Stunt turns deadly for pair seeking fame on YouTube

Over the past several weeks, Monalisa Perez of Halstad, Minn., and her boyfriend, Pedro Ruiz III, began their quest for YouTube fame by creating and posting videos of mostly harmless pranks: Ruiz climbing onto a tenuous tree branch and falling a short distance, or Perez feeding him a doughnut covered in baby powder rather than powdered sugar.

On Monday evening, the couple suddenly upped the ante when, authorities say, Perez, 19, shot at a thick book that Ruiz, 22, was holding, apparently believing that the bullet would not make it through the volume.

But the high-risk stunt went horribly wrong: The bullet entered Ruiz’s chest and he died at the scene.

“I really have no idea what they were thinking,” Sheriff Jeremy Thornton of Norman County said in a telephone interview late Wednesday. “I just don’t understand the younger generation on trying to get their 15 minutes of fame.”

It was a preventable death, the sheriff said, apparently fostered by a culture in which money and some degree of stardom can be obtained by those who attract a loyal internet following with their antics.

In the couple’s last video, posted Monday, Perez and her boyfriend considered what it would be like to be one of those stars — “when we have 300,000 subscribers.”

“The bigger we get, I’ll be throwing parties,” Ruiz said. “Why not?”

Instead, just hours after she posted that video, Perez was arrested and booked into Northwest Regional Corrections Center on suspicion of reckless discharge of a firearm, the sheriff said. Then, Wednesday morning, prosecutors charged her with second-degree manslaughter. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, a fine of up to $20,000, or both.

Perez, who is pregnant with her second child, appeared in court Wednesday afternoon for a hearing and was released in the evening after $7,000 bail was posted.

The department has video recordings of the shooting, the sheriff said, adding that he would not release them.

Perez told investigators that she had shot Ruiz from about a foot away while he held a 1.5-inch thick book to his chest, authorities said.

The gun, a gold Desert Eagle .50-caliber pistol, was a “very strong weapon,” the sheriff said.