Two wannabe YouTube stars are about to see their lives get put on pause for a bit — as they’re charged with felonies for a stupid prank!
It all started on the afternoon of July 3, when police in Forsyth County, Georgia, received multiple emergency calls describing an abduction in progress.
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According to eyewitnesses, it looked like a young girl was being taken away in a Chevrolet Tahoe; her hands were bound, and her head was partially covered in what appeared to be a pillowcase as she screamed:
“He is going to kill me!”
The Sheriff’s office immediately dispatched EIGHT deputies to the mall where the “kidnapping” was taking place. Worth noting: this was half the force in the small, rural region of South Forsyth.
Corporal Doug Rainwater told The Forsyth County News:
“For 20 straight minutes, we had deputies racing across Forsyth County to help this girl, thinking that this was a true abduction… That’s unacceptable.”
What was really going on, according to investigators, was nothing more than a simple hoax.
17-year-old Ava Coleman and 19-year-old Christopher Jones Kratzer were pulled over and ordered out of the vehicle at gunpoint.
Deputies quickly discovered Coleman was not, as they had made it seem, being abducted — she was allegedly in on it!
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During their investigation, police say they discovered the pair planned to put video of the incident on their YouTube channel. It was all to get views.
Thankfully no one was hurt, but Rainwater wants to articulate with the utmost severity how that outcome was not guaranteed in such a dangerous stunt:
“So many things could have gone wrong. We truly thought that there was a kidnapping in progress.”
Coleman and Kratzer are being charged with raising a false alarm (a felony) and reckless conduct (a misdemeanor), and frankly that’s getting off light.
After all, a violent kidnapping? The phrase “he’s going to kill me”?
Coleman is very, very lucky she didn’t get Kratzer shot and killed on the spot.
Forsyth County Sheriff Ron Freeman concurred in one of the most no-nonsense statements we’ve ever seen, saying:
“If you want to create a social media following, I would strongly dissuade you from this stupidity. Good armed citizens might have been justified in using force to stop what they legitimately believed was a kidnapping.
Committing a criminal act for social media likes will get you arrested in Forsyth County. That’s not the kind of attention most people want to have.”
We should also point out, even if the kids had gotten away with the ill-conceived plan, YouTube wouldn’t have kept the video up anyway.
Back in January, following injuries suffered in the Bird Box challenge, the streaming site updated their safety guidelines and specifically mentioned this sort of thing:
“We’ve made it clear that our policies prohibiting harmful and dangerous content also extend to pranks with a perceived danger of serious physical injury. We don’t allow pranks that make victims believe they’re in serious physical danger — for example, a home invasion prank or a drive-by shooting prank.”
So yeah.
Dumb move all around.
Next time you want views, just film yourself “explaining” the end of Game Of Thrones like everyone else.
[Image via Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office.]
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