Entertainment
YouTube prankster testifies about video that got him shot
LEESBURG, Va., (AP) — Tanner Cook’s prank videos were known to security guards at Dulles Town Center, a mall in northern Virginia where Cook sometimes found his unsuspecting targets.
And the content creator was known to law enforcement. The sheriff’s deputy who found Cook shot and bleeding outside the mall last month said he recognized Cook immediately.
But Cook’s pranks were unfamiliar, confusing and frustrating to Alan Colie, the man charged with shooting Cook while he and his team surrounded Colie last month for their latest joke.
Cook, who has more than 50,000 subscribers to his “Classified Goons” prank channel on YouTube, testified for the first time Wednesday about the shooting inside the mall, which prompted a massive police response and panic from callers reporting an active shooter.
Cook, 21, acknowledged that he and a cohort approached Colie at the mall’s food court while two others filmed the prank from a short distance away.
Cook described the prank as playing “funny words” on a Google translate app and watching Colie’s confused reaction.
On cross-examination, he acknowledged that he stuck his phone about six inches (15 centimeters) from Colie’s face while the translate app repeated the phrase “Hey dips—, stop thinking about my sparkle” in English and Spanish.
Colie backed away from the 6-foot-5 Cook (196 cm), who kept advancing toward Colie even as Colie said “no” and “stop” and pushed Cook’s arm away.
Then, Cook said, when the two were separated by a small distance, Colie pulled out an handgun and shot him in the abdomen.
“I was kind of in shock,” Cook testified Wednesday at Colie’s preliminary hearing in Loudoun County General District Court. “I had to double check I was shot because I didn’t feel anything at first.”
Cook fled the food court, and eventually collapsed outside a Cheesecake Factory when he thought he’d reached safety. That’s where sheriff’s deputies found him and took him to the hospital.
Cook said the shooting ruptured his liver and left him scarred.
Deputies found Colie in the food court, where he surrendered peacefully. The charges against him include aggravated malicious wounding and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. He is in jail as he awaits trial.
His lawyer, Adam Pouilliard, argued Wednesday that Colie’s actions were reasonable under the circumstances.
Cook “is making money by causing fear” in those he targets, Pouilliard said. “We know these pranks are designed to generate confusion and frustration. And they do just that.”
Prosecutor Eden Holmes said there was nothing reasonable about Colie’s response to the prank.
“They were holding cellphones, not weapons,” she said of Cook and his associates.
Cook said he’s been posting pranks online for about a year. He said he was trying to avoid mall security while he filmed the prank on Colie because they had confronted him in the past. A survey of his YouTube channel finds a series of off-putting stunts, like pretending to vomit on Uber drivers and following unsuspecting customers through department stores.
He said his goal in posting the videos is “to bring people who are watching some kind of relief” and that many of his viewers “like when people get frustrated on camera.”
The judge at Wednesday’s hearing found probable cause to send the case to a grand jury for an indictment. He acknowledged that the evidence shows Cook was “perhaps acting in an obnoxious manner” but said that fact alone “does not justify the use of deadly force.”
A well-known Hawaii lifeguard who was killed in a shark attack while surfing off Oahu’s North Shore was a former professional surfer with acting credits to his name, including a role in one of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies.
Tamayo Perry, 49, was killed Sunday near Goat Island, Shayne Enright of the Honolulu Emergency Services Department said in a statement.
It’s not known if Perry was the first professional surfer to be killed in a shark attack, since the definition of a professional in the sport can be blurry, said Brendan Buckley, the editor of Stab Magazine, a website devoted to surfing.
“But in terms of a high-level surfer that people around the world know and respected, he’s the first that I’m aware of,” Buckley told The Associated Press Monday from his office in Portugal.
Perry and his wife, Emilia Perry, operated the Oahu Surfing Experience, offering surfing lessons. According to his biography on the business’ website, he surfed professionally for over 15 years, highlighted by winning the Pipeline Master trials in 1999.
The Pipeline off Oahu’s North Shore is famous for creating a tube that surfers ride for as long as they can. But it’s also the most deadly wave in the world, killing some of the world’s best surfers, Buckley said. Surfing it became Perry’s specialty, he said.
Surfers either focus on competitions or what they can do outside of those meets.
Perry “was never like somebody that was going to contend for a world title,” Buckley said. “He was more of the type to just kind of hunt down big, crazy waves and have that documented.”
“For a while, he was one of the top, top, top people out there,” Buckley added. ”He got some of the craziest waves of his era. He was insanely respected by obviously everybody there and everybody around the world for what he did.”
Perry said on his website that he took to heart lessons learned from a near-fatal accident while surfing the Pipeline years ago.
“The lessons I’ve taken from that event have inspired me to my goal of instilling proper surf etiquette and safety into those whom I teach,” he wrote.
Emilia competed as a professional bodyboarder in western Australia before moving to Hawaii when she was 18. She and Tamayo met when she was bodyboarding out to a Pipeline wave.
“A few years later, I picked up a surfboard, we got married and there was no turning back,” she wrote. “The vast amounts of ocean knowledge that Tamayo has ingrained in me over the years is priceless.”
