These are the final moments a wannabe YouTube star‘s life before he forced his nervous girlfriend to shoot him through a book in a stunt which left him dead and her jailed.
Monalisa Perez, then 19 and pregnant with her second child, was advised by Pedro Ruiz, 22, he would be shielded by a thick book as she took aim from close range.
But the stunt went horribly wrong and the bullet went straight through the 1.5-inch book and into Ruiz’s chest, fatally wounding him. Dramatic footage newly released shows him encouraging his terrified girlfriend to pull the trigger, with a bullet inside he says can travel the length of three football pitches.
In a transcript of the moments leading up to the shooting, Perez says: “Babe, I’m not doing this, I can’t.” “I don’t want to be responsible,” she adds. But according to local reports , Pedro tells her: “You won’t as long as you hit the book, as long as you hit the book you’ll be fine. Come on. The batteries gonna die on it. Come closer.”
Before she pulled the trigger, transcripts showed she said: “I can’t do it babe. I’m so scared.” “Babe, if I kill you what’s gonna happen to my life. Like, no this isn’t okay,” she continued. Eventually Perez pulled the trigger that ended Ruiz’s life.
Ruiz had introduced the video by saying his YouTube channel would have “crazy stuff” in it. “Here I have my girlfriend Monalisa to help me out with my first video,” a video shows him saying. So babe, let’s go ahead and show them what we have in store,” he said as she showed off a 50 caliber desert eagle gun placed on a red cushion. He explains in the clip that he’s going to ask Perez to ‘clip the button’ and she looks at him nervously asking “is it hard” to which he replies “no, it’s a button”. “It’s basically a canon in your hand going off,” he describes.
Ruiz shows off how big both the gun and the bullet are in the footage. He says if he snaps his fingers the bullet could travel more than three football fields in length. “The point of this video is I really want to see if a 50 caliber bullet can go through a book,” he says. “I’m going to stand behind it, and Monalisa is going to shoot it, hoping she hits the book. Hoping she hits the book and not me, but the most trustworthy person that I trust in this world is my girlfriend, Monalisa, so if I’m going to die, I’m pretty much ready to go to heaven right now. If I die I’ll be ready for Jesus. He probably won’t accept me into the gates because of how stupid this is but I have confidence my girlfriend will hit the book and not me.”Before the incident, Monalisa Perez had tweeted: “Me and Pedro are probably going to shoot one of the most dangerous videos ever. HIS idea not MINE.(sic).” Mum-of-two Perez, now 20, later pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter. She was sentenced earlier this year to 180 days in jail. During a court hearing in Minnesota, judge Jeffrey Remick said Perez would serve her time in 10-day increments over three years in accordance with the plea agreement recommendations. Perez is also banned for life from owning firearms and will be on probation for 10 years. She also agreed not to seek any financial gain from the case.
Photo Credit: Getty
