A YouTube filmmaker who staged a shooting scene with fake guns in the stairwell of a Manhattan housing project admitted the brainless stunt could have gotten him killed.
Aaron Beam, 38, claims he was inches from death when cops — who had heard the sound of gunfire — stormed the set at the Straus Houses in Kips Bay and arrested him Thursday night.
“[T]he situation could have got ugly, it could have went both ways, I could have been dead — a boy couldn’t have been here right now,” Beam, 38, said in a YouTube video he posted Saturday.
Beam spoke out for the first time about the close call with cops on vertical patrol — the same police detail that ended with an officer killing Akai Gurley in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project in 2014.
“We ended up doing a little scene in there which had a prop gun involved. The cops came and they saw the gun involved. It could have went left, they told me freeze and I put the gun down,” Beam said.
“We’re not gangbangers — I’m actually an owner of my own company,” he stressed.
Holding of a copy of the New York Post, Beam claimed he simply wants to tell his side of the story — after his arrest widely covered arrest.
“I know you all see what’s going on— it’s all in the papers, it’s all on the internet, but we didn’t really get to tell our side of the story as far as what happened.It could have went left, but it didn’t.I had the gun, the prop gun, which is what we shoot with,” Beam said.
Ultimately, he hopes the airhead set stunt makes him more famous, he said.
“This is just going to put us on the map more…all press is good press,” he concluded.
Beam, who is also an MTA bus driver, was arrested for disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment but charges that were dropped after cops learned his weapon was BB gun.
His co-stars Rahman Soto, 30, and cameraman Jarod Nabors, 34, were hit with the same charges.
Gurley was shot and killed by former NYPD Officer Peter Liang during a vertical patrol in the Louis H. Pink Houses in Brooklyn in 2014.
Liang was convicted of manslaughter this month. Vertical patrols played a central role in his trial.