A YouTube personality who appears to be involved in a fringe movement that films law enforcement personnel was shot Thursday outside of a Los Angeles synagogue during a confrontation with a security guard.
“He said he was gonna shoot me dead if I moved, everybody,” a transgender woman identified as Zhoie Perez can be heard saying while live-streaming the incident outside the Etz Jacob Torah Center.
The guard, who appears anxious, can be heard saying “Get away!” before a gunshot rings out and the camera pans to the ground.
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“Fucker shot me!” Perez is heard yelling. “Fucker shot me in the leg! Fuck!”
As bystanders gather around amidst the commotion, the guard can be heard repeatedly claiming Perez was trying to “break inside” the synagogue. Perez later told local news station KCAL the guard was “super-aggressive” while she was “just taking shots” of the synagogue.
Perez has identified herself as a First Amendment auditor—a YouTube genre in which participants show up at places like post offices or power plants, start filming and capture the police reaction on tape.
As The Daily Beast reported last month, it’s become a highly competitive online industry, with auditors becoming more and more aggressive in their encounters because an arrest or a physical confrontation will boost their views and fame.
The LAPD provided scant details about the shooting, saying only that an unidentified person had “suffered a gunshot wound to the leg” after a shooting at a school. (Perez told KCLA that she suffered just a graze wound in the shooting.) Police did not name the school but the address they provided is near the Etz Jacob Torah Center where Perez was filming.
Police identified the guard as a “school security guard,” though the statement on Perez’s YouTube channel insisted the filming had not been done at a school, as there were “no children.”
LAPD said the guard was arrested on suspicion of felony assault with a deadly weapon.
Last summer, police reportedly were called to a military base near Los Angeles last summer as Perez filmed an “audit” there and allegedly berated troops outside. She was reportedly arrested and charged with allegedly making terrorist threats at the U.S. Marine Recruiting Station in Valencia, California.
The statement on her YouTube channel, signed by “Mrs. Potato,” suggested this was not the first time Perez was injured in the course of her “auditing.”
“Furry has now been shot, pepper sprayed, attacked with metal batons assaulted, had strong arm robbery committed against her simply for filming from a public sidewalk,” it said.
Perez also acknowledged her work as an “auditor” in a GoFundMe campaign posted last February in which she sought $10,000 for her “auditing indeavors” and her gender transition surgery.
