Alleged Strip shooter’s digital life at odds with private personal life

When Manuel Ruiz and Rodney Finley encountered each other on the Strip the night of June 8, their digital worlds collided with reality.

The livestreamed meeting on a sidewalk in front of the Bellagio fountains ended in the shooting death of Finley and his wife, Tanisha Finley. The Metropolitan Police Department has said Ruiz was the shooter.

Ruiz, 41, faces two counts of open murder with a deadly weapon in connection with the shooting.

Acquaintances of Ruiz and Finley knew little about the men beyond the curated YouTube personas their lives seemed to revolve around.

A neighbor, Las Vegas resident Todd Wright, 51, said he would sometimes see Ruiz leaving the house wearing the “crazy face makeup” he put on for videos.

“He kept to himself,” Wright said. “There was never a wave or a hello or anything, and that’s what he was like with everybody on our street.”

Wright said Ruiz drove a yellow Ford Mustang with personalized “MR DEE” Nevada plates. On Wednesday, the car was in the home’s driveway, but nobody answered when a Las Vegas Review-Journal reported knocked on the door.

Ruiz declined a request for an interview at the Clark County Detention Center.

Feuding YouTubers

It was clear that the two men, both YouTubers, had been sniping at each other on social media in what police have said was a feud that dated back a couple of years.

Archie Coronado, identified by police as a witness who had been watching Finley’s livestream, said Ruiz had threatened him and Finley in the past by making finger gun gestures while saying “pow, pow, pow.”

Coronado said the long-running feud started with an altercation between the Finleys and Ruiz on Halloween in 2023. Finley’s wife apologized to Ruiz, but the Finleys wanted an apology, too, and Ruiz didn’t say he was sorry, according to Coronado.

Finley decided to start his own YouTube channel and would criticize Ruiz and Ruiz’s wife, Coronado said. Ruiz, he said, did not react well.

“He just couldn’t take the negativity, and I guess he was just getting angrier and angrier,” said Coronado.

Coronado said it was hard to say whether he knew either Finley or Ruiz personally. He discovered both men through YouTube and had met Finley on Fremont Street last Halloween. He also hung out with Ruiz, but insisted: “We were never friends.”

“He was like a party animal,” Coronado said of Ruiz. “That’s what attracted me to him.”

Coronado said Ruiz would livestream from about 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. and didn’t seem to have a life outside of his channels.

Ruiz would order people not to talk to others, Coronado said. On one livestream, he said not to hang out with a different Las Vegas YouTuber Marc Sanson, according to Coronado.

Coronado and Ruiz had a falling out and at some point, he said. Coronado went on Finley’s livestream to discuss his experience with Ruiz, whom he said had “alienated” a lot of people.

Coronado thought that before livestreaming, Ruiz had worked at a heliport, perhaps in a customer service role. He didn’t know what Rodney Finley did for a living, but recalled him talking about an office job.

At a vigil for the slain couple on the Strip on Tuesday, a woman said she believed Rodney Finley also worked in “customer service,” but that she wasn’t sure.

From chump change to big money

According to Coronado, Ruiz eventually quit his day job to devote himself fulltime to livestreaming.

At first, Coronado said, he thinks Ruiz didn’t earn enough to support himself, but he eventually built up a following of as many as 50,000 subscribers.

Sanson, who has 36,000 subscribers to his “The Other Me” page, said people often think YouTubers with tens of thousands of subscribers or followers are making big money. Sanson said he knows Ruiz and knew the Finleys.

“That isn’t the case for most of us,” Sanson said. “I barely break even most months. I might make a couple hundred bucks, but everybody thinks it’s more than what it is.”

Sanson said he suspects that Ruiz likely made more than he did because of how his YouTube channel was set up — content creators can get extra money for allowing advertising to be sold — but he also said he’s sure Ruiz wasn’t becoming wealthy from his channel.

A Maricopa County family court case for Rodney Finley lists information that matches with the age and middle name provided with Clark County authorities and suggests he struggled financially.

Records in the case show Finley was born in Arizona in 1980. In 2006, he was employed by FedEx and ordered to pay $296.50 in child support each month.

He apparently had trouble making payments. As of 2020, he owed about $8,200 in child support and about $7,500 in interest. At one point, a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Notes in 2021 court orders say that he “has had odd jobs occasionally but has failed to pay anything for his child support” and that “his wife is paying all of their bills.”

Benjamin Burroughs, an associate professor of emerging media at UNLV, said earning potential for YouTubers can vary significantly.

“The amount you earn is not solely based on your number of followers, but views and engagement levels are also important,” Burroughs said. “Some YouTube creators make real money with only a few thousand subscribers if their content connects with advertisers and keyword searches. Making a lot of money, however, usually requires millions of views each month.”

Burroughs said some YouTubers try to generate advertising revenue from views, but that they can also get sponsorship deals for producing paid content. Some, like Sanson, sell merchandise, though Sanson said he doesn’t make much money from it.

Viewers and fans of channels can also just donate money to content creators, Sanson said.

“For instance, if I get a super chat donation, YouTube takes 35 percent of that,” Sanson said. “For the time we put into this, most of us aren’t making big money.”

Part of why the shooting has received so much attention is because it happened in real time. Viewers on one channel commented about what appeared to be happening, and some even seemed to try to warn Finley that Ruiz was in the area.

Crime and social media

Las Vegas defense attorney Charles Goodwin said social media frequently plays a role in crimes.

“I’ve seen people livestreaming shootings,” Goodwin said.

Some gangs also appear to use Instagram and Facebook to coordinate crimes, according to Goodwin.

Goodwin said he the people involved in violence that stems from a social media battle often have impulse control problems and a lower IQ level.

“There’s not a lot of thinking past tomorrow,” he said.

They also aren’t people who are doing well in life, Goodwin said, and typically live in a different reality than what they project online.

Ryan Helmick, another defense attorney, has also dealt with social media in criminal cases.

“It has damaged many clients’ cases because of things they post on social media,” Helmick said.

Younger defendants tend to incriminate themselves by posting photos of guns, drugs and cash. People use social media to threaten each other and those threats are sometimes followed through in real life, especially in gang cases, according to Helmick.

In one murder case, Helmick said the defendant was face-timing four people as he was about to engage in an altercation that led to a killing. The conversation continued during the killing and the footage was preserved, according to Helmick.

Since the shooting, Ruiz has received the level of attention he apparently craved on his channel.

There’s a deep irony attached to the story of Manuel Ruiz, at least according to his neighbor, Todd Wright, who said Ruiz moved to his neighborhood near Windmill Lane and the 215 Beltway about five years ago.

“There was never anybody over there to visit him that we noticed,” Wright said. “He was a very private person.”

Contact Bryan Horwath at bhorwath@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BryanHorwath on X. Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BrighamNoble on X. Review-Journal staff writers Akiya Dillon and Casey Harrison contributed to this report.