When the police surrounded a house in Wichita, Kan., late Thursday, they expected to find a gunman who told a 911 dispatcher that he was holding his mother and brother at gunpoint after shooting his father in the head.

But no crime had been committed at that house, and the man who would be fatally shot by an officer moments later was not the person who had called. The suspected caller, who was arrested on Friday and has a history of making false police reports, was actually about 1,300 miles away, in Los Angeles.

Both the Wichita police and the man in the house were pawns in a hoax called “swatting,” in which people report made-up crimes in hopes of creating a spectacle and getting a SWAT team deployed. And Thursday’s iteration of the ruse, which is thought to have been the first to end in a fatality, raised the thorny question of who, ultimately, bears responsibility for an innocent man’s death in a prank gone horribly wrong.

“This is a national trend,” said Deputy Chief Troy Livingston of the Wichita Police Department at a news conference last week. “We’re not the only community dealing with this type of incident.”