A woman who was just days away from marrying a police officer says she initially thought his colleagues were playing an elaborate wedding prank on her. Then armed officers surrounded their apartment and ordered him outside with his hands up.
Sabrina DiGennaro (@sabridigenn) recalls the terrifying experience, which she says unfolded around midnight on the Monday before her wedding. Her video has more than 760,000 views.
The couple had only just moved into their apartment two weeks earlier and were fast asleep. Then she heard an unfamiliar noise. She realized the sound was coming from a megaphone outside. Someone was calling her fiance by his full name and ordering him to come outside with his hands raised. The unknown voice announced that police had surrounded the building.
“Mind you, my fiance is a police officer, so I’m like, this must be a prank,” DiGennaro recalls.
She quickly realized the officers were not joking when she looked outside and saw her fiance. She says that he had his hands in the air.
“And you see 15 police officers with helmets, shields, and AR rifles pointed at him,” she continues. She tells her audience that she was too blinded by bright flashlights to see much else.
“They’re yelling at him to put his hands higher in the sky and get down on the floor and turn around and all that,” DiGennaro recollects. All of a sudden, he disappeared from her view, leaving her alone in her apartment to imagine the worst.
“Am I about to marry a killer? Am I about to watch my future soon-to-be-husband get unalived?” she recalls thinking. Before she could process what was happening, the officers began calling her full name over the loudspeaker.
The officers turn their attention to her
Still wearing her pajamas, DiGennaro says she walked outside with her hands raised. Law enforcement pointed their weapons at her. She says police officers asked her to put her hands behind her back. They ordered her to the ground. Then, with raised voices, they began asking her questions.
“Who lives in your apartment? How long have you lived there? Who lived there before you?” she recalls them asking.
Meanwhile, officers entered her apartment to search it. She describes having “a full-blown panic attack on the floor with the guns pointed at [her].” She says her new neighbors watched.
Then they see her dog
While she was on the ground, she heard an officer tell her fiance, “I hope that dog is well trained.”
“And I look over and my 10-pound dog … They just let her out the door,” DiGennaro recalls. “They just open the door and let her out.”
She was afraid that getting up to chase her would result in police firing their weapons at her. Luckily, the dog responded when DiGennaro called her over.
“I’m just hyperventilating on the floor, my dog in my lap, while my dog’s also shaking with the gun still pointed at me,” DiGennaro says, adding that she felt like she was “in a movie.”
Meanwhile, she says her fiance tried to explain that he was also a police officer. He even identified himself as a sergeant.
DiGennaro says she felt like someone on the movie set yelled “cut.” Within moments, the officers put their weapons down and announced, “Oh, sorry, that was [the] wrong person.”
She believes they were victims of swatting
In a follow-up video, DiGennaro says that she and her now-husband believe they were victims of a swatting incident.
She explains how an unidentified caller allegedly contacted 911 using a fake phone number. The caller, she says, claimed to have killed their father. She says they threatened to take their own life. The caller reportedly gave the couple’s address to law enforcement and even played noises resembling gunfire.
DiGennaro says that her husband’s colleagues had tried to warn him. But their doorbell wasn’t working, and their air conditioner was on. They didn’t hear officers initially knocking on the door.
The couple still has no idea who made the call or why their address was targeted.
“I kind of feel like once they figured out the names didn’t match, they should have ended it,” she says. “They should have detected that it was a fake call before they deployed people. Or maybe did some research on who lives in the apartment and who doesn’t.”
DiGennaro continues, saying, “There was a lot I think they should have done.”
In spite of the ordeal, DiGennaro says she returned to work as a teacher for the rest of the week before marrying her husband that Saturday.
‘I’m suing everybody’
Many commenters urged DiGennaro to take legal action. One self-identified “former detective” told her to sue, writing, “This sounds like gross negligence, and it’s how people end up dead.”
“I hope you have a lawyer, this is wild,” wrote another viewer, to which DiGennaro replied, “Haven’t looked into it so far.”
A third viewer simply wrote: “Oh I’m suing everybody.”
As for whether she has any grounds for a lawsuit, DiGennaro could potentially sue the police department for violating her civil rights, although officers are allowed to enter a home under certain circumstances and are also protected by qualified immunity.
What is swatting?
Swatting is a dangerous form of harassment in which someone makes a fake call to emergency services, intending “to draw a large response from SWAT teams or other law enforcement resources to an unsuspecting victim’s location, causing chaos and the potential for injury or violence,” according to the FBI.
Although it’s sometimes described as a “prank,” the FBI warns that swatting “is a serious crime that can have deadly consequences” and notes that beyond causing confusion to all parties, the act “diverts limited public safety resources from valid emergencies.”
While the bureau notes that swatting is often used to target “high-profile public figures,” it adds that “anyone can be a victim.”
In April 2026, federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania announced charges against a juvenile accused of participating in a series of swatting calls targeting universities. Prosecutors accused the defendant of being affiliated with an online cybercriminal group that “selected the victim institutions at random.”
According to the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), swatting is on the rise across the United States. In school guidelines posted just last month, the organizations warned educators that anonymized threats are a growing problem.
Here’s to hoping the rest of the couple’s wedding week was less eventful.
@sabridigenn
Subplot News reached out to DiGennaro via email.
