A Washington teen has convinced the authorities to send a heavily armed SWAT team at a random location in Lake Forest, Orange County, California. The unsuspecting family was sleeping and the homeowner nearly got shot by the law enforcement troops.

It all began when last March 19 at 11:30 PM, Randall Ellis, 19, of Mukilteo, Washington, called the 911 emergency number spoofing his number such as to appear he was calling from the Lake Forest home. He claimed he had murdered someone in the house and threatened to shoot others. Ellis also knew the couple's names from a prank call to the house earlier on. During the course of a 38-minute telephone conversation, he convinced the sheriff's department into storming the house with a heavily armed SWAT team.

The homeowner, who was sleeping at the time in the house with his wife and two toddlers, heard noise outside and exited the house armed with a knife, thinking he is dealing with a prowler. However, much to his surprise, he was confronted with heavily armed SWAT officers who, fortunately, did not shoot him but rather wrestled him to the ground. He was handcuffed, as was his wife, until the whole situation was proved a hoax.

"The husband heard rustling outside of his home and believed it to be a prowler. he took a knife and went into the backyard. Instead of finding a prowler he found a SWAT team pointing assault rifles at him," said Farrah Emami, a spokeswoman with the Orange County District Attorney's office. "It really easily could have escalated into an innocent person being killed," she added. "We're lucky that they didn't shoot him."

Orange County authorities said that Randall Ellis had made nearly 200 fake 911 calls to dispatch systems in California, Arizona, Washington and Pennsylvania, and he is set to be arraigned Monday in Santa Ana, California. If convicted of felony counts of fraud, false imprisonment and assault, as well as a misdemeanor count of falsely reporting a crime, Ellis could spend up to 18 years in prison.

Authorities want to charge him with assault with an assault weapon by proxy, meaning he summoned the SWAT team and thus is responsible as if he had assaulted the family with an assault weapon.

It's still unclear whether Ellis hacked the 911 emergency system to show up a certain telephone number or whether he hacked the telephone system itself to report a spoofed calling ID. The authorities are keeping mum on the exact method used.