Heartwarming story from my neck of the woods:
Police in Tennessee are investigating after a man was shot and killed Friday night during a robbery ‘prank’ for a YouTube video.
Nashville police responded to the parking lot of an Urban Air indoor trampoline park at 9:25pm where David Starnes Jr., 23, admitted to shooting 20-year-old Timothy Wilks.Witnesses told detectives that Wilks and a friend were participating in a ‘prank’ robbery.
The stunt was apparently all part of a YouTube video whereby Wilk approached a group of people, including Starnes, with butcher knives.
Starnes said he was unaware of the prank and shot Wilks to defend himself and the people he was with.
According to MNPD, no charges have been filed in Wilks’ death. The investigation is ongoing.
Yeah.
That was a bad idea in a state where roughly 20% of adults have a carry permit. This is should be a story that gets repeated a lot in the future, as a cautionary tale against doing stupid things that can get you killed but I’m not optimistic about that.
That’s all I’m going to say about the dead guy. I’d like to focus on the shooter, because he’s going to need some help.
It’s likely that he realizes two things right now:
1. He reacted exactly as he should have, given the information he had at the time.
2. The guy he shot wasn’t really going to hurt him.
I said this in another place, but he’s fortunate that Tennesseans still outnumber Californians in Nashville. The Nashville DA would absolutely love to put the fear of prosecution in to every carry permit holder in the state, but there’s no way he could get a conviction. I’d say I would be shocked if he’s charged, but Nashville is currently prosecuting a police officer for shooting back at a fleeing felon and another officer who killed a man walking towards him while firing an AK pistol at someone else before that officer was hired with the police department. But Starnes is probably fine.
That second one is going to be with him for the rest of his life, though.
In 2008, I had a similar experience with a much happier ending. I won’t go in to too much detail, but a group of teenagers decided to pull a prank on a motorist and that motorist was an armed me. It was at night and I don’t think they ever realized how close they came to tragedy, but luckily I was able to realize it was a hoax before it was too late. And yes, had they actually been doing what they were pretending to do, I would have been 100% justified in opening fire. It’s a very close parallel to what happened here.
I’ve often thought about what would have happened if things had gone differently. Would the group have banded together and say I opened fire “for no reason”? Would the Nashville DA have wanted to make an example of me? I would most certainly have been fired within a week. Would I have had to move across the country to get away from bad press? Would I have ever worked again, even if no charges were filed?
This young man, David Starnes, is going to be going through all of those things I was terrified of.