LEESBURG, Va. — After two days of testimony, the man who shot a 21-year-old YouTuber inside Dulles Town Center on video in April has been found not guilty on two charges of malicious wounding.
The jury found Alan Colie not guilty of aggravated malicious wounding or use of a firearm for aggravated malicious wounding, however, he was found guilty of firing a gun inside the mall. That guilty verdict has been set aside until a hearing to discuss it on October 19.
Colie, a DoorDash driver, was on trial for shooting Tanner Cook, the man behind the YouTube channel “Classified Goons,” at the Dulles Town Center back in April. Colie admitted to shooting Cook when he took the stand Wednesday but claimed it was self-defense.
The case went viral not because there was a shooting inside a mall, but because Cook is known to make prank videos. Cook amassed 55,000 subscribers with an average income of up to $3,000 per month. He said he elicits responses to entertain viewers and called his pranks “comedy content.”
Colie faced three charges, including aggravated malicious wounding, malicious discharge of a firearm within an occupied dwelling, and use of firearm for aggravated malicious wounding. The jury had to weigh different factors including if Colie had malicious intent and had reasonable fear of imminent danger of bodily harm.
Cook was in the courtroom when jurors were shown footage of him getting shot near the stomach – a video that has not yet been made public. Cook’s mother, however, left the courtroom to avoid watching the key piece of evidence in her son’s shooting.
The footage was recorded by one of Cook’s friends, who was helping to record a prank video for Cook’s channel. The video shows Cook holding his phone near Colie’s ear and using Google Translate to play a phrase out loud four times, while Colie backed away.
When he testified, Colie recalled how Cook and his friend approached him from behind and put the phone about 6 inches away from his face. He described feeling confused by the phrase Cook was playing. Colie told the jury the two looked “really cold and angry.” He also acknowledged carrying a gun during work as a way to protect himself after seeing reports of other delivery service drivers being robbed.
“Colie walked into the mall to do his job with no intention of interacting with Tanner Cook. None,” Adam Pouilliard, Colie’s defense attorney, said. "He’s sitting next to his defense attorneys right now. How’s that for a consequence?”
The Commonwealth argued that Cook was never armed, never placed hands on Colie and never posed a threat. They stressed that just because Cook may not seem like a saint or his occupation makes him appear undesirable, that a conviction is warranted.
“We don’t like our personal space invaded, but that does not justify the ability to shoot someone in a public space during an interaction that lasted for only 20 seconds,” Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Eden Holmes said.
The jury began deliberating around 11:30 a.m. Thursday. Shortly after 3:30 p.m., the jury came back saying they were divided and couldn’t come to a resolution. The judge instructed them to continue deliberating and later returned with the not-guilty verdict.
WUSA9 caught up with the Cook family following the verdict. When we asked Tanner Cook how he felt about the outcome, he said it is all up to God.
“I really don’t care, I mean it is what it is,” he said. “It’s God’s plan at the end of the day.”
His mother, Marla Elam, said the family respects the jury and that the Cook family is just thankful Tanner is alive.
“Nothing else matters right now,” she said.
Here’s the video by NBC Washington, apologies that it’s served by Discord
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Have you considered not defending insane paranoid gun culture?
This is definitionally an ad hominem argument; i.e. you’re attacking people in place of actually attacking the argument.
But to refute your attacks on people’s character, I’m just going to say, you’re from lemmy.ca, so I imagine you’re Canadian. sndmn is also lemmy.ca, so I imagine they’re a Canadian. If you check @[email protected], the account I’ve been using until I signed up to my current instance, as well as the content I interact with, you’ll see that I’m a Canadian.
As for the idea that maybe I’m some pro-gun PoS, I’m radically anti-gun. I think our gun laws in Canada are much too lax. The fact that pigs walk around with guns means that criminals are more likely to carry guns as well.
Not if I’m to emapthise with the person in the video, instead of making emotional judgements reliant solely on reading articles and a 3rd person video perspective, I can try to understand that people living in the US are painfully aware that those around them are constantly surrounded by guns. I can also try and understand that if you have an easy “fuck off” button that carries big consequences with it, you’ll be quicker to jump to it the moment things get dicey.
I do think he was too quick to pull out the gun, but seeing as he’s a human, I also understand people make hasty decisions that are suboptimal. So if I look at things outside a clinical perspective and consider how I’d react in such a situation, with at least two much larger men playing something weird in my ear, chasing me, and continuing to play it as I try to disengage - them refusing to allow me to disengage, I can very well see why someone who would go for the big fuck-off button.
Maybe I describe it in a clinical way - that’s just what it’s like to be neurodivergent for some people. But the reality is that my perspective is defined by my empathy for the person, despite not being someone who’s had to suffer living in a gun-happy country, and despite being someone who, based on life experience, would likely die before pulling that big fuck off button on someone.
Try empathising with someone for a bit instead of jumping to “guns are the problem.” The only problem with guns is that they were involved at all. Any situation with a gun is more deadly than without, but the reality of the dystopia that is the USA is that situations have guns.