I’d love to say I can’t believe we have to go over this again, but I totally can.
Ideally, when you play a prank, it’s one of those things that might irritate someone (think cleverly annoying phone call), but at the end of the day is relatively harmless. Perhaps not everyone is laughing, but there’s more merriment than not, and nobody does something crazy like end up dead for being incredibly stupid.
Like seriously, how, at an age as advanced as 20, do you and more than one other person manage to think it a good idea to arm yourselves with butcher knives and then pretend to rob people? Especially in America, a place where even the guns have guns.
A 20-year-old man has died after participating in a YouTube prank gone horribly wrong in Tennessee, where police say he was shot by someone who was not in on the joke.
David Starnes Jr., 23, told police that he saw two men coming at him with butcher knives outside the trampoline park around 9:20 p.m. last Friday, so he shot one of them “in defence of himself and others.”
Timothy Wilks, 20, died in the shooting, according to the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department.Wilks’ friend told police that they were trying to stage a robbery “prank” for their YouTube channel. The pair armed themselves with butcher knives and approached a group of people outside the Urban Air trampoline park in Heritage, Tenn., where the shooting took place.
Just in case all of that isn’t dumb enough for you, it’s also worth noting that YouTube doesn’t even allow the sort of video that these goobers were trying to make.
The following types of content are not allowed on YouTube. This isn’t a complete list.
Making someone feel in immediate danger: Tricking others into believing they’re in real danger, even if no physical harm comes to them. This includes:
- Threats with weapons
- Bomb scares
- Swatting or fake 911 calls
- Fake home invasions or robberies
- Fake kidnapping
I feel for this guy’s family. They have to face the future without a son and a brother. That’s awful. But try as I might, I can’t dredge up much sympathy for him or his idiot friends. I don’t want to say they got what they deserved, but it’s really, really hard not to.
