20-year-old Youtuber shot dead during knife-point mugging prank

'Pranks.' These filmed hoaxes have become a great Youtube classic in recent years, but they've made a new victim. As reported by the American media NBC News, Timothy Wilks, a young man aged 20, was shot dead on Friday, February 5 in the parking lot of a company in Nashville, Tennessee, after a gag that went (very) badly for him.

Butchers knives and self-defence

Along with a friend, the young man had geared up with butchers knives in order to give some believability to his little trick, whose aim was to fake a mugging on random people he met in the street. But things got out of hand when the pretend muggers stumbled upon a group of people not really keen to just accept it: one of them, David Starnes Jr., a young man of 23, drew his gun and shot Timothy Wilks, believing this to be a real assault. Evidently Wilks had done his homework when it came to believability.

According to the police, who arrived shortly after the tragedy, the shooter 'did not understand that it was a prank' and 'acted in self-defense,' it was told in a press release. David Starnes Junior has not been charged following this tragic turn of events, and an investigation is still ongoing.

Not a first

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that an influencer has paid in blood for wanting to offer ever more sensational content to their subscribers. At the end of 2020, a Mexican woman had filmed a fake kidnapping for a TikTok video. But things went wrong and the young woman died during the filming of this hoax.