He's almost undoubtedly responsible for not only the swattings, but also nearly every "serious" thing that happened. He was clearly told early on by authorities that messages on the internet, no matter how mean and hurtful, were not something they'd be arresting people for. He needed something like physical stalking, vandalism, threatening phone calls, swatting, theft, actual threats of violence not just "I hope Pat kills himself" and most importantly he needed names.
So he took his head full of pudding and the police's list of what they might act on, and set about faking all of them, whilst suing to try to get names to give them alongside all his Gay Virgin Fatrick marker graffiti, phony Craigslist chair ads, obviously self-sent voicemails referencing Rahul, swatting he orchestrated through Tor end nodes with his Gemini account and created threats of violence and hitman orders and shit. Once he had racked up enough debt, he also figured if he could trick the MPD for this long, they were probably dumb enough to settle and pay off his windmill tilting expenses.
It's incredible how brazen he is about all this and isn't either in jail or being countersued by the city for wasting their time and resources.
Yet.