The woman, Monalisa Perez, aged 19, has been arrested and she is held in Norman County jail, Minnesota. This follows, as The Verge reports, her shooting of her boyfriend, and father of her child, Pedro Ruiz, aged 22. Ruiz was holding a book close to his chest on the basis that the book would stop the bullet. The couple undertook the unfortunate act for an intended YouTube video, with the aim of becoming famous across the video-based network. Perez, who is pregnant with the couple’s second child, now faces manslaughter charges
More disturbing, the BBC reports that the couple’s three-year-old child together with a gathering 30 onlookers, mostly made up of family and friends, watched as Perez fired a bullet directly into the chest of her lover. The bullet was fired using a .50-calibre Desert Eagle handgun, shot from around one foot away while Ruiz held a single edition of a hard bound encyclopedia across his chest. After the incident on June 27, Perez called 911 to report that she accidentally shot Ruiz.
Just prior to the stunt, Perez tweeted: “Me and Pedro are probably going to shoot one of the most dangerous videos ever HIS idea not MINE ” (@MonalisaPerez5).
The aunt of the victim, Claudia Ruiz, told the U.S. station WDAY-TV that her nephew had said he wanted to carry out the stunt “because we want more viewers, we want to get famous”. Fame certainly seemed part of the stunt. The couple had started a YouTube channel in March, aiming to show the “the real life of a young couple who happen to be teen parents”. This was via a channel called La MonaLisa.
