YouTuber Timothy Wilks Shot Dead Filming Robbery Prank Gone Wrong

YouTube pranks have been around for almost as long as the platform itself, and while many of them are completely harmless, some take things a little too far and wind up getting someone injured or even killed. Such is the case of YouTuber Timothy Wilks, who was shot dead last Friday after a “robbery prank” went awry.

The 20-year-old Tennessee man was reportedly recording the prank in the parking lot of Urban Air, a trampoline park, in Hermitage alongside a friend (who was not identified by police) at around 9 p.m. According to the police report, Wilks and his friend intended to stage a fake robbery for his channel where they would approach a car with butcher knives in their hands.

Upon approaching a group of people with the knives drawn, 23-year-old David Starnes Jr. then shot Wilks, killing him. According to Starnes, he claimed to have acted in self-defense and was unaware of the prank entirely. Police said they are currently investigating his self-defense claim, and Starnes is not facing charges for his actions.

“This is like a huge kids area, and when we were in there, there were a ton of tiny kids and it’s just like, that would not be a great idea, especially if anyone was walking out here or something like that,” Emily Yeager, a customer at the trampoline park, told WKRN during an interview.

Wilks’s prank gone wrong adds to a long list of YouTubers being killed during pranks and stunts. In 2017, YouTubers Monalisa Perez and Pedro Ruiz similarly made headlines after Ruiz was killed in a stunt where he was holding a book expected to stop a bullet.

In early 2019, following a wave of such incidents, YouTube banned dangerous and harmful pranks from its platform, but the content has remained prevalent despite their efforts. Examples of these have millions of views on YouTube, though some have been deleted.

In the wake of Wilks’s death, numerous users from Reddit and beyond have tried to track down his YouTube channel, but it appears that it was removed sometime between Friday and Monday.