A pregnant Monalisa Perez cried and pleaded with her boyfriend several times to put a stop to a YouTube stunt, but the man urged her on, eventually dying after she fired a gun at him as he held an encyclopedia in front of his chest.
Norman County authorities released videos, evidence and transcripts Friday showing that Pedro Ruiz III, 22, methodically planned and directed Perez, who was 19 at the time, in the June 26, 2017, incident. Perez, 20, pleaded guilty in the case and was sentenced in March to 180 days in jail on one count of second-degree manslaughter. She also received a lifetime ban from owning firearms or profiting from telling the story of Ruiz’s death.
“I can’t do it babe,” Perez told Ruiz at one point in a transcript from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). “I’m so scared.”
The videos show a heavily pregnant Perez appearing winded and tired at times as Ruiz recorded several versions of the same action.
Ruiz said in his videos that he would post stunt videos weekly and hoped to raise money to support his endeavor.
He said he wanted to be “crazier” than famous stunt stars like the men behind MTV’s hit series, “Jackass.”
Acting under Ruiz’s instructions, Perez presented the camera with a black-and-gold .50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol nestled on a red pillow.
Footage of the shooting itself was not released. Perez told BCA investigators that when she pulled the trigger, the gun’s barrel was about a foot away from a book Ruiz was holding about a foot or two from his chest.
A round passed through the hardcover encyclopedia and killed Ruiz outside their home in the northwestern Minnesota town of Halstad.
She pleaded another time for Ruiz to stop the stunt. Once she fired the gun, she immediately called 911, but Ruiz died at the scene.
Perez later told a BCA investigator that Ruiz had previously practiced shooting into a book, and that for a month she had resisted his plans to replicate the stunt. Authorities recovered the presumed practice book, also an encyclopedia, with a .50-caliber bullet still lodged halfway inside.