Tamayo Perry began his career as a lifeguard on the North Shore for the City and County of Honolulu Ocean Safety in July 2016, Enright said.
Perry’s other passion was acting. He had several small roles credited to him on the film website www.imdb.com, including playing a buccaneer in “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” in 2011. That same year, he appeared in an episode of the television series “Hawaii Five-0.” He was also in a couple of national commercials.
“When I’m not acting, I’m still quite a character, so there’s always a ton of fun to be had,” he said.
Photographer Brian Bielmann had known and worked with Perry for 25 years, shooting the surfer in both Hawaii and Tahiti. Perry and several friends wound up at a party about five months ago, when Bielmann said they had an incredible bonding experience.
“There’s about five of us there, and we’ve all called each other and just said, ‘We just are so thankful that we had that night with him,’” he said. “Everybody is just shaken to the core. I mean, it’s a gnarly thing to have happen no matter who it is, but to find out it was Tamayo, it’s crazy, man.”
Honolulu Ocean Safety and the city’s fire, police and emergency medical services departments responded to Malaekahana Beach on Oahu’s North Shore just before 1 p.m. Sunday after a caller reported seeing a man who appeared to have suffered shark bites, Enright said.
Lifeguards brought Perry to shore, where he was pronounced dead, Enright said.
Ocean Safety personnel posted shark warnings in the area following the attack, Enright said.
Honolulu Ocean Safety Acting Chief Kurt Lager said Perry was “a lifeguard loved by all.”
“Tamayo’s personality was infectious and as much as people loved him, he loved everyone else more,” Lager said at a news conference.
“Tamayo was a legendary waterman and highly respected,” Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi said, calling Perry’s death “a tragic loss.”
The last fatal shark incident in Hawaii was Dec. 30 when a man surfing off Maui was attacked about 150 yards (137 meters) from shore.
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Thiessen reported from Anchorage, Alaska.
The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner said in the autopsy report that Perry also drowned in “the heated end of his pool,” but that it was a secondary factor in his Oct. 28 death, deemed an accident.
People close to Perry told investigators that he was undergoing ketamine infusion therapy, an experimental treatment used to treat depression and anxiety. But the medical examiner said the levels of ketamine in Perry’s body were in the range used for general anesthesia during surgery, and that his last treatment 1 1/2 weeks earlier wouldn’t explain those levels. The drug is typically metabolized in a matter of hours.
The report says coronary artery disease and buprenorphine, which is used to treat opioid use disorder, also contributed.
The amount of ketamine detected “would be enough to make him lose consciousness and lose his posture and his ability to keep himself above the water,” said Dr. Andrew Stolbach, a medical toxicologist with Johns Hopkins Medicine who reviewed the autopsy report at the request of The Associated Press.
“Using sedative drugs in a pool or hot tub, especially when you’re alone, is extremely risky and, sadly, here it’s fatal,” said Stolbach, who noted that both ketamine and buprenorphine can be used safely.
Perry was declared dead after being found unresponsive at his home in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. Investigators performed the autopsy the following day.
The actor had taken drugs in the past but had been “reportedly clean for 19 months,” according to the report.
Perry had played pickleball earlier in the day, the report says, and his assistant, who lives with him, found him face down in the pool after returning from errands.
The assistant told investigators Perry had not been sick, had not made any health complaints, and had not shown evidence of recent alcohol or drug use.
Postmortem blood tests showed “high levels” of ketamine in his system, which could have raised his blood pressure and heart rate and dulled his impulse to breathe.
Buprenorphine, commonly used in opioid addiction and found in therapeutic levels in Perry’s blood, could have contributed to the breathing problem, the autopsy said. It would have been risky to mix the central nervous system depressant with ketamine “due to the additive respiratory effects when present with high levels of ketamine,” according to the autopsy report.
The report said his coronary artery disease would have made him more susceptible to the drugs’ effects.
Perry was among the biggest television stars of his generation when he played Chandler Bing alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 on NBC’s megahit sitcom “Friends.”
His castmates, like many of his friends, family and fans, were stunned by his death, and paid him loving tribute in the weeks that followed.
Perry was open about discussing his struggles with addiction dating back to his time on “Friends.”
“I loved everything about the show but I was struggling with my addictions which only added to my sense of shame,” he wrote in his 2022 memoir. “I had a secret and no one could know.”
A woman whose name is redacted in the autopsy report told investigators that Perry had been in good spirits when she spoke to him a few days earlier, but had been taking testosterone shots which she said were making him “angry and mean.” She said he had quit smoking two weeks earlier.
The woman said he had been receiving the ketamine infusions for his mental health, and that his doctor had been giving them to him less often because he had been feeling well.
Ketamine is a powerful anesthetic approved by U.S. health regulators for use during surgery, but in the past decade it has emerged as an experimental treatment for a range of psychiatric and hard-to-treat conditions, including depression, anxiety and chronic pain.
While not approved by regulators, doctors are free to prescribe drugs for these alternate uses if they think their patients could benefit, and hundreds of clinics across the U.S. offer ketamine infusions and other formulations for various health conditions.
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AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson in Washington state, Health Writer Matthew Perrone in Washington, D.C., and Ryan J. Foley in Iowa City, Iowa, contributed reporting.
