I’m like, ‘Something’s not right,’” McLeod said. “I thought maybe somebody was in one of our cars or something.”

McLeod said the ordeal caused him to get his gun.

“I had the gun in my hand, passed the door because I didn’t know who was out there … And, I heard somebody over here yell ‘Gun! Gun!’” McLeod said. “Then, I heard them say, ‘Police, put the gun down.’”

McLeod complied and went to the door.

“I opened the door and I put my hands immediately on the glass, went like this and when I got here they were yelling ‘On your knees! On your knees!’” McLeod said. “And I’m like, ‘what’s going on?’

“And, I got on my knees and by that time, they were already up here, they put my hands behind my back, they handcuffed me.”

McLeod was clueless, "I’m saying, ‘why are you all doing this?’"

It got worse as officers rushed inside where McLeod’s family was asleep.

Police broke through stepson Stanton Postl’s bedroom door. Postl told WRAL Investigates he was in bed at the time.

"The flashlight in my eyes and I saw the gun and it was really dark, so I wasn’t sure what was going on," Postl said. "I thought we were getting broken into.

"My heart was beating. I was definitely scared."

At that point, officers started questioning what brought them to the home. It turns out it was a swatting case, where someone makes a false call to an address in hopes the police SWAT team responds.

"They apologized several times afterwards," McLeod said of officers once they realized there was no crime scene and no threat.

Police explained to McLeod why they were there.

"He showed me line after line that somebody had called up and said that somebody was holding their mother hostage, they were on heroin and they were going to kill everybody and they weren’t giving up," McLeod said.

The caller even used his stepson’s name during the hoax. While frightening and upsetting, it made sense. However, McLeod says that quickly changed.

"Then, I heard somebody ask something about where’d the call come from," McLeod said. "Then they go, ‘This is weird.’"

McLeod says he was told the urgent sounding call appeared to originate from inside the Fayetteville Police Department, which is something a tech-savvy swatter could do, but also something officers could have checked first.

"Somehow, they need to verify everything before they come banging on a house with guns in the air," McLeod said. "I have the utmost respect for law enforcement, but this but this was wrong."

Postl knows what could have happened.

"I think it’s sickening," Postl said." It could have gotten us killed."

McLeod doesn’t understand the motivation.

"It’s just so hard to comprehend how somebody could think this is fun, how this is a joke," McLeod said. "If they get caught doing it, I hope they go to jail for a very long time because they’re putting innocent people’s lives at risk.

"Somebody could have been killed."

McLeod says Fayetteville police reached out to him to discuss ways they could have better handled the situation, but he decided to file a formal complaint anyway.

WRAL Investigates asked for a response from Fayetteville police about what happened that night. While they did provide a dispatch report, we still have not received an explanation.

Making a false call to 911 or police is a misdemeanor in North Carolina. At least three states have enacted swatting-specific laws where the penalty is a felony. Several other states, including Kansas, where a swatting call led to a death, passed laws where misuse of 911 can be upgraded to a felony if the call results in serious injury or death.