Monalisa Perez. Picture: Instagram.
A teenager from Minnesota, in the US, has been charged with manslaughter after shooting dead her boyfriend in a stunt the couple hoped would get them hits on YouTube.
Monalisa Perez shared on Twitter this week that she was preparing to shoot one of the “most dangerous videos ever”, and said it was her boyfriend’s idea.
Perez, 19, shot 22-year-old Pedro Ruiz in the chest while he held an encyclopedia as a shield. He died at the scene, reported The Telegraph.
She reportedly called the police on Monday evening, and told them she and her boyfriend were making a YouTube video, and that she accidentally shot him in the chest. Perez further said the stunt was intended to help them get more followers on the YouTube channel launched in March.
After the shooting, she told police that Ruiz had been trying to get her to fire the gun for a while.
He had even shown her a book that he had previously shot himself, she told investigators. In that case, she said, the bullet had not gone all the way through the text.
His aunt, Claudia Ruiz, described the tragedy as “a prank gone wrong” and corroborated Perez’s story that Ruiz had been thinking about doing the stunt for a while.
“He had told me about an idea. I said, don’t do it, don’t do it. Why are you going to use a gun? Why?
“Because, we want more viewers [he said]. We want to get famous,” she was quoted as saying.
In the couple’s last video Perez and Ruiz, a railway engineer, considered what it would be like to be a social media “star”, defining stardom as “when we have 300 000 subscribers”.
Ruiz added: “The bigger we get, I’ll be throwing parties. Why not?”
The teen, expecting her second child, appeared in court on Wednesday and was released on $7 000 bail (R91 527).
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