Soldier Victimized By Vile Phone Prank Is Too Embarrassed To Press Criminal Charges

The military veteran who was just humiliated by a vile telephone prank orchestrated by a pair of online deviants is too embarrassed to pursue criminal charges, according to Texas police.

The man, a 22-year-old former Army paratrooper who served in Iraq, was victimized during a December 5 call to his room at a Motel 6 in Amarillo. That prank call, which TSG previously detailed here, was placed by Steven Brown, 43, and Tariq Malik, 26, mainstays with Pranknet, the notorious online collective.

Brown, a McHenry, Illinois resident who works as a computer programmer, is pictured above in a webcam image he recently broadcast in Pranknet’s chat room. Malik, the group’s founder, is an unemployed Canadian who lives in Windsor, Ontario.

In an e-mail, Amarillo Police Department Corporal Jerry Neufeld reported that the prank’s target--whom TSG has only identified by his first name, Sam--“doesn’t want to pursue charges…I don’t think he wants all the publicity we would need in order to file charges. He would have to be willing to testify in court about what took place that night, and he is too embarrassed to relive it again.”

During the prank, Brown (who posed as a hotel manager) and Malik told Sam that a prior occupant of his room had tested positive for the H1N1 virus. Malik, pretending to be a doctor who was following instructions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, convinced Sam to consume his own bodily waste as a way of combating the swine flu’s onset.

Neufeld said that if Sam were to change his mind about pressing charges, he would have to contact Amarillo cops before the statute of limitations expires. For example, Neufeld added, the statute on limitations on telephone harassment, a Class B misdemeanor, is two years.