The caller said he stabbed his wife. Cops rushed to catch a killer. It was all a scam.

Thomas Alan Grossman was at his home in Palm Springs when he got a call from a man claiming to be with the IRS. Through a thick accent, the caller said Grossman owed back taxes and would be arrested if he didn’t pay up. It was an obvious scam.

Most people would have ignored the call, but Grossman was angry. He Googled the phone number to confirm it was linked to a fraud scheme, then called back, cursing.

“Don’t ever call here again,” Grossman said before hanging up.

In most cases, this would be where the story ends. Grossman, a personal injury attorney, would forget about the scammers and move on with his life. The scammers would move on too, making more calls, assuming they would eventually fool somebody else.

Instead, on this Friday afternoon in March 2014, things got weird. What followed over the next hour was a mess of deception, confusion and questionable decisions. A woman who never existed would be brutally murdered. A man who had done nothing wrong would be ordered out of his home in his underwear, then handcuffed at gunpoint. One cop would cruelly joke that a victim needed a lobotomy and the Palm Springs Police Department would later learn it had been bamboozled by a savvy scammer.

Ultimately, the ordeal would spark a three-year legal battle that continues in federal court today. This story is based upon a review of more than 500 pages of court documents, police reports and deposition excerpts filed in that lawsuit, many of which only recently became public.

The murder that wasn't

About 30 minutes after Grossman hung up on the scammer, a different phone rang in another part of Palm Springs.

Richard Robinson, a dispatcher in the city's 911 call center, picked up. The call had been made to an emergency services phone line, not the standard 911 line, so Robinson couldn't tell where it was coming from.

“Palm Springs police and fire,” Robinson said, as he had done thousands of times.

“Hi. My name is Thomas Grossman,” the caller said. “Is this the Palm Springs Police Department?

“Yes it is.”

“Okay. Sir. I did a mistake and I want to apologize for that. I want you to come at my place and please save me, please.”

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Robinson was alarmed. The caller, a man with a thick foreign accent, sounded as if he had been crying. But for someone so distraught, he was also unusually precise. The caller gave his full name three times and listed his address with the unit number.

“I had an argument with my wife and I got – I got angry on her and I put a knife on her stomach,” the caller said.

“Is she still breathing?” Robinson asked.

“No, she died.”

In an instant, police were dispatched to the address the caller had given, an apartment complex on Sunrise Avenue. The first officer to respond was John Mejia, a 12-year veteran of the Palm Springs Police Department, who was on the scene within three minutes. Mejia began to set up a perimeter as he was joined by six other officers.

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In the meantime, Robinson called the apartment, likely by looking up the address in older police call records. Robinson hoped that, if he could get the killer back on the phone, he might be able to keep him talking while the police surrounded the home.

A phone rang in Grossman’s kitchen. He picked up.

“Hi this is the Palm Springs Police Department,” Robinson said. “Is there a Thomas Grossman there?”

“That’s me,” Grossman said. He had no accent. He didn’t sound like he was crying either.

“OK,” Robinson responded, a little confused. “Do you have an emergency there?”

“No. Why?”

Robinson tried to explain. Just moments ago, the police had received a call from this apartment, he said. The caller, a man identifying himself as Thomas Grossman, had confessed to stabbing his wife to death.

Grossman had a hunch.

“Did he have an Indian accent?” Grossman asked.

“Yes,” Robinson said.

Grossman described how he had cursed out the phone scammer with a heavy accent earlier that day. Now it appeared the same person was trying to deceive the police.

These scammers, Grossman warned, “are nuts.”

But Robinson was worried about something else. Police officers were rushing to Grossman’s home in force, expecting to find a dead woman and a murder suspect. Whatever was really going on, those cops knew nothing about it. They were prepared for the worst, but they weren’t expecting this.

“You are going to need to follow my instructions to the T,” Robinson told Grossman. “We have several – several – officers coming to your house. I’m going to need you to step out in a moment, but hang on the phone with me, OK?"

“OK,” Grossman said. “By the way, I have no wife.”

A pivotal moment

An instant later, police banged on Grossman’s front door, demanding he come outside. Grossman, who was wearing just underwear and a pajama top, put the phone down because the cord couldn’t reach the front door. He shouted to the cops, asking for a moment to put some pants on.

“No! Come out immediately!” an officer shouted back, according to Grossman.

Grossman opened the door, finding himself face to face with a police dog and several officers with their guns drawn and pointed. The cops ordered him outside, then pushed him to the ground and cuffed his hands behind his back.

This time, Grossman was the one who tried to explain. He insisted that phone scammers, posing as the IRS, were trying to frame him. There had been no murder, he said.

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The police didn't buy it. As Grossman spoke, Officer Mejia and two other cops swept into the house, looking for a dead body. In a court deposition, Mejia said the unkempt apartment was filled with boxes and stacks of documents – a seeming case of “extreme hoarding” – but officers found no knife, no blood and no evidence of a crime.

But Mejia did notice that the phone in the kitchen was off the hook.

He checked the line, discovering the voice on the other end was Robinson, the dispatcher. Grossman had insisted he never called 911, and yet here he was, caught red handed on the line with 911.

Mejia tried to put the pieces together in his head – the mysterious calls, the messy apartment, "ravings" about the IRS and a phone left off the hook. Grossman must be mentally ill, he thought. He probably called 911 himself, using his real name and a fake accent, to report a crime that never happened to a woman that didn’t exist. Once caught, he tried to blame it all on some nonsense government conspiracy theory.

This decision – whether or not to believe Grossman – would eventually become the most pivotal moment in the ongoing lawsuit against the Palm Springs Police Department.

Attorneys for the department have argued that Mejia’s logic was reasonable considering what he knew at the time, but Grossman insists Mejia "presumed" he was mentally ill and never bothered to investigate what was actually going on.

In court motions, Grossman argues the cop ignored his explanation for the phone calls and assumed the attorney was hoarding despite a logical explanation for the stacked documents. (He recently moved out of his law office.) More importantly, when Mejia discovered the phone on the line with 911 in the kitchen, he failed to ask who had initiated the phone call. Had he asked, Grossman may have been exonerated right then.

Instead, Grossman alleges that Mejia and the officers “mocked him" and "made jokes" about people with mental disabilities. Court documents confirm that's at least partially true. According to a police department communications log filed in the lawsuit, one cop was texting from the scene, belittling Grossman.

"A frontal lobotomy might help," texted Officer Merritt Chassie, a veteran officer.

"But let a licensed professional due it," responded Angela Sawyer, another police department employee. "Kept your knife in your pants! LOL".

When the taunts were over, Grossman claims police gave him a terrible choice – go to jail for making a false 911 call or go to the hospital on psychiatric hold.

The proposal didn't make sense, Grossman argues, because if police truly believed he was mentally ill, they shouldn't have let him choose. Regardless, he assumed a hospital had to be a better option than jail.

“Plaintiff ‘chose’ under coercion to go to the hospital,” Grossman's attorneys wrote in his lawsuit. “Officers first walked plaintiff, handcuffed and partially dressed, through his home complex to a squad car, where multiple residents saw him being treated like a convicted criminal.”

Grossman was held at Desert Regional Medical Center for about 30 minutes until police came to believe him. After a further review of the phone recordings, officers noticed that – in addition to the varying accents – the calls had dramatic differences in the sound clarity and background noises.

Robinson, the 911 dispatcher who heard the calls, later admitted in a court deposition that he had realized the incident was a “hoax” after police found no body at the scene.

But Robinson never told that to any officers. He assumed they didn't need his opinion.

“Not to sound like I’m talking low about myself, but my opinion really doesn’t matter,” Robinson said. “I can think that, you know, cranberries are blue, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the case.”

When the cops finally did realize the call for help was a hoax, a police supervisor sent word to the hospital. Mejia returned Grossman to his home, then began to interview him for an investigation into who was really behind the emergency calls.

As they spoke, the phone in the kitchen rang. Grossman answered, then the caller hung up, then the phone rang again.

This time, Mejia picked up the phone.

The man on the line had a thick accent. He asked if he was speaking to “Thomas.”

Mejia identified himself as a police officer.

The man hung up and never called back.

Fooled for the first time

After a month-long review, the Palm Springs Police Department would deem the Grossman incident as its first-ever case of “SWATing,” a dangerous trend in which cybercriminals use fake 911 calls to send cops blitzing to the house of innocent people.

SWATing calls are often made in conjunction with “spoofing” technology that deceives caller ID by masking one phone number as another.

In the Palm Springs case, however, it appears the scammer didn't need spoofing technology at all. Because he called an emergency services phone line instead of the standard 911 line, the scammer circumvented the department's caller ID system. Police were vulnerable to the deception because they placed too much faith in the address information collected at the call center, even if it didn't come from caller ID.

More than a year after the incident, some officers were still in disbelief the system could be fooled.

“I didn’t think that was possible to do with our dispatch center,” said Officer Erik Larsen, one of the cops who responded to Grossman’s house, in a court deposition in late 2015. “I’m still like sitting here perplexed."

Statements like these are precisely why SWATing incidents are so troublesome and dangerous – they undermine one of the few sources of information that cops have learned to trust – said Jim Bueermann, a law enforcement expert and president of The Policing Foundation.

For decades, Bueermann said, police across the country have treated the caller ID and address information collected by their 911 systems as fact.

“Up to this point, that was a reasonable assumption,” he said. “Apparently, now it is not. That is something police are going to need to keep in the forefront of their minds as they respond to emergencies from now on.”

Palm Springs police have received at least two more SWATing calls since the Grossman incident – a fake murder and a false bomb threat – but it is unclear if the police department is any less vulnerable to the deception than they were back in 2014. When asked how the department had adapted to SWATing, police officials forwarded all questions to Palm Springs Attorney Edward Kotkin, who said the city would not make any comment about how it defends against the calls.

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SWATing first surfaced a little more than a decade ago, as internet technology and hacking strategies outpaced the nation’s dated 911 call center system. The crime has targeted celebrities and politicians and is also common in online gaming communities, where SWATing calls are used as real world revenge for an in-game insult. The calls frequently lead to false arrest and wasted resources, and in some instances have prompted police to harm innocent victims. For example, in 2015, a SWATing call about a fake hostage situation in Maryland caused police to shoot an innocent man in the face with rubber bullets, putting him in the hospital.

Consequences were far less severe in Palm Springs, but Grossman did sue the police department claiming a violation of his civil rights. He argues police were justified in their search of his home, but once they realized there was no actual murder, they should have let him go.

Much of the city's defense hinges on the reasonableness of Mejia's decision to take Grossman into custody. However, the cop's credibility was damaged about a month after the Grossman incident. In a separate case, Mejia was arrested for insurance fraud after he faked his car being stolen. He separated from the police department that year and was later convicted of a felony. He is no longer a police officer.

Meanwhile, Grossman’s lawsuit has crept forward in federal court. The case nearly ended last month after attorneys negotiated a settlement, but the deal was rejected by the Palm Springs City Council.

The settlement amount, and the reason for rejection, have not been disclosed.

Grossman and his attorney declined to comment for this story. Three attorneys who represent the Palm Springs Police Department did not respond to interview requests. Chassie, who is no longer a cop and now works as a real estate agent, declined to comment on her "lobotomy" text message.

Public Safety Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached at 760 778 4642 or at brett.kelman@desertsun.com. You can follow him on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.