Police, for the second time in 26 hours, rushed to the house in Georgia of the Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Thursday for another false shooting report, authorities said.
An individual calling herself “Wayne Greene” electronically contacted a suicide crisis center at 2:53 a.m. to report gunshots, police said in Rome, Georgia.
Greene is married with three children, but none of those immediate relatives are named “Wayne.”
“The person who called through the chat said they were ‘transgender and claimed to have shot the family,'” according to a police report in Rome. “They also claimed, ‘If someone tries to stop me from shooting myself, I will shoot them.’ They advised ‘they would wait for us’.”
An officer who responded spoke to Greene at her door and “warned her with the reason we were there,” police said.
Greene has a long history of opposing the LGBTQ community and its supporters, most recently support a proposal until ban gender affirming care for transgender minors.
This was the second time in as many days that Greene had been the target of a fake call.
A 911 call made at 1:03 a.m. Wednesday prompted officers in Rome, about 70 miles northwest of Atlanta, to respond to Greene’s home because “a subject was shot multiple times,” police said.
Making a false report of an ongoing crime just to lure the police to the crime scene is known as ‘swatting’.
Although Thursday’s swatting incident came via electronic chat rather than a phone call, police said they had no choice but to act immediately.
“We take these calls seriously,” Assistant Chief Debbie Burnett said in a statement to NBC News. “It’s a shame that people don’t understand the seriousness of this kind of action.”
Regular Americans and celebrities alike have struck victims, with the most infamous incident occurring in December 2017, when police officers in Wichita, Kansas, fatally shot a man whose home was mistakenly involved in a shooting.
An Ohio gamer, angry over a $1.50 bet while playing “Call of Duty: WWII” online, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for recruiting a prankster to make the deadly fake emergency call.
Over the past decade, entertainers such as Tom Cruise, Ryan Seacrest, Justin TimberlakeSelena Gomez, Sean “Diddy” Kammen and Rihanna are all the targets of hoax police reports.
Donna Mendell contributed.