A jury found a delivery driver not guilty in the shooting of a YouTube prankster in a mall food court in Virginia.
On Thursday, a jury acquitted Alan Colie, 31, of aggravated malicious wounding and malicious shooting inside an occupied building in the shooting of 21-year-old Tanner Cook. The jury found Colie guilty of using a firearm during the commission of a felony.
Colie pleaded not guilty and said he was acting in self-defense. Colie has a license to carry a concealed weapon.
Since the April shooting, Colie has been incarcerated and will remain in jail. Colie is due back in court on Oct. 19.
On April 2, Cook and another individual approached Colie at the food court in the Dulles Town Center in Sterling, Virginia. Colie, a driver with DoorDash, was picking up a food order. Cook gets in the face of Colie and pushes a phone within inches of the delivery driver. The phone repeatedly plays an audio message: “Hey dips**t, quit thinking about my twinkle.”
Video shows Colie retreating from the situation, swatting at the phone, and telling Cook to “stop” on three different occasions. However, Cook continues to pursue him. Suddenly, Colie pulls out a gun and shoots Cook.
As TheBlaze previously reported, Colie shot Cook, and the bullet punctured his stomach and liver. Cook has since been discharged from the hospital.
Prosecutor Eden Holmes said she didn’t believe that Colie was in imminent danger and said he didn’t act in self-defense.
“They were playing a silly phrase on a phone,” Holmes said. “How could the defendant have found that he was reasonably in fear of imminent bodily harm?”
The bizarre encounter was part of a YouTube prank. Cook runs the “Classified Goons” YouTube channel that has more than 50,000 subscribers, and often engages in public confrontations with negative outcomes. The videos include fake vomiting on Uber drivers, taking people’s groceries, breaking store merchandise in front of employees, and impersonating security guards.
Cook said he will continue to make “prank” videos on YouTube, which he earns as much as $3,000 a month.
Tanner’s father, Jeramy Cook, told WUSA, “Right after this shooting, ‘Saturday Night Live’ reported on their Weekend Update that a YouTuber doing a prank video at a Virginia mall was shot, then paused, starred into the camera and said, ‘Good.’ Everyone laughed, so millions of people saw this and just went with it.”
The father added, “So is it open season on YouTubers even if they don’t touch or talk to you. It’s cool to just shoot them no matter what the facts are?”
“Mob is more important than the rule of law,” he stated. “This is the real danger for all of us.”
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